In our presentation, “What We Are Talking About When We Are Talking About Resistance (today)”, we aim to critically examine the evolving concept of resistance in the context of contemporary societal transformations. The talk reveal how different activist campaigns and outreach activities of the French environmental movement are currently spurring and cultivating a new human–nature relationship in the light of biodiversity loss and climate change. We will discuss how the civil society approach “nature” as either overlapping with, entangling or being created by, humanity. The way in which the activists are ‘nature’ also suggests a longer time perspective, in which their bodies exceed their own corporeality, and they become part of the cyclic process of nature and the birth-death-rebirth continuum of bodies and plants. Moreover, we suggest, the new stories about nature are imbricated in a kind of constructive resistance, which oppose the idea of resistance as “against” or “in opposition”. By this, we will highlight the limitations of the current research landscape, which often focuses narrowly on either organized social movements or everyday forms of hidden dissent, leading to a fragmented understanding of resistance dynamics. Our goal is to stimulate fruitful discussion about the complexities of resistance and its implications for social change in our increasingly interconnected world.

Mona Lilja is Professor of Peace and Development Research at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Lilja’s work focuses on resistance as a theoretical concept, the relation of power and resistance and resistance and gender.

Mikael Baaz is a full Professor of International Law as well as an Associate Professor (docent) in Political Science and an Associate Professor (docent) in Peace and Conflict studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Baaz’ work focuses on Resistance Theory, International Criminal and Procedural Law and International Public Law.

Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford), Tuesday, June 17, 2025, at 18-20 (c.t.) | Hybrid lecture | on site: SH 1.104 | via zoom

Rewilding is a new approach to wildlife conservation that challenges the temporalities of orthodox approaches to identifying and securing desired environments. It encourages conservationists to look to deeper pasts and further futures as they formulate appropriate reference points for the Anthropocene. It figures conservation less as the prevention of species extinction and more as the choreography of ecological processes to secure desired functions and services. This paper develops and applies a novel conceptual framework for critically examining the more-than-human politics of rewilding by drawing together cognate literatures from political ecology, environmental philosophy, time studies and queer and disability studies to theorise the chrononormativities and chronobiopolitics of rewilding. The analysis comes in three parts. The first examines the normative political strategies of baselining and horizoning through which pasts and futures are mobilised to legitimate present rewilding practice. It then explores the environmental biopolitics through which temporal rhythms are choreographed in the practices of rewilding, exploring how processes of ecological succession are curated and how rewilders deal with unexpected events. The final part of the analysis critiques the emerging chrononormativities and chronobiopolitics of rewilding and advocates for alternative models more conducive to multispecies flourishing and resistance in more-than human crip ecologies. The analysis largely focuses on the use of large herbivores and native trees to enable afforestation in Europe, while referring to examples of rewilding elsewhere. The conclusion identifies priorities for future research on time in conservation and calls for continued conceptual engagement at the interface of political ecology and queer and disability theories.

Jamie Lorimer is Professor of Environmental Geography at the University of Oxford. His past and ongoing research explores the history, culture and politics of wildlife conservation, examining the implications of the Anthropocene for how people think about and govern the environment. He combines concepts and approaches from more-than-human geography with those from science studies, using ethnographic, participatory, and historical methods.

Carlotta Molfese (Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice) | Tuesday, July 8, 2025, 18-20 (c.t.) | via Zoom

Building on the paper “Towards a more-than-human theory of resistance” (Molfese 2023) in which I have reflected upon some of the theoretical tensions that more-than-human perspectives bring to traditional conceptualisations of resistance, in this contribution, I engage the anarchist concept of prefiguration to advance a less-anthropocentric framework. The concept of prefiguration is often presented as being ontologically radical, having an experimental ethos and manifesting in multiple, situated forms. However, like resistance, it also remains tightly enmeshed within modernist, dualist notions of Nature-Culture that abstract human subjects from their more-than-human relations, deny the latter any agencies, and privilege human-to-human relations. After briefly reviewing traditional conceptualizations of resistance and prefiguration in social science literature, I advance a less-anthropocentric understanding of prefiguration using more-than-human perspectives. This reconceptualization builds upon (1) a post-phenomenological rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality, and (2) a reframing of prefigurative politics as a form of ontological organization. The first theoretical move attends to the becoming of prefigurative subjects through affective, more-than-human relations, and it shifts attention away from human individuals to forms-of-life. The second move focuses on the crafting of infrastructures as a form of doing-with more-than-human others, which reconfigures the form and transformative agency of prefigurative politics.To ground this conceptual framework, I draw upon my (auto)ethnographic research into the back-to-the-land movement, attending to both the becoming and doing-with the land of radical farmers.

Carlotta Molfese is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at the Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice. Carlotta has a multidisciplinary background in biology and environmental social science and works at the intersection of cultural and environmental geography using more-than-human and critical perspectives. In her PhD thesis, she developed an original theoretical framework that combined more-than-human with anarchist perspectives in geography to examine the affective journeys and everyday doings of countercultural or radical „back-to-the-land“ farmers.