Interspecies Agencies: Controversies, Ontologies, and New Forms of Cohabitation (Part 3)
Gonzalo Correa and Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira 04/01/2025 | Report-Backs
Editor’s Introduction
The following post is the third and final in a multi-part, co-authored piece of scholarship, continuing Backchannels’ experimental tradition in short-form communication. In a series of posts, Gonzalo Correa and Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira examine multispecies relations in science and technology.
When we speak of “interspecies agencies,” we do not simply mean the capacity for action within nonhuman living beings–even their capacity for political action. By this phrase, we seek, rather, to understand how these agencies are constitutive of our own capacity for action.
We live in, and belong, to a fundamentally interdependent world. Singular actions form part of the very conditions that make the world possible, continuously plural, perpetually becoming. Yet this perpetual, unfinished transformation, manifest in many lifeforms and modes of being, is not without its tensions, conflicts, and, as STS scholars like to say, “controversies.” There is, in other words, an immanent agonism within human and nonhuman existence. Studying these dynamics has revealed how various entities develop and stabilize, and it has simultaneously exposed how they, at times, alternatively mutate, transform, and become otherwise.
This interdependent, relational, and conflictual dimension leads us to the ontological–that is, to the question of being. This question has been central to STS concepts like the "seamless web,” socio-technical assemblages, and even actor-networks, which all assert that action constitutes being and that entities emerge through relations. This perspective de-essentializes both material and epistemic categories, recasting technical objects as network effects, scientific facts as stabilized constructions, cognition as trans-subjective processes, and foundational concepts (nature, humanity) as relational rather than absolute existences.
Embracing the human, not as a singular, unchanging essence, but as a relational material-semiotic knot in constant becoming demands nothing less than a radical reconfiguration of co-existence where “living together” extends beyond biological life to include the vibrant matter that co-constitutes our worlds. We propose the concept of "co-habitation" as a theoretical intervention that highlights how habitat functions less as the background of action and becomes, instead, an active mesh of world-making relations.
The word “habitat,” within ecological science, denotes the physical and biological environment in which species naturally live and reproduce. “Habitation,” in contrast, refers specifically to the human process of creating and occupying dwelling spaces. We conceptualize “co-habitation” as a synthesis that transcends both categories–the intersection where these two living-environment frameworks converge; it rejects both the naturalization of habitat, as purely non-human, and the anthropocentrism of habitation. This notion collapses the nature-culture divide, constituting what Donna Haraway would call “natureculture.”1 Importantly, co-habitation is not merely a category describing the physical and biological spaces where human and non-human lives intersect. It is, above all, a conceptual artifact that enables us to think in a symmetrical and situated manner about the relational production of life and the co-construction of territories and spaces. These two processes are recursive. Co-habitation highlights this recursivity and simultaneity. The encounter between species that is necessary for their production also implicates the constitutive relationality of what we call space.
As this series has illustrated, the diverse papers all engaged with the subject of co-habitation, sometimes indirectly yet always, undeniably shaped by it. Each case exposed the infrastructural power of technologies to stabilize, or disrupt, multispecies relations, whether these were war technologies, environmental monitoring systems, preservation technologies, protest technologies, or industrial technologies. To analyze these, we drew on Latour’s axiom that "technology is society made durable." This STS perspective shifted our focus: Our object of study was not mere technical artifacts but rather the socio-technological environments that constitute our habitats.
Alongside this series, we presented different ways of interspecies co-habitation. As evidenced in papers by Wairimu Njambi and William O'Brien and by Shashar Shiloach, war scenarios and conflict zones involve interspecies coexistence as a constitutive element of conflict dynamics. Combatants' daily lives reveal unexpected alliances with nonhuman beings who, even if ostensibly unaffected by warfare, nevertheless become active participants in territorial disputes and spatial reconfigurations, particularly in contexts where boundaries remain contested. This phenomenon finds parallel expression in Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira's work, which demonstrated how urban political conflicts implicate nonhuman inhabitants in the polis. The active participation of quiltros (unowned dogs) in popular protests is a salient example of multispecies cohabitation within urban political spaces. Building on this trajectory while shifting analytical focus, Gonzalo Correa's paper examined the constitutive role of cattle in producing a modern Southern state (Uruguay). When framed as biopolitical objects, bovine lives become integral components within the machinic relations that simultaneously generate a liberal state apparatus and its integration into international capitalism. This analysis revealed how the political animal (zōon politikon) fundamentally exceeds humans. Nonhuman animals emerge as political subjects within these configurations through active participation in modern political economies.
Moreover, the analysis by Blanco-Wells and Iriarte and the multi-author study by Zellner and collaborators empirically demonstrated how more-than-human agencies disrupt established epistemic regimes. A paradigmatic case is the disruptive behavior of a juvenile South American sea lion pack (Otaria flavescens), which subverted transdisciplinary agreements among human actors (i.e., local communities, scientists, policymakers) and revealed the politics within what, in modernity, has been coded as "nature,” as outside politics. Similarly, the resistance of fish species to engineer-prescribed behavioral scripts generated what Stengers (2010) conceptualized as “interesting questions”—those that dislocate hegemonic interpretive frameworks of science and technology.2 These sociomaterial reconfigurations show how animals transition from objects of knowledge within modern epistemology to “actants” in the co-construction of possible worlds (Latour, 2005).3
Both epistemically and politically, multispecies relations constitute intrinsic elements of the sociotechnical configurations that shape our societies. Our STS analyses may omit animality, or even actively denied and downplayed it in our explanatory narratives. Yet, animality persists as a condition of possibility for our most mundane artifacts and our most complex systems.4 These cases thus exemplify what Haraway (2008) has called “multispecies entanglements.”5 Animality is not merely a passive resource but a constitutive actor within our technologies, even when modern narratives of technical progress have systematically masked the agencies of the nonhuman.
Through its openness to renewed critique, the STS tradition has increasingly created conceptual space for engaging animality in analyses of sociotechnical assemblages. This development aligns with a broader epistemic shift away from anthropocentrism in world-making practices, a stance deeply embedded in the foundational ethos of this plural and interdisciplinary field that seeks to understand science and technology without either negating their complexities or severing their intrinsic political dimensions. While this orientation remains marginal rather than dominant within STS, it establishes the field as a fertile ground for interrogating multispecies relations. In this space, such questions can not only emerge but thrive.
Author Bios
Gonzalo Correa is a professor at the Universidad de la República (Uruguay) with a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on STS and multispecies studies. He is currently concluding a study on the role of cows in social composition.
Arthur Arruda Leal Ferreira is a post-doctoral researcher and professor of the History of Psychology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He has edited several psychology books and contributed to others, including works on Foucault, pragmatism, and biopolitics. His research spans technology, governance, and psychological theory.
1. Haraway, D.J. (2003). The Companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press.
2. Stengers, I. (2010). Cosmopolitics I (R. Bononno, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 2003).
3. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford University Press.
4. As Nicole Shukin (2009) reveals in her analysis of animal “rendering,” animal presence operates through: (1) concealed materialities (for instance, the animal-derived gelatin that enabled Kodak’s early films and, by extension, the very development of cinema emerges directly from Chicago’s industrial slaughterhouses; (2) experimental bodies, such as the frogs used in Galvani’s (1791) foundational bioelectricity experiments, which established the basis of modern neurophysiology; (3) materialized metaphors, including how the "horsepower" unit transposes animal capacities into combustion engines, erasing their zoological origin while symbolically perpetuating it. See Shukin, N. (2009). Animal capital: Rendering life in biopolitical times. University of Minnesota Press.
5. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press.
