This thesis focuses on the interspecies relationships of care in the Hambach Forest, Germany. It covers the caring relations between the human activists protecting the Forest by occupying it and the trees growing there. The text covers the affectionate dimension of the activists’ caring relation towards the trees as well as how the caring manifested in their attentiveness and actions. Apart from the traditional ethnographic methods, the research is rooted in multispecies methodology, particularly plant ethnography. As primary theoretical frameworks, the concepts of more-than human sociality and world-making by Anna Tsing were used, as well as the understanding of the interspecies ethics of care by Puig de la Bellacasa. The analysis shows that the caring relationship of the activists was often rooted in the situated relationality that emerges from particular relations with particular trees or other nonhumans. As a navigating tool, activists sometimes used also the nature-culture dichotomy, and sometimes they, on the contrary, contested it. I show that relationships of care were mutual and occurred in the direction from activists to the trees but also that the trees and Forest took care of many activists’ needs. I also demonstrate how the trees and other nonhumans actively participated in the processes of co-creating the more-than-human sociality in the Forest. The analysis shows that the activists’ behaviour was not always coherent or determined by the same values but was often ambivalent and changing depending on the situation.

The original contribution of this thesis is through its conceptualisations of human more-than- human encounters on the allotment that break down the boundaries of subjectivities. This work extends knowledge of cultural food geography by investigating how people engage with the matter of the plot and learn to grow food. The conceptual tool by which this occurs is set out as processes of visceral learning within a framework of mattering. Therefore this work follows the material transformations of matter across production consumption cycles of allotment produce. This is examined through processes of bodily adaptions to the matter of the plot. The processes of growing your own food affords an opportunity to focus on the processes of doing and becoming, allowing the how of food growing to take centre stage (Crouch 2003, Ingold 2010, Grosz 1999). Procuring and producing food for consumption is enacted through the human more-than-human interface of bodily engagement that disrupts dualisms and revealing their complex inter-relationships, as well as the potential of visceral research (Roe 2006, Whatmore 2006, Hayes-Conroy 2008). Therefore, this is an immersive account of the procurement of food and the development of food knowledge through material, sensory and visceral becomings, which occur within a contextual frame of everyday food experiences. This study is contextualised in the complexities of contemporary food issues where matters of access, foodism and sustainability shape the enquiry. However the research is carried out at a micro-geographies lens of bodily engagements with food matter through grow your own practices on allotments. Growing food on new allotments is the locus of procurement reflecting a resurgence in such activities following from the recent rise in interest in local food, alternative food networks (AFNs) and food as a conduit for celebrity in the media (Dupuis & Goodman 2005, Lockie & Kitto 2000, Winter 2003). Moreover, the current spread of the allotment is examined as transgressing urban/rural divides and disrupting traditional perceptions of plot users. This allows investigations into spaces where community processes can unfold, providing a richly observed insight into the broadened demographics of recent allotment life.

Drawing on everyday encounters from a three year collaborative research project with young children and early childhood educators in British Columbia, Canada, the manuscripts contained in this dissertation craft and put to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. This work critically engages with the question of what attention to Indigenous presences, to ongoing colonialisms, and to human/more-than-human entanglements, in everyday pedagogical encounters might do towards enacting anti-colonial early childhood pedagogies. My particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that I inhabit with children and educators. In the first manuscript, enacting figurations of witnessing, I map the complexities of my role as a pedagogista, early childhood educator, and researcher; situating myself as an embodied and implicated presence within the research and pedagogical practices from which this dissertation is assembled. In the second manuscript, I articulate refiguring presences as an anti-colonial methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings. In the third manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences through a series of interruptive stories that attend to Indigenous relationalities, human-non-human entanglements and the settler colonial tensions that come together in the making of a mountain forest that I regularly visit with children and educators. In the fourth manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences to pay attention to everyday encounters with a community garden. I experiment with orientations that bring attention to messy historical relations and that attend to the vitalities of specific plant and animal worlds. I discuss the interruptive effects of this noticing in generating politicized dialogues with this place, where more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) disrupt and subvert colonial impositions of control, belonging and order. / Graduate

Rätten till staden är en ständigt pågående diskussion om människors möjlighet att använda sig av staden och skapa den verklighet de själva lever i. I städer finns människor som har sällskap av hund och som frekvent använder sig av det offentliga rummet. Uppsatsen syftar till att bidra med en förståelse för hundägarens och hundens plats i staden genom att undersöka hundägares och hundars användande av staden, deras upplevelser i det offentliga rummet och på vilket sett de kan ge uttryck för behov i staden.   Uppsatsens empiriska material har samlats in med den etnografiska metoden go-along för att undersöka hundägares och hundars vardagliga liv, samt genom en fokusgrupp med två etologer för att synliggöra hundens behov i planering. Det empiriska materialet har undersökts i relation till teori om rätten till staden, social rättvisa och more-than-human geography. Den sistnämnda teorin utgår från djurens rätt till staden som likställd människan. Med utgångspunkt i more-than-human geography antar studien en kritisk ansats mot hur hundars behov tillgodoses i den svenska planeringen. Studien visar på en avsaknad av hundägares och hundars rätt till staden. Detta tar sig uttryck i hundägarens vardagliga liv som en längtan och en saknad efter att kunna tillfredsställa sin hunds behov i staden, samt genom en osäkerhet och ett motstånd i användningen av stadens offentliga rum. Uppsatsen synliggör även en social konflikt mellan hundägare och icke-hundägare. Konflikten har sitt ursprung i hundägares vilja att nyttja staden på ett annat sätt än vad som är tillåtet, vilket innebär att hundägare bryter mot hundförbud och restriktioner i syfte att tillfredsställa sin hunds behov och intressen. Uppsatsen visar på en begränsning av hundens utrymme i staden som en effekt av att människans behov står i centrum för utveckling, samt som en följd av stadens ekonomiska drivkraft. Uppsatsen argumenterar för att ge hundar mer utrymme i planering för att stärka hundägares och hundars rätt till staden, men även i syfte att minska den konflikt som existerar mellan hundägare och icke-hundägare.

