Feral Collaborations: Writing With More-Than-Human Worlds

Abstract

What would it mean to engage with more-than-human landscapes as collaborative writing partners? Through a collaborative process we explore this question, developing a practice of feral collaborations. Starting from Tsing et al.’s (2024) ‘patchy Anthropocene’, the inquiry leads us through four landscapes across Europe as we consider embodied, relational co-creation that unfolds between human and more-than-human agencies. Piling these patches in collaborative writing comprises another feral landscape, in which concepts, technologies, schedules, and commitments become feral actors themselves. Our ongoing collaboration illuminates themes across our patches that lead us to engage our own research in new ways. Heterogeneous temporalities, ruptures, fragility, and endurance emerge as characteristics of feral collaborations. A practice of care for the other and the common becomes important in each landscape and in our collaborative process.

Starting a Journey: We’ve Got to Go Through It

We approach questions of collaboration as writing partners engaged with different landscapes and human and more-than-human interlocutors, spread across multiple countries. The challenges of the messy collaborative process remind us of the children’s story ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’ (Rosen, 2016), in which a family sets out on an adventure and faces the obstacles of squelchy mud, howling snow, and other tricky landscapes. Their refrain became our motto as we navigated material and conceptual terrains together:

We can’t go over it.

We can’t go under it.

Oh no!

We’ve got to go through it!

Like the family in the story, we cannot avoid the complications of the journey but go through them together with an attitude of curiosity and wonder. This essay comprises the record of our journey through several landscapes and through our collaborative writing.

Each of us is a postgraduate researcher, and part of the international doctoral program in European Ethnology titled ‘Transformations in European Societies’. Together, we established a reading focus group called ‘Ecologies in Transformation’. We are all at different stages of developing our doctoral projects, conducting fieldwork in diverse languages and settings, working with various research partners, and employing distinct theoretical frameworks. As we proceed on this journey, each researcher becomes a guide through their respective landscape.

We conceptualise our exploration of collaborative writing documented in this essay as feral collaboration. It engages with two interconnected levels of more-than-human collaborative practice. First, it concerns the individual partnerships each of us cultivates with our research counterparts which explicitly include as active participants the more-than-human landscapes we work in and with. Second, it encompasses our endeavour to co-author an essay, a process that extends beyond the four human writers to involve a diverse set of actors and participants, for example, our schedules and the technologies that mediate our interactions. Through this work, our landscape patches enter into dialogue. ‘Piling’ (Tsing et al., 2024) and ‘composting’ (Hohti/Tammi 2024) them gave rise to new constellations that shaped our thinking and writing. Collaboration here emerges as a relational assemblage – a dynamic configuration in which landscapes, ideas, and the act of writing itself assume agency. Alongside the notion of ferality, our collaborative process has been consistently marked by the emergence of the themes of temporalities, ruptures, fragility, care and endurance both with respect to our patches and to our co-writing.

By invoking the term ‘feral’ in relation to collaboration, we draw loosely on Tsing et al. (2024) to emphasise the inevitability of co-creation with more-than-human agencies, as well as the unpredictability of collaborative processes, outcomes, and participants. Feral collaborations resist the notion that collaboration is something fully pre-designed or controllable. Instead, they embrace the messiness and contingency inherent in such work. In a similar vein to Gale and Wyatt’s idea of approaching collaborative writing itself as ‘a method of inquiry’ (2016), we explored collaborative writing through the act of writing collaboratively. Doing so, we adopted an attitude of curiosity – one that fostered our capacity to be surprised, to allow emergent situations to make us think, and to engage with our research material, landscape patches, collaborative fields, and writing practices in novel ways in each iteration.

Following Feral Intuitions

In our reading group, we delved into the ‘Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene’ (Tsing et al., 2024). Working with and thinking through the key concepts proposed therein – patches, ruptures, piling, and ferality – inspired us to share our field experiences and discover resonances between them. When we decided to submit an abstract for this special issue, we set out to further explore our intuition that collaborative writing itself might be something feral.

