Date: 9-12 June 2026

Convenors: Muhammad A. Kavesh and Natasha Fijn

For more than a decade now, multispecies anthropology has moved from the disciplinary margins to the centre, foregrounding Indigenous and local modes of understanding that depend on co-existence with more-than-human beings. Yet what does it mean to rethink this ontological turn in the face of the strength of capitalism, extractive economies, and ongoing marginalisation in this era of the Anthropocene? Animals, plants, and their products, such as meat, spices, or medicines, routinely cross borders and boundaries, unsettling both material and conceived orders. Conservation zones, informal trade networks, and global commodity chains reveal how the crossings of different species consequently reconfigure the social, economic, and political landscapes of our time. This roundtable takes the crossing of boundaries as critical sites for re-examining the limits and possibilities of multispecies ethnography in the current age. By treating more-than-human mobilities as both challenges of and openings for anthropological practice, contributors will have the opportunity to consider how such entanglements demand collaborative and ethical reorientations within the discipline. In doing so, the roundtable asks how multispecies studies might not only unsettle disciplinary and methodological boundaries but also expand anthropology’s capacity to engage with the edges, margins, and peripheries that define the contemporary world.