Guest Introduction: More-than-human contact zones

Abstract

Mary Louise Pratt used the term “contact zones” to describe those spaces where “cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today”. Building on three sessions at the 2017 American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting, this special section features articles which apply Pratt’s concepts to environmental research. We argue that these articles demonstrate a “more-than-human ‘contact’ approach” to (1) better account for nonhuman agency by multiplying perspectives, (2) intervene in cases of violence and injustice, and (3) decolonize knowledge/production. Included are empirical case studies which describe encounters with the nonhuman; these include a postcolonial reading of the BBC’s Blue Planet II, a feminist science study of migratory shorebird conservation on New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore, and political ecologies of prescribed forest burns by Parks Canada and tidal energy production in the Bay of Fundy. These articles broaden the definitions of “contact” and “justice” as they direct critical attention to the politics of environmental knowledge production, technoscientific means of understanding and managing the living environment, and forms of resistance to the exclusive governance of “wild” spaces. They present sites of environmental management and exploration as places of transformation, co-presence, unpredictability, and often intimate violence. The section demonstrates how political ecologies and more-than-human geographies expand Pratt’s “contact” perspective. An afterword is provided by Mary Louise Pratt.

Keywords

More-than-human multispecies contact zone political ecology postcolonial decolonization encounter nonhuman agency

Overview

Mary Louise Pratt’s contact perspective works across decolonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial paradigms. Committed to “renewed anti-imperial, decolonizing practice”, Pratt stated that “The decolonization of knowledge is, I believe, one of the most important intellectual challenges of our time” and she noted recently that “The postcolonial project requires some decolonizing of its own” (in Moraña et al., 2008: 460–461). Her analysis focuses on encounters and processes “by which this [colonial] ‘legacy’ has been and continues to be ongoingly renewed and reintegrated into a changing world through continuing permutations of its signifying powers, administrative practices, and forms of violence” (Moraña et al., 2008). More generally, her contact perspective “emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other” (Pratt, 2008: 8–9). Since publication in the early 1990s, her most widely cited works, Imperial Eyes ([1992] 2008) and “Arts of the Contact Zone” (1991), continue to have tremendous reach across the social sciences and humanities. Besides “the contact zone,” key elements of her “contact perspective” include “transculturation,” “autoethnography,” “anti-conquest,” “arts of the contact zone,” and “planetary consciousness.” Featured within this special section are Pratt’s “anti-conquest,” which refers to those “strategies of representation” that profess colonial “innocence” in the same moment that they “assert, reproduce, and expand hegemony” (2008: 9), and “the arts of the contact zone”—i.e. those methods, artifacts, and technologies which make marginalized or subaltern voices more decipherable “to those who once would have ignored them in defense of a stable, centered sense of knowledge and reality” (1991: 37). In her book Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (2008), Pratt offers a critical analysis of European travel writing, describing how the development of the Linnaean classification system within natural history was essential to the formation of a colonial “planetary consciousness.”² Despite this geographic subject matter, across her works, the environment and nonhuman agency were not the focus of Pratt’s humanist project; this important gap served as an entry point for more-than-human reformulations, including the contributions of this special section.

The articles in this special section decenter the human and challenge “colonial differences” (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) by applying Pratt’s critical de/postcolonial “contact” perspective to environmental studies. In so doing, they bridge critical environmental and more-than-human geographical research with postcolonial studies and the project of decolonization. Several authors here demonstrate how Pratt’s focus on uneven power relations in colonial contexts is shared within political ecology, which has traditionally focused on post/colonial environments where “the role of unequal power relations in constituting a politicized environment is a central theme” and attention is given to the ways in which “conflict over access to environmental resources is linked to systems of political and economic control first elaborated during the colonial era” (Bryant, 1998). Juanita Sundberg (2014: 34), defined “decolonizing” as “exposing the ontological violence authorized by Eurocentric epistemologies both in scholarship and everyday life”. Because these articles examine the more-than-human contact zone in place, as more than metaphor (Tuck and Yang, 2012), they demonstrate how Pratt’s concepts might serve as tools for the decolonization of land and environmental knowledge production (de Leeuw and Hunt, 2018).³ Specifically, the section engages with questions and manifestations of “significant otherness”(Haraway, 2003), where the “other” might be human, but also includes nonhuman animals, plants, forces, and other lively things. We argue that these articles demonstrate a more-than-human contact approach which (1) multiplies perspectives by re-centering subaltern accounts and nonhuman agency, asserting “voices that remained absent from the archives” (Wilson: 712); (2) deploys case studies to deconstruct and decolonize the social construction of (environmental) knowledge/production; and (3) functions as critical intervention in instances of asymmetry, injustice, and harm. They creatively apply Pratt’s concepts to nonhuman subjects in the field, examining the conditions and “ontological politics of a present moment defined, increasingly, by catastrophic violence and the unfolding collapse of planetary ecosystems” (Reinert, 2016: 95). Beyond diagnosing those performative differences, dualisms, and violences which underpin hierarchies, the articles itemize and explain the processes, mechanisms, tools, and discourses through which coloniality persists and asymmetries are reproduced, allowing for more symmetrical relations and radical alternatives to emerge.