The ecological upheaval which characterises the Anthropocene brings other-than-human agents to the front stage of our collaborative writing processes. Tsing et al. (2024) approach the Anthropocene as made in material patches where it takes on different feral effects. While they acknowledge its planetary dimension, they argue that studying it requires ‘descriptive field studies and histories, that is, fine-grained attention to patches’ (p.1). We took this as a prompt to start thinking together from our specific landscapes to collectively learn more than we individually could. As a designation for an epoch, the Anthropocene has an inherent temporal quality. It calls into question how we think about time in general, whose or which temporalities – and the associated rhythms, continuities, and durations – become relevant. Rather than global linearity, from a patchy perspective, ‘a multiplicity of Anthropocene timelines’ (p. 56) becomes apprehensible and shows up in our engagement with the respective landscapes. Thinking with Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2024), the ecological crisis necessitates ‘learning to compose heterogeneous timelines’ that accommodate ‘populations that are normally separated from each other by the dividing walls of classifications: minerals, plants, animals, and humans’ (p. 14). Ruptures (Tsing et al., 2024) are the characteristic events of these plural anthropo(s)cenes (Castree, 2015; Lorimer, 2017): they establish new rhythms and cycles, being ‘a mode of temporality in which the structure of emplaced relations itself changes’ (Tsing et al., 2024, p. 65). In our landscape patches, we observe a sense of rupture and urgency in the heterogeneous temporalities of more-than-human actors. It brings us to ask questions concerning fragility and duration in relation to change.

By working in our respective fields, each of us became a part of a patch and its material-semiotic processes. Researching and writing is always a collaboration with our human and more-than-human research partners. This process is feral: one does not know what will come out of the non-linear interactions involving an uncontrollable number of actors. Also in writing, we found that ‘we’ve never been individuals’ (Gilbert et al., 2012) and writing, in a sense, has always been feral. ‘Feral collaboration’ aims at making this ferality explicit, embracing and interacting with it, harnessing its potentiality.

Tsing et al. propose ‘piling’ as a method that gathers information without a predetermined framework or an aim to forge one shared narrative. It brings different kinds of situated empirics and empiricism into conversation and friction. Rose and Van Dooren (2012) similarly describe a generative process where ‘stories and meanings are not just layered over a pre-existing landscape [but] emerge from and impact upon the way in which places come to be – the material and the discursive are all mixed up in the making of places, as with worlds more generally’ (p. 2). That kind of material semiotics is always situated (Haraway 2015, p. 4). In gathering piles and composting storytelling (Haraway 2015; Hohti & Tammi 2023), our field sites and collaborations became storied places, describing the contingent and unpredictable coming together of different actors and voices. Feral collaborations arise intra-actively, through the situational and practical interplay of specific conditions, abilities, and possibilities, giving rise to multiple stories and storytellers.

Working in this way was a messy, often obscure and unsettling process. We quickly became aware that our conceptual extension of ferality draws attention to the silenced and invisible aspects of collaboration: the more-than-human relations and agencies at work, but also the dense web of relations in our daily lives which interacts with our efforts to meet and write together. Coordinating our schedules and discussing texts happens in the midst of work, travel, family life, and our commitments to our own doctoral research and interests. Divergent constraints and concepts become feral collaborating actors in their own right. We use the framework of ‘ferality’ to practice, describe and conceptualise collaboration as it comes into being. Our emergent knowledge and this text are constructed by practices involving landscapes, texts, technologies and ‘a whole range of participants that extend far beyond people’ (Law, 2004: 19). While the host of actors in our collaboration sometimes seems to contradict or even exclude each other, we come to understand our practices to ‘have diverging ways of having things and situations matter’ (Stengers, 2007: p. 14). Seeing, diving, gardening, asking, researching, writing, reading, and talking are not separable. In this way, our act(s) of collaboration for this piece of writing became another landscape, our common ground that embraces the presence of paradoxical agencies. Far from haphazard, holding together this messy collaborative landscape demanded that we prioritise practices of care for our own as well as each other’s thoughts and wellbeing.