This thesis explores the concept of ‘feral’ while speculating possible futures of more-than-human interactions in urban environments. Feral in this project is described as living and non-living entities that are uncontrollable, unintentional, situated and dethatched from humans. The aim of this thesis to implement more-than-human theory and concepts into design practice to expand the design space of non-anthropocentric design. A speculative design approach is used to question and alter the status quo of power relations within more-than-human interactions through its experimental and critical nature (Bardzell, Bardzell and Koefoed Hansen, 2015; Dunne and Raby, 2013). Further, a series of methods, approaches and speculative fabulations (Haraway, 2016) are proposed that tell stories of possible worlds and act as a catalyst for moving more-than-human theory beyond concepts towards design practice.

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Deeply influenced by emotional, ethical, and ecological principles, John Steinbeck developed a holistic ideology to describe and analyze the relationships among individuals, society, and the more-than-human world. Although he explored environmental issues with ecological insight and philosophical contemplation that placed him well beyond his literary and scientific contemporaries, Steinbeck’s contributions to modern ecological inquiry and environmental thought have received only intermittent attention from literary scholars. Throughout his writing, Steinbeck develops a view of intellectual holism that encourages (perhaps even enables) us to dovetail science and ethics as we attempt to construct a new environmental paradigm. Viewing the world through his holistic lens, Steinbeck was able to see the global ecosystem, local environments, human communities, and even minute tide pools as objects of scientific and artistic inquiry. Specifically, it is my contention that the American environmental movement owes a greater debt to John Steinbeck than it realizes. In short, John Steinbeck made significant contributions to the growing awareness of human-nature interconnectedness and the parallels between social ills and ecological ailments. Yet, for whatever reasons Steinbeck is not granted a position of honor alongside the other giants of American environmental thought. Now witnessing the full blossoming of 21st century environmentalism, it is useful to cast a reflexive eye upon our ideological forebears with the intent to better understand the genealogy of the American environmental movement. Doing so will not only provide a richer and fuller family tree, but will also promote additional flourishing of new approaches to solving ongoing environmental troubles. / Master of Arts

Since its invention nearly 150 years ago, margarine has proven itself adaptable to multiple ingredients and techniques whilst continuing to mimic the fatty tastes familiar to eaters in Northern Europe. In this thesis I argue that it this malleability that makes margarine a useful subject with which to explore constructions of eating-well. This thesis examines the ways in which margarine is done, why it is done in the ways that it is, and explores how such doings frame possibilities for eating-together-well. Eating-well has become something of a social obsession in the UK in recent years. Individual eating practices have become framed as a responsibility of care for personal and societal health, for agricultural workers, animal welfare and for the future of the planet. Nonetheless, it is commonly believed that although deeply personal, food habits are culturally and socially engrained, and as such are hard to change. This empirically led thesis, examines the knowledges and practices of producers and consumers, and establishes habit formation as a typical response by both producers and consumers to becoming overwhelmed with incompatible knowledges and information, compelling them to choose, prioritise and juggle ‘moral’ values. Yet, I demonstrate that such habits only remain stable until disrupted by an event which overflows and troubles this settlement. Building on this, this thesis then examines the possibilities offered by the creation of micro-events for encountering, knowing, and relating with, margarine matters anew. In this way, this thesis investigates the values, norms and power relations entangled with the presentation and enactment of margarine and its constituent parts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods, examining both what these framings do, and how they are maintained. In approaching margarine matters in this way, this thesis offers three key contributions to the area of food geographies. Firstly, I demonstrate how commodity frameworks shift political problems in to a technical and administrative realm and close down spaces of critical thought and political intervention. Secondly, I establish that ‘strange encounters’ are events which can add to understandings of the more-than human world-making of food knowledges, practices, and habits. Thirdly, I determine that the novel methodological approach of ‘playing with our food’ is a productive technique with which to prefigure and rehearse more nuanced ethical understandings of eating-well as a relational doing that is excessive to consuming-well.

In this thesis project, the aim is to explore displacements beyond the familiar usage in migration studies associated with ’human’ by using a new materialist/s understanding ofontology and agency. This approach opens the possibility to move beyond the understanding of displacements as referring only to human agency. The fictionalised story, Parable of theSower, is used in the thesis as the real-world ontological world-building storytelling and the questions that flow from the aim of this thesis is used as a guiding navigator within the mainstory to see what other stories emerges; The Earthseed Story, The More-Than-Human Storiesand The Human Stories. Displacement(s) beyond human agency from a new materialist outlook show the complexity and challenges of being interconnected and codependent in a world containing multiple stories that move in and out of spacetime refuturing. This occursboth as dystopia and utopia, as agency is in-the-making and ongoing reshaping of territorialization and deterritorialization making all-the-flesh moving boundaries of being displaced and in-place in a belongings-non-belongings continuum. For future research,multispecies displacement(s) is discussed as ongoing processes of both; dystopian and utopian storytelling, and the possibilities for refuturing shared worlds.