This introduction to the special section proceeds as follows. We trace previous uses of Pratt’s “contact” perspective within political ecology, work on encounter, multispecies ethnography, and more-than-human geographies. Specifically, we describe how Pratt’s “contact zone” has “traveled” (Said, 1983) and serves as a boundary object (Leigh Star, 2010) or convergence point between literatures, urging a critical reformulation of the concept. We describe in further detail our more-than-human contact approach which develops the core elements of Pratt’s contact perspective in new registers, drawing on critical theories of the environment. Then we provide a brief overview of the section’s empirical case studies, including a postcolonial reading of the BBC’s Blue Planet II (Wilson), a feminist science study of migratory shorebird conservation on New Jersey’s Delaware Bay (Isaacs), and political ecologies of prescribed forest burns by Parks Canada (Sutherland) and tidal energy production in the Bay of Fundy (Fredrikson), with an afterword by Mary Louise Pratt. We conclude with a brief discussion of directions for further research.

More-than-human contact zones

This special section is its own interdisciplinary contact zone. It combines theoretical insights from a host of literatures (decolonial feminist science studies, political ecology, de/postcolonial theory and indigenous studies, more-than-human geography, etc.) to critically examine the dynamics of human relations with the environment, between peoples and nonhumans. The articles “hold open a question of who—and what—is taken to exist and of how certain modes of existence are (and are not) made to count” (Reinert in van Dooren et al., 2016: 16). To challenge the (Western) hierarchical divisions and notions of supremacy which underpin (colonial-capitalist) violences, we see these articles and literatures affirming the following two assumptions about environmental or more-than-human relations: that (1) humans are inescapably “entangled” with nonhuman agents (Barad, 2007; Collard, 2012; Grosfoguel, 2011; Haraway, 2008), in “cultures of reciprocity” within an interconnected “democracy of species” (Kimmerer, 2013: 112–114) “never outside a sticky web of connections”(Bennett, 2004: 365); and that (2) local conditions and geohistorical context are primary, but must be understood within and in relation to wider, larger, multi-scalar, and longer contexts (of “the Anthropocene,” of coloniality, within competing versions and understandings of “history,” etc.) This second point recognizes, for instance, that all knowledges are ontologically and geographically “situated” (Haraway, 1988), within political ecologies (Robbins, 2012; Sundberg, 2011), saturated with cultural meaning and the ongoing “legacies” of colonization (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2018; Cronon, 1996; Pratt, 2008; Tuck et al., 2014; Vickery and Hunter, 2016; Wilcox and Rutherford, 2018). Specifically, many cases focus on and “elucidate gaps between ecological knowledge systems and managerial practices…[they] critique and reframe the questions asked by environmental researchers in light of historical insights, cultural differences, and unjust power relations” (DeLoughrey et al., 2015: 15). Such aims and insights guide this interdisciplinary project to imagine and apply a more-than-human contact approach.

The core element of a Pratt-inspired “contact” approach is the “contact zone.” Contact zones are spaces of (colonial) encounter. Although the term “contact zone” does not describe all encounters, encounter is the main object of study within a Pratt-inspired “contact approach”; i.e. without encounter there is no contact zone. Recalling Allport’s (1954) “contact hypothesis” (see also Askins and Pain, 2011; Sundberg, 2006), Helen Wilson defined encounter as a “genre of contact” and “an event of relation” between “two beings or things that are momentarily held together” (2017). Pratt’s original definition of the contact zone emphasized its specific geographic and temporal dimensions; as “the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (2008, emphasis added). The word “ongoing” in this definition implies repeated encounters and/or protracted engagements over time, suggesting broader colonial-capitalist relations and significant histories of (imperial) contact.⁴ Authors using a contact approach therefore should attend to both the affective dynamics and the historical, colonial-capitalist context of encounters.