In that spirit, we started with our own landscape patches, bringing them together, making sense of each other’s material and insights, examining them, and watching out for emerging meanings. With our findings in mind, we each rewrote, developed, and condensed our fragments. We then collaborated on and between the landscape patches to provide feedback, and make connections. While attempting to learn in conversation between our patches, we performed a careful and always precarious move beyond our patches. It did not lead us to a universal and generalised perspective, but to articulating the depth and richness of detail in our field sites beyond their specificity.

Sarah’s Landscape: Stone Structures in the Highlands of Scotland

The first landscape we walk through together features historic stone structures and the small living things that thrive there. For this essay, I conducted a brief autoethnography during a family holiday. With my phone, I recorded my children scampering around, whooping at ocean waves, dropping stones into Loch Ness, and I found that in each video or series of photos my focus turned from my human family towards more-than-human companions. I was aware of their presence – immanence – and that our visit was a small blink of their long stories.

At Fort George, we explored the multi-leveled earth and stone fortifications of the 18th century military facility (still in use). We all agreed it looks like a video game battle scene, which makes my blood run cold, because it is not imaginary but a real place of soil and stone and breath, with my beloved and mortal children playing around it. In one video, they are calling to their grandparents who walk up the defensible slope towards them. The camera pans across the structures, with the sound of seabirds, and then zooms in on a clump of small purple flowers growing between stones. The wall built to shelter soldiers from attack shelters plant life from the wind off the ocean.

The binomial name of the plant, Cymbalaria muralis, identifies it as ‘of a city wall’ (Harris, n.d). It has adapted and thrived in human structures, and humans have recognised it and named it as ‘of’ those structures. Blooming in a military setting highlights its quiet but persistent ferality: this little flower might be more successful than any human colonising force. Native to the Mediterranean, it has been naturalised in the UK for hundreds of years, and populates every continent but Antarctica (Grace, 2025). What story might it tell about the purposes of stone walls?

At Clava Cairns, round stone piles nearly as old as the pyramids in Egypt, I tried and failed to imagine the lives, bodies, feelings of the humans who built them. Large standing stones encircle each cairn. One of these larger circles is cut by a fence and a narrow farm road, so one stone stands alone on the other side: tractors and tourists drive right through the ancient circle. People pose with their hand on a tall standing stone, in reference to a TV show in which stones are conduits to an exciting romantic past. To go back in time 200 years would be but a small fraction of the history of these cairns. What is time to a stone? I think of a line by Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1934/1993): ‘All is lithogenesis’. Stones are always in the process of becoming new, and the lifetime of these stones is the age of the earth. Baffled by that timescale, I again turned my camera to something small and immediate: the diversity of thick, bright moss living on the stones. Each clump, smaller than my hand, has many species, as dense and entangled as a miniature woodland. The stones lure me towards abstraction, but the moss reminds me that ‘always’ is also now, and alive, and we are in it. I want to apply Haraway’s comment about companion species to these stones and flowers and moss: they ‘are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with’ (Haraway, 2003, p. 5).

Participating in more-than-human collaboration requires me to attend with a ‘different sensory repertoire’ (Hohti & Tammi, 2024, p. 598): my hand on the spongy moss drawing me into presence. There is immediacy in this relational exchange, which is multi-directional and material, even as its full meaning(s) is unknown/unknowable. It confronts us with the limits of our knowing while simultaneously grounding us in co-presence: the boundaries and not-boundaries between us.

Magdalena’s Landscape: A Village in the Swiss Alps

In May 2025, a massive mountain and glacier collapse occurred in the Swiss Alps, burying an entire village – an interplay of great forces, local circumstances in global contexts. I made this destructive event my patch. Since, the area has been declared a danger zone – and I was never there. My story was created from afar; conveyed via screens, in numerous printed newspaper articles, in pictures, videos.

That I was not there, that I did not see it with my own eyes and experience it with my own body, does not mean that the diverse practices associated with the event do not create realities – including my research intervention. I am over 170 km away, and yet I lie awake in bed, feeling affected, overwhelmed by grief and anger, a lump in my throat. Not only were the local people affected, but this event became a matter of concern far beyond its immediate vicinity – very different realities arise, and they arise in the practices that connect living beings, places, things, and stories.

