Date: 25-27 Sep 2026

Waqas Butt (A/Prof, Anthropology: University of Toronto)

Muhammad Kavesh (A/Prof, Anthropology: Australian National University)

Ecologies are still framed in traditional scales: the planetary, the global, the national, and the local. Each of these scales are familiar ones and amenable to the intentions, interests, and projects of seemingly disparate actors—policymakers, activists, engineers, scientists, bureaucrats, and citizens. What happens to our approaches to relating to the environment when we utilize other, unexpected scales, ones that have their own histories, praxis of relating, and forms of life? What implications—ontological, epistemological, ethical, and ultimately, political—do such spatial, temporal, and conceptual scalar shifts offer us in the contemporary moment, where ecologies are coming under all kinds of duress?

This panel interrogates ecologies across Asia by examining the multiple, intersecting scales that come together in novel and unanticipated ways, which raises a series of ontological, epistemological, and political dilemmas. Some of the scalar and ecological problems posed by this panel include: what role have weather patterns played in connecting disparate regions? How are human and more-than-human worlds captured through traditional scales, and what possibilities could a scalar rethinking offer? In what ways are infrastructural interventions across urban and agrarian landscapes alike, being contested through informal and formal mechanisms? How are relations between bodies of water and masses of land being negotiated by local people, and experts, in light of global warming? And what are the security and logistical systems through which economies are stretching across vast and unexpected ecologies?