Recent environmental scholarship has emphasized the value of encounter as a lens for better appreciating the complexity of entanglement in our more-than-human world. Johnson (2015: 297) finds critical value in the ways that encounter “emphasize[s] action as it unfolds”, illustrating “how moving, more-than-human parts take hold of one another to produce our worlds, bringing to light these plural elements that shape events and constitute difference”, examining their political and ethical implications “in an increasingly global social milieu”. Observing that “Encounters forge ‘contact zones,’ where people across cultures, with different histories come together into composition, interact and intertwine”, Maan Barua (2014a: 265) affirms that encounters are also/always more-than-human, which include “beings of biologically different origins, equally vital to such histories and world-making”. Affect and emotion are essential properties of encounter which invest contact zones with their liminal qualities and transformative potential; Barua explains that because “There are encounters of passion, and encounters of pain” therefore “Encounters are thus spatial; encounters spatialize”. In order to “lay bare the spatial politics at work,” he suggests that more-than-human scholars should purposefully engage in radical forms of multispecies storytelling (2015: 268). This is similar to Wilson (p. 712, quoting Todd and Hynes, 2017: 733), who celebrates the disruptive aspects of encounter as a tool for change; she observes that “Encounters ‘seize thought’ and ‘unravel the unity of the faculties’ and it is only through keeping hold of their ‘radically ungrounding effects’ that we can begin to challenge species hierarchies and our most familiar way of knowing”. In Wilson’s (2017: 461) review of encounter studies, she observed that previous encounter studies have tended to emphasize dominant perspectives, which “not only marginalizes a plurality of perspectives, but also has clear implications for how encounters are named, understood and identified as ‘meaningful’”. Such radical readings of multispecies encounters support Pratt’s de/postcolonial project by challenging how meaning and value is determined through power, while demonstrating how it may be resisted through practice in place.

Early diffusion of Pratt’s concepts into geography, specifically political ecology, feminist science studies, and multispecies scholarship, can be traced to the foundational work of Juanita Sundberg and Donna Haraway in the mid-2000s. Sundberg and others have used Pratt’s contact zone in environmental studies to challenge asymmetry and hierarchy, encouraging more ethical engagement with one’s subjects (Collard, 2015; Sundberg, 2015). Juanita Sundberg borrowed Pratt’s concept of “transculturation” to describe negotiations between supranational conservation actors and local residents in the creation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve; offering questions relevant for any contact study, she asked, “Who is coming together? Under what conditions? What are the specific configurations of power and knowledge, and how do they privilege and attempt to fix particular social and environmental formations, thereby rendering others unlivable or invisible?” (2006: 242). Dedicated to the project of decolonization, activist-scholars such as Sundberg strive to learn from, support, and “walk with” (Collard et al., 2015) subaltern actors, asserting silent/silenced perspectives (Chakrabarty, 2009; Haraway, 1997; Spivak, 1988; Sundberg, 2014). Collard et al. (2015) describe the goal of such a project as “reckoning with colonial-capitalist ruination” which has produced “a world of social asymmetries and ecological impoverishment”. Sundberg et al.’s radical interventions using Pratt’s concepts in environmental research was complemented over the same period by Donna Haraway’s use of the contact zone as a way to describe “entangled” relations between “companion species.”

The citation of Donna Haraway by all authors in this section demonstrates the importance of her multispecies applications of Pratt’s contact perspective. With a shared (decolonial) focus on “copresence and the shared building of other worlds”(Haraway, 2008: 237), Haraway builds upon Pratt to “foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions” of encounter (Haraway, 2008: 216, citing Pratt, [1992] 2008). For instance, she describes the training of her companion dog, Cayenne, as a “located, multispecies, subject-shaping encounter in a contact zone fraught with power, knowledge and technique, moral questions—and the chance for joint, cross-species invention” (2008: 205). Interested in the affective dimensions of research and co-habitation, she methodologically focuses on “the cause and effect of each other’s movements” (Haraway, 2008: 229). She explained that “most of the transformative things in life happen in contact zones… contact zones are where the action is, and current interactions change interactions to follow…Contact zones change the subject—all the subjects—in surprising ways” (Haraway, 2008': 219). Haraway (2016) continues to focus on the transformative potential of the contact zone to imagine new forms of multispecies flourishing.

