This session brings together scholars working at the cutting edge of religion, ecology, and multispecies justice to confront the systems that sever humans from the more-than-human world. Whether through the sacred resistance of Minamata protest literature, the politics of poop, or the spiritual implications of multispecies entanglement, these papers challenge the logics of extraction, autonomy, and control that underwrite ecological collapse. In their place, they offer visions of embodied freedom, collective subjectivity, and ecological solidarity grounded in animist cosmologies, Buddhist ethics, and radical relationality. By interrogating the infrastructures—both material and metaphysical—that render life disposable, these scholars call for a transformation in how we imagine democracy, agency, and responsibility. This session is a call to unmake the old assumptions and begin building livable futures rooted in reciprocity, vulnerability, and the sacred entanglement of all life.
Multispecies democracy (MD) challenges human exceptionalism by advocating for the political inclusion of nonhumans, positioning itself as a hopeful intervention in an era of democratic crisis. While MD does not propose direct democratic participation for nonhumans, its advocates argue that humans should act as proxies, representing nonhuman interests in democratic processes. A crucial tension emerges, however: How can MD reject anthropocentric models of agency and freedom while simultaneously depending on humans to articulate nonhuman interests? This paper explores this tension by examining democracy’s dependence on practices of discursive accountability—giving and taking reasons, justifying claims, and revising shared norms. Because nonhumans lack the capacity to take part in these practices, the prospects for their democratic participation require further theorization. By clarifying the limits of MD’s current political vision, this paper argues for forms of nonhuman democratic representation that preserve democracy’s core structure of accountability while expanding its ethical scope.
Excreta, specifically human feces, as in poop, is an understudied phenomenon in the study of Religion. Yet, ancient texts and contemporary contexts speak to its importance for the lives of human individuals and the environment. There is a dual sanitation crisis plaguing the planet. On one hand, there are 3.5 billion people who do not have a dignified, private place to relieve themselves. On the other hand, the copious use of resources to flush (and then extract) feces and urine from fresh water is straining municipal systems. Much more than a technical problem, however, the crisis and its solutions require asking religious, psychological, and social questions. Paying attention to the dynamics of power, worldviews, and practices elucidate why the porcelain toilet system is so entrenched, even in places where ecological sanitation alternatives exist. This paper hones in on the religious dimensions of this question, theorizing that our sh*t is sacred.
This paper employs Rob Nixon’s notion of “slow violence” to examine the systemic issues underpinning the environmental and humanitarian disaster in the Minamata Disease Incident—the worst industrial pollution in Japanese history—and show how the Minamata villagers were rendered “unimagined communities” by the Japanese government-industrial complex during postwar modernization. As is often the case in contexts marked by slow violence, literature emerged as a form of resistance in Minamata. This paper explores Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, a major driving force in the Minamata protest movement, and suggests that her writing, appealing to the local (pre)animistic worldview and the Buddhist notion of Tariki (Other-power), gestures towards a relational framework that reclaims the victims’ subjectivity beyond their subjection to objectification. This framework, transcending the confines of human agency, repudiates the “premises of individualism” on which neoliberal capitalism operates and reimagines a human-nature relationship characterized by sympathy and interdependence.
This paper argues that dominant anthropocentric ideologies, rooted in autonomy and human exceptionalism, have systematically denied agency and well-being to the more-than-human world, contributing to ecological degradation and species extinction. In response, I develop embodied freedom as a theoretical and ethical framework that redefines freedom as relational, interdependent, and materially grounded. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, this paper proposes a relational ethics that recognizes the shared vulnerability and agency of all beings, challenging the prevailing notion that freedom requires detachment from constraint. By reframing freedom through multispecies entanglements rather than human sovereignty, this paper offers a pathway toward a more just and sustainable vision of multispecies flourishing in an era of planetary crisis.