ABSTRACT
More-than-human geographies are explicitly political and they assert claims about how people should act and respond (or ‘normative’ claims). This chapter examines how the assumptions outlined in Chapters 2 and 3 (about what the world is and how it can be known) lead to specific political interests and ethical commitments asserted in more-than-human geography. It begins with a summary case study, analysing the politics of a singular Nature to show how more-than-human critique might operate. The main body of the chapter then reviews a wide range of geographic scholarship concerned with the politics of materials (e.g. technologies, elements, and organisms), the politics of multiple knowledges (and how they might be brought into democracy), and the politics of material and ecological relations (especially concerning the management of affectual atmospheres, ecological process, and relational asymmetries). The chapter concludes by identifying three common normative commitments within more-than-human work: an ethics of care, a commitment to listening to and conversing with diverse knowledge claims, and an imperative to (re)compose relations and connections with care and inclusion. Not all the authors’ work reviewed would ascribe to these commitments, but they are often found (implicitly or explicitly) in much more-than-human geographic scholarship.