The articles in this section illustrate the central tenets of Sarah Whatmore’s (2002, 2006) “more-than-human” research. Whatmore (2006) listed three aims of this research: (1) to “re-animate the missing ‘matter’ of landscape, focusing attention on bodily involvements in the world in which landscapes are co-fabricated between more-than-human bodies and a lively earth”; (2) to “interrogate ‘the human’ as no less a subject of ongoing cofabrication than any other socio-material assemblage”, and (3) to ‘redistribute’ subjectivity as something that ‘does not live inside, in the cellar of the soul, but outside in the dappled world” (Whatmore, 2006: 603 citing Ingold). This research reaches towards a “relational ethics that places corporeality and hybridity at its heart” (2002: 166). In a notable critique of Whatmore (2006) and other new materialists, Anderson and Wylie (2009: 332) remind readers that materiality is

never apprehensible in just one state, nor is it static or inert. [It] is not glue, binding and holding other, less material, things (social relations, cultural meanings) together…materiality is always already scored across states (solid, liquid, gaseous) and elements (air, fire, water, earth).

They asserted that “To set materiality free from its traditionally lumpen role with respect to thought and discourse is necessarily to set the concordant task of reimagining relations between the material, perceptual, affectual, and discursive” such that “Matter thereafter becomes a question posed: simultaneously, a provocation, incitement, enigma, and promise” (citing Grosz, 2001). In this spirit, a novel contribution of this special section is the authors' identification of ephemeral and moving contact zones, characterized by rhythmic patterns, cycles, phases, and shifting properties. Case studies focus on the agency and shifting properties of fire, tides, benthic zones, environmental governance technologies, and the mobility of multispecies actors. Through greater recognition of nonhuman agency, more-than-human approaches purposefully reimagine and unsettle categories.

This special section is titled “more-than-human contact zones” over “multispecies contact zones” for several reasons. Van Dooren et al. claim “more-than-human geographies” under their multispecies umbrella, along with other approaches “united by a common interest in better understanding what is at stake—ethically, politically, epistemologically—for different forms of life caught up in diverse relationships of knowing and living together” (2016: 5). While such interests certainly carry over here in full, as environmental geographers writing first with Pratt’s concerns, the term “more-than-human” is preferred. First, because de/postcolonial studies challenge divisive hierarchies, classification processes, and segregating categories (such as “species”), often imposed by Westerners. For instance, in Imperial Eyes (2008), Pratt critiqued the globalizing effects of those exact Linnaean hierarchical classification schemes of natural history of which “multispecies” is inescapably performative. Second, “more-than-human” research has deep roots in STS research which also challenges asymmetry in the production of knowledge (between human and nonhuman agents, see Callon, 1984), strongly resonating with Pratt’s focus on asymmetry. Finally, by re-centering focus on the agency of abiotic agents, technologies, tools and artifacts, a “more-than-human” contact approach supports the authors of this section who challenge “the biotic prejudices of multispecies work” (van Dooren et al., 2016: 4)⁵.

A more-than-human contact approach

Our more-than-human contact approach consists of three overlapping aims: multiplying perspectives, intervention, and decolonizing knowledge.

Multiplying perspectives: Recognizing the subaltern and nonhuman agency

Decentering the human is a principal aim of this research. Recognizing that the human as an object of study “can no longer be taken for granted” (Åsberg et al., 2011: 214) and that “human nature is an interspecies relationship” (Tsing, 2012: 14), a more-than-human contact approach “bring[s] the animals back in” (Wolch and Emel, 1995) and reinscribes those “many other lively bodies whose presence gets overwritten in scholarship about cultural circulation and exchange” (Barua, 2014b: 564). These articles also recognize environments as assertive, unruly, dynamic ecosystems and assemblages of unpredictable living and nonliving entities. They avoid treating the environment as backdrop, contested resource object, or passive terrain (van Dooren et al., 2016). They collectively affirm subaltern perspectives and vantage points. In these works, “different forms of knowledge, technology, people and non-human life grapple with each other” (Wilson: 712), including fire, tides, waves, tracking devices, and screens. Yet, approaches that decenter the human can also create their own problems; as Johnson (2015: 297) explains “centralizing nonhuman animals often raises more questions than it answers” because “attempts to dismantle assumed species hierarchies often reify others”. Critical reflexivity is required since by asserting multiple perspectives and focusing on particular asymmetries, researchers risk speaking for or occluding others and/or ironically reinforcing the dualisms they seek to deconstruct.