Residents, politicians, government institutions, scientific experts and engineers, and military units were concerned about it and spoke of ‘ground zero’, a ‘new era’, what should have been done, how to assess the current situation, whether reconstruction was possible and whether this place had a future. The care practices associated with these concerns produce the rupture: a place where ‘something broke’ (Tsing et al., 2024, p. 65) – and is still breaking.

The destruction and danger caused by the moving mountain called many things into question, including a major, dominant narrative: the eternity of mountains. In Switzerland, this notion of the timeless stability of mountains is linked to the idea of an independent, resilient country that is supposed to convey strength and endurance both internally and externally. However, it presents a timeline that is interrupted by the physical collapse of the mountain, revealing the fragility of the concept and the vulnerability of the mountain itself.

A still-acute danger, coupled with the admission of current hopelessness, evoked an existential urgency (Beck, 1987) which leads to practical and ontological problems: it is no longer certain what something was, what it is, and what it will be. The chronology and continuity of a temporal order are at stake, as are the relationships between humans and non-humans involved.

The loss of control and human powerlessness in relation to the mountain disrupts the narrative of a living environment that changes yet endures over time. The catastrophe, articulating itself as a rupture, highlights the urgent need to create a specific praxio-temporal arrangement to deal with this world that has become fragile. This arrangement, in turn, is characterised by restoration: people and animals are relocated, emergency roads are constructed, debris is cleared, and the movements of the mountain are closely monitored. The more fragile the objects, narratives, and environments become, the stronger the desire for permanence grows – what does it mean to make things last?

However, the desire for continuity and the associated practices of stabilising mountain worlds in material, social, and ideological terms seem to cloud awareness of the fragility of these worlds. The question of how to make mountain worlds last seems to imply asking about the practices that determine what specifically needs to be done to ensure that the mountains remain the same, that they endure. For ‘each problematisation of time and each form of maintenance organised around it actualizes the specific modes of existence of things’ (Denis & Pontille, 2025: p. 168). Perhaps it is time to take the practices of this fragility more seriously and to look closely at who and where we care for. We should also ask ourselves how those we construct as ‘others’ spend their time in the world, not as points on a line, ‘but as marks and movements within landscapes that are being shaped by a catastrophic “meeting-up of histories”’ (Tsing et al., 2024: p. 56).

Kasia’s Landscape: Allotment Gardens in Poland

The next landscape is very different, but resonant themes become apparent as we go through it together. Over the past 5 years, I conducted extensive fieldwork with the eldest allotment gardeners in Nowa Huta, Kraków.

The sense of life for the oldest allotment gardeners is caring for the reproduction of life – of plants, animals, their families, and community – being a part of a cycle of life. They often say that growing an allotment is what keeps them alive but as they are ageing, they have less ability and strength to carry on. So, they liquidate crops – grow less edible plants and more ‘useless’ grass. There is less life in them and on their plots – they feel that they are useless and their land is wasted – life loses meaning.

When the oldest gardeners can no longer mow the lawn, their plots become overgrown with grass and weeds. For them, it is a matter of honour not to let that happen and to control their more-than-human plots. However, as they age and approach death, natural succession takes over. Gardeners can lose their allotment, however, if they don’t tend to the grass. They receive warnings from the garden board and fear being evicted. For the oldest gardeners, it is a catastrophic more-than-human rupture.

My grandfather died overworked after having mowed his plot. I have been told many stories of gardeners dying on their allotments, and some also wish it for themselves. An allotment is what keeps them alive: they experience the passing of time by cultivating a garden, and in that, being a part of the world. However, it is not easy to give up to death when you live for reproduction of life. Ironically, an allotment is often also what kills them.

A few years back, as I was walking along an alley in an allotment garden, I noticed an elderly man looking at me from his allotment. It felt as if he had been waiting for me to tell me about his life. As his story was coming to a close, he said with tears in his eyes that his wife recently passed away and he does not know what he is going to do without her. Seeing him in this fragile state, I felt sorry and worried about him. After we shared this emotional moment, he showed me around his allotment which was covered with crops. He said that it is easier to weed potatoes than mow grass. He also bred chickens and let them run loose by the riverbank. I thanked him for sharing and asked whether I could meet with him again. He said that he is at his allotment every day and I can visit him anytime.

