Anarchism beyond Anthropos: Cultivating more-than-human ecologies of solidarity and care until all are free.

This contribution thought about the puzzling disconnect between the increasing calls for action to protect ‘the environment’ made by so many, and the continued domination and violence enacted by humans towards our biosphere and the non-human animals we share it with. I suggested that fundamental questions are being overlooked: What are the underlying (and unexamined) values, subjective meanings, life-modes, philosophical perspectives, and cosmovisions regarding humanity’s relationship with(in) nature that determine current responses to these crises? And what world(s) do we prefigure as a result? Until this challenge is fully addressed, responses based on anthroparchal theoretical orientations will unwittingly perpetuate the very crises they aim to solve. Taking my lead from this year’s conference organisers, I argued that anarchism already contains within it the seeds of a profoundly more‐than‐human worldview to lead us out of such crises. Bringing activist voices into dialogue with anarchist, ecofeminist, indigenous and posthumanist thought, the paper discussed the ongoing Deep Commons research exploring conditions of empathic entanglement that provide the basis for both individual and societal formation, and for the radical loving-caring praxes which underpin many contemporary struggles. By extending popular conceptions of the commons to include our more-than-human psycho-socio-material relations, these deep commons were proposed as a ground for new political intersubjectivities to manifest — exploring how this radical interrelationality might serve as the basis for a co-emergent relational ethics of solidarity and care.