Presentation of other viewpoints is ethically fraught and technically difficult for those with an interest in asserting subaltern agency. As Wilson (p. 712) notes, when researching the nonhuman, “the tools for interpretation and understanding may not always exist and even if they do, there will always be a gap”. Therefore, it may be impossible to ever truly understand or accurately represent any contact zone from a nonhuman perspective. Despite this, Haraway insists that humans should strive to communicate with and understand nonhuman others “however imperfectly” because to do otherwise would be “a denial of mortal entanglements…for which we are responsible and in which we respond.” (2008: 226–227). For this section, in discussions of “the nonhuman”, we choose to engage in what Gayatri Spivak (1988) called “strategic essentialism” or the necessity to “speak on behalf of the group on the exploited side of a binary, even though at the same time the group is trying to dismantle the binary itself”. References to “the human” or “the nonhuman” should therefore be read as strategic, where “the binaries are used, but for another, nondiscriminatory goal” (in Harding, 2016: 1077). In the interest of greater symmetry, strategic essentialism and speculation are used to reinscribe the experience, suffering, and agency of the marginalized Other so that it becomes visible and harm reduction strategies can be drafted.

Intervention: Confronting violence and injustice

A more-than-human contact approach works as intervention in cases of extreme asymmetry, violence, and injustice. Each article in this section describes the domination, disturbance, discomfort, and intimate violence of asymmetrical meetings within contact zones (as research sites). Analysis of these dynamics is inspired by expansive environmental justice frameworks and critical theories of intersectionality (Birke, 2004; Cutter, 1995; Gillespie and Collard, 2015; Moore et al., 2003; Olive and Rabe, 2016; Taylor and Twine, 2014; Vickery and Hunter, 2016; Whyte, 2013; Yarbrough, 2015). For instance the concept of the contact zone might be useful for researchers examining the intersecting asymmetrical violences at work in cases involving, for instance, factory farming, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, contamination and pollution, or lab testing of nonhumans. Because a “more-than-human” contact approach is focused first on the local scale of different bodies in encounter, such research often implicates the researchers themselves (Butler, 2006; Gillespie, 2016; Stanescu, 2012; Sundberg, 2015). It therefore serves the purposes of decolonization by implicating those in power whose work routinely goes unquestioned and who often appear or present themselves as “conspicuously innocent.”

A more-than-human contact approach extends environmental justice concerns beyond the present, the human, and the local to “higher” scales. For instance, the contact zone’s plasticity and diverse applications across genres suggests its rich capacity to frame debates about Earth futures. As it spatializes and contextualizes local conflicts within colonial-capitalist processes of expansion, globalization, environmental change and widespread degradation, it troubles local–global distinctions, ontological categories, and demands new structural analyses. For example, Whyte (2013) projects the concerns of environmental justice into the future and challenges it to better recognize disjunctures between Western and Native American values and ideas of nature in confronting and adapting to climate change (see also Todd, 2016). In their Manifesto for abundant futures, Collard et al. (2015) argue that the Anthropocene “prompts the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment; how to live in a multispecies world”. Indigenous decolonial feminist scholar Zoe Todd (2016) challenges the deployment of concepts such as the Anthropocene and its cosmopolitics within environmental justice debates as new forms of “structural colonialism within the academy,” arguing that EuroWestern thinkers appropriate indigenous causes and discourses without acknowledging them as such. Pratt also cautioned that the imaginary of the planet/ary is fraught with colonial assumptions (in Mudimbe-boyi, 2002). Sundberg (2014: 38) explained that this planetary imaginary “sustains itself through performances that tend to suppress and or contain the enactment of other possible worlds” so that “Radical alterity is contained and reduced to sameness”. Attending to “other-than-human” agents, the concepts of the “pluriverse” (see Blaser and de la Cadena, 2018) and “fractiverse” have been offered to capture by contrast how “worlds in the plural are enacted in different and power-saturated practices” (Law, 2015: 2). These examples suggest how emerging, more-than-human reformulations of “contact” and “justice” expand the reach of Pratt’s work into new registers and scales.