I kept coming back to the alley by this allotment in the same week, month, season, and then the following years. However, I never saw the gardener again. After some time, the chicken disappeared. The allotment progressively grew over. Then, a cat appeared and seemed to have made itself a home on the allotment. I wondered if the gardener took care of it when he was still around and it stayed after he left. Or, if it filled an emptied space – found an opportunity to sleep in peace in an abandoned glasshouse and pray on mice in the overgrown grass. I kept coming back to this allotment as a way of commemorating the gardener and witnessing his overwhelming absence in the landscape. The gardener evoked in me strong feelings of compassion, care and loss which unveiled an affective dimension of the allotment landscape.

I have met the authorities of the garden since the gardener disappeared, yet I never asked them what had happened to him. I did not have to as I could observe it in the progressive changes on his allotment. I learned how to attend to and understand the landscape from my epistemic partners. The oldest allotment gardeners experience the passing of time, fragility of life, and feelings of loss with the more-than-human, through practices of liquidating crops, mowing lawn, dying on an allotment and overgrowing grass.

Julian’s Landscape: A Contested Lagoonscape in Spain

Doing fieldwork around the Mar Menor, a unique but highly degraded saltwater-lagoon in Southeastern Spain, I found a landscape where ferality abounds. Transformed by the effects of large-scale infrastructure projects that were part of development programs of Spain’s fascist era, heavy-metal mining run-off, coastal construction boom, and particularly fertilisers and agrochemicals from industrial farming continue to haunt the lagoonscape and its inhabitants. The past, it seems, is never only the past. Ironically, these modernisation projects based on linear time have resulted in feral dynamics that are plural, multi-temporal, open-ended, ridiculing any vision of human control.

One of these dynamics is the seasonal proliferation of the jellyfish Cotylorhiza tuberculata that immigrated from the Mediterranean. This new temporal cycle emerged in the wake of the rupture of the lagoon’s relational meshwork by the run-off of industrial agriculture, pushing the lagoon to eutrophication.

In summer, when more and more jellyfish leave the swarms and end up on the beaches, I hear people talk and local media write about them as a plague. Bathers shy away, assuming the harmless animals cause inflammation. Fishermen complain that their nets quickly become filled with jellyfish. Local mayors call on the regional government to install anti-jellyfish nets to ensure ‘safe bathing’. The animals, I think as I get increasingly interested in them, point to the ecosystem’s fragility but at the same time proof its agency: they impose themselves on the lagoonscape and are hard to ignore. Yet, in a sort of blaming the messenger, they become the symbol for the lagoon’s degradation and the unease felt in the face of its feral transformations is projected on their otherly appearance. What, I wondered, may we learn about this landscape patch and the possibility to care for it when thinking with these feral entities?

Staying with that question, I found less antagonistic relationships being cultivated with the jellyfish that float with the slow currents of the lagoon. Gabriela, an activist for the regeneration of the lagoon, explains to me that they are an immune response: they feed on phytoplankton, which in turn feeds on nutrients from agricultural fertilisers. Rather than a plague, the activists perceive them as allies in their caring for the lagoon, by maintaining a fragile equilibrium and preventing it from crossing another catastrophic tipping point.

One morning, Gabriela and I put on snorkelling gear and enter the warm and still water. Not far from the shore, we find ourselves in a swarm of hundreds of jellyfish. Some tiny, others up to 30 cm wide, they pulsate their partly transparent bodies. From above they look like a fried egg (huevo frito is its local colloquial name), and from below, I admire their bright yellow dress adorned with short tentacles that end with a blue and violet spot.

While Gabriela moves confidently into the congregation, I find myself fascinated but reluctant, noticing an affective resistance to approach the animals. Unable to read their behaviour and unsure what to expect from their reactions, I first start by touching them cautiously, then follow Gabriela in entering the swarm. As some jellyfish brush against my skin unexpectedly, I have to suppress the urge to move quickly. Eventually, I get more comfortable and we float effortlessly among the pulsating swarm, carried by the hypersaline water. We take each other’s hands and breathe.