Decolonizing knowledge production

A third aim of a more-than-human contact approach is the critical examination of knowledge production. This approach follows Pratt’s example of postcolonial analysis in Imperial Eyes (2008) regarding the social construction of knowledge about nature at the colonial frontier.⁶ It examines encounters of knowledge production as unpredictable co-happenings with nonhuman agents rather than discoveries of facts. Such perspectives dovetail with feminist science studies (Barad, 2007; Bauchspies and de la Bellacasa, 2009; Haraway, 1988), science and technology studies (Jasanoff, 2004; Latour, 1987; Schaffer and Shapin, 1985), and/or combined critical decolonial approaches (Giraldo, 2016; Harding, 2016)—all of which recognize that “knowledge is always anchored in historical, economic and politically driven projects” (Mignolo, 2011: 278)”. The articles in this section share Haraway’s interest in “critical silences, excavating the reasons questions cannot make headway and seem ridiculous, getting at the denied and disavowed in the heart of what seems neutral and rational”(1997: 269). Justifying a joint critical framework between technoscience and de/postcolonial studies, she asserted,

Twenty-first-century technoscience and technoculture are nothing if not frontier practices, always announcing new worlds, proposing the novel as the solution to the old, figuring creation as radical invention and replacement, rushing toward a future that wobbles between ultimate salvation and destruction but has little truck with thick pasts or presents. (2014: 143)

To confront such colonial practices of knowledge production includes first asking, with Mignolo, “Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)?” affirming that “Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation” (2009: 160).

Contributions: New stories of the contact zone

The articles in this section offer new case studies which demonstrate novel applications of Pratt’s contact perspective within environmental research. Using a more-than-human contact approach, they illustrate how and why the political dynamics, affective aspects, historical and spatial dimensions of encounter are interlocking.⁷ Like Askins and Pain (2011; 804), they specifically examine the “link between spatiality, encounter and the notion of contact zones, emphasizing contact zones as method as well as theory”, reworking basic spatial questions, such as how to delimit a more-than-human contact zone.

Helen F. Wilson’s “Multispecies Scholarship Through Imperial Eyes” considers the value of the contact zone for multispecies scholarship. Her critical discussion of BBC’s Blue Planet II considers wildlife documentary as anti-conquest which shapes “planetary consciousness.” In her article, Pratt’s contact zone is “lifted out of its original context” and displaced into the ocean depths, where wildlife photographers, researchers, film crews, and outdoor enthusiasts grapple with the materiality of the ocean and its many lively agents. Media here serves as a mode of contact which renders the benthic zone encounterable to viewers. The film functions as a governmentalizing technology, transmitting familiar imperial tropes and imaginings of an unexplored frontier waiting to be discovered, leading to the erasure or subjugation of certain knowledges. Yet the film also works as an “art of the contact zone” with transformative potential, i.e. a way of telling more-than-human stories. Wilson questions not only whether we can make sense of the nonhuman experiences shown in the film, but “whether such a translation is desirable or even possible, without reducing difference into more familiar (human) systems of meaning or causing unknown harms”.

Jenny R. Isaacs’ “The ‘Bander’s Grip’: Reading Zones of Human-Shorebird Contact” is a decolonial feminist science study of migratory shorebird conservation. She describes the asymmetry between shorebirds, residents, and their “defenders,” who annually congregate on the Delaware Bay. With her analysis of bird banding as a sometimes “violent” expression of “animality/coloniality”, she troubles conservation work by re-thinking “disturbance” as state-sanctioned contact for purposes of knowledge production. As a new “art of the contact zone,” she explains how remote monitoring technologies reveal the experiences of interpellated birds while effectively expanding the space of the contact zone and rule across the hemisphere. She considers how portraying conservation as violence within a decolonial framework—as what Pratt described as “anti-conquest”—shifts understandings of global conservation projects in colonial contexts.

Like Isaacs and Wilson, Aurora Fredrikson’s “Encounters in the Ebb and Flood: Knowing Marine Wildlife in the Intertidal Contact Zone,” continues with a multispecies contact approach sensitive to the shifting materialities and timespaces of intertidal contact zones. Fredrikson writes, “the rhythmpatterns of the timespaces of the Bay of Fundy are not the background to action, not space as container of encounter, but integral components in the co-composition of worlds.” She describes how Nova Scotia’s tidal waters in the Bay of Fundy made it a key site for renewable energy generation. However, as Fredrikson shows, many living and working in the bay view turbine energy as an “unwanted intrusion on, and potential interruption of, existing ecological relations in the bay.” Fredrikson offers the concept of “intrusion” to convey concerns for the perceived threat that turbines pose to marine ecological relations and livelihoods.

Colin Sutherland’s “Theorizing the Burn: Wildfire Ecologies as Contact Zone,” describes how land managers and ecologists come to know, govern, and encounter fire in different ways. His approach represents some important departures from the multispecies perspectives discussed above and illustrates the significance of broader environmental applications of a contact approach. Sutherland’s case study on wildfire ecology and management in postcolonial Canada critically examines combustible landscapes, the liveliness of fire as a significant-other, and encounters with processes of unbecoming. A central contribution of this article is the assertation that the burn challenges “compartmentalized notions of subject encounters” by imagining how time can be understood to be “negotiated as temporalities are crafted through the creation of new landscapes through the suppression or ignition of fire.” His invocation of “agentic rhythms” and descriptions of a patchwork of environmental governance in a settler-colonial context resonates with temporally attuned, more fluid notions of the contact zone while demonstrating the need for historical contextualizing of more-than-human contact zones. Such research expands the political, pushing against multispecies research which privileges actors possessing more obvious qualities of “mobility and intentionality”.⁸

The final offering in this section is an afterword by Mary Louise Pratt, who explains how the imperial contact zone and the environmental contact zone “are reflexes of each other, ruled by many of the same myths.”

Conclusion

These articles demonstrate how researchers might apply Pratt's concepts to understand encounters with the nonhuman. They offer many opportunities for further research; Who or what is considered an agent within ecological contact zones? What is implied by and/or with “contact”? How might researchers methodologically delimit the borders and topology of a more-than-human contact zone? Taking seriously the decolonial narrative of ubiquitous European hegemony (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Moore, 2016; Quijano, 2007) coupled with the geological case for the Anthropocene (Collard et al., 2015; Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), we wonder: are we ever NOT in a contact zone? At a global scale, do notions of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene imply that all encounters and their spaces are always/already colonial? How and by whom a contact zone is defined remains an open ontoepistemological (justice) question, to be determined differently by those within the encounter versus witnesses to encounter. Specific openings include the need for empirical work which leans formally on a contact approach from the outset and research which applies a “more-than-human contact approach” for practical, multidimensional environmental problem solving.

These articles illustrate how Mary Louise Pratt’s contact perspective continues to be extremely generative. Although more than 25 years old, the contact zone is still facilitating fresh insights as it evolves, gaining momentum as it challenges Western/human exceptionalism. With its focus on the lived aspects of asymmetry, Pratt’s perspective suggests that notions of more-than-human entanglement do not and cannot escape decolonial imperatives and environmental justice critiques; in fact, they reinforce, extend, upscale, and intensify them. We encourage other researchers and activists to take up a more-than-human contact approach to confront asymmetries, better recognize nonhuman agency, challenge violence and injustice, and decolonize the production of environmental knowledge as they recognize and develop the new “arts of the contact zone.”

Highlights

Mary Louise Pratt’s critical de/postcolonial “contact” perspective has spurned creative applications in multispecies and environmental research since the mid-2000s.

The articles of this section focus on nonhuman agency, filling an important gap within Pratt’s humanist research.

Our “more-than-human ‘contact’ approach” has three aims: (1) multiply perspectives and recognize nonhuman agency, (2) intervention, (3) decolonize knowledge production.

More-than-human perspectives expand the reach and potential of Pratt’s contact perspective as they strive for more symmetrical relations.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the authors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagements with this special section. We extend our deepest thanks to the steering editors, Rosemary-Claire Collard and Leila Harris, for welcoming this section and for their guidance in the revision process. We thank the many participants in our AAG Contact Zone sessions. Thanks especially to Mary Louise Pratt for graciously contributing to this conversation. Finally, we thank Richard A. Schroeder and the Rutgers University Geography Department for supporting our work on this topic. Shortcomings and omissions are entirely ours.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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