Gabriela later tells me: ‘like that I feel one with the ecosystem’.

In many conversation, I hear nostalgia among the lagoon dwellers when they tell stories of their childhood on the shores of a past lagoon, teeming with life. Guarding and regenerating the Mar Menor means also guarding the historical memory of its potentiality for multispecies flourishing. Yet, far from reifying a pure and unchanging nature, feeling one with the ecosystem happens in Gabriela’s and my jellyfish encounter exactly in immersing and attuning to its ferality and strangeness. The meaning of the popular activist slogan ‘El Mar Menor somos todos’ (‘We are all the Mar Menor’) has to be rediscovered again and again in a landscape in transformation.

Opening up to Feral Collaboration

In our conversations, we have swum with jellyfish, explored allotments, pondered mountains, and scrambled over stone walls. Where did we get to? In the cozy story of ‘Going on a Bear Hunt’, the family does indeed find a bear, and then quickly scurries back through each landscape to snuggle themselves safely in bed. They decide they will not be going on a bear hunt again. Although we, too, have retraced our steps through this collaboration, we cannot wrap our journey up in a neat and comforting way but must ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) of ongoing collaborations within our own landscapes and lives. While the ‘Bear Hunt’ story encouraged us to persevere through challenges, we have come to realise that our feral collaboration started and remains in the middle of complex, ongoing relations. The middle where we encountered each other and decided to proceed together is where things grow, expand, speed up – not a fixed place but a ‘transversal movement’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1997, p. 25). ‘Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’

While not conclusive, this troublesome middle is generative. Holding our patches and ourselves together revealed both resonance and dissonance in our local experiences of the Anthropocene. In the process of research with more-than-human actors, collaboration meant attending to, trying to understand and include various actors, voices and perspectives. We observed temporal-spatial and material-semiotic ruptures which, in each field site, resulted in more-than-human fragility paradoxically paired with endurance: a tender flower that hides from the wind but outperforms armies, the vulnerability of a mountain and its great power to assert presence, the ageing and death of gardeners visible in the persistent more-than-human growth on their allotments, the delicate ecology of the Mar Menor whose transformations nonetheless impose themselves on the lagoon dwellers. Our human research partners responded to them with practices of attention, care and repair, and manifold conflicting affects and narratives. They strove for the landscape to resist, sustain and endure, whether with or against the change.

Our perspectives on our individual research have shifted as a result of our feral collaboration. For example, Sarah became more able to attend to ‘temporality’ in more-than-human landscapes as material, relational, and unboundaried (Ingold, 1993, p. 158–9): it is ‘practical’, experienced through embodied practice. Ruins and debris are what remain – and they tell us something about the time of things and stories, how they are cherished and cared for, and how their fragility exposes them to corrosion. Magdalena’s attention has focused on how, along these remnants, things believed to be far away in time and space become tangible. Kasia learned that human absence makes allotments go feral. She noticed fragility and care as her field site transitioned from humans in a landscape to a landscape without humans. Julian became attuned to the many cyclicalities found around the Mar Menor as well as their continuities and transformations. Thinking together about fragility, loss, and resilience made him wonder about the relation of nostalgia and longing for a lost past with the activism for the regeneration of the lagoon.

As we found out in the process, our collaborative situation also remained in a state of fragile existence and required care and sustenance to endure and last. Ordinary life happened: dentist appointments took longer, we fell ill, children wanted to play or be put to bed, half of the participants were unprepared because other things came up, we had differing understandings and concerns in proceeding with the text. Yet, we kept showing up for meetings, continuing to work together and develop our fragile feral collaboration with care for the other and the common.

Our conversation corresponds to what Stengers (2005) calls ‘collective thinking in the presence of others’, which requires ‘that we don’t consider ourselves authorised to believe we possess the meaning of what we know’ (p. 995). That describes our experience of feral collaboration both with more-than-human agencies and within the relational worlds we co-enact in our collaborative writing. Beyond the initial conceptual proposition and exploration offered in this short essay, feral collaboration opens up a number of questions regarding research practices, authorship, and ethical implications that require further investigation.