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trajectories of becoming feral

Feral is what escapes and rejects domestication and the anthropocentric modes of domination. It is the runaway, the non-designed, one that slips through the cracks, is abandoned or neglected. Rooted in biology, the feral has become a prominent category in environmental humanities and Anthropocene studies and has been widely used (Tsing et al. eds. 2020; Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011; Monbiot 2014; Luke 1995; Struthers Montford and Taylor eds. 2016). As a notion, it has a broad use and, as I explore in this project animals, plants, ecologies, effects, processes, technologies, but also theories and art, can become feral. It offers an alternative to “wild” as that which has broken away from the systems of domination, without implying a return to a pristine state of Nature. However, although the wild is being conceptualised also as a process of rewilding, feralizing as a process has not yet received the necessary attention. The proposed project aims to fill this gap and answer the question – how does feralizing work within the field of study? How can something (like theory or art) BECOME feral? This will be done by (1) developing the category of feralizing, (2) establishing its characteristics, (3) conditions of use, and (4) critically comparing it with the category of rewilding. 

As a site of domination, domestication does not necessarily equal oppression, it can also mean inviting more-than-human others into your home and creating (often difficult) multispecies alliances (Tsing 2018; Swanson, Lien, and Ween ed. 2018; Cassidy and Mullin 2007). Questioning domestication is thus an important element of environmental humanities’ and Anthropocene studies’ attempts at creating improved modes of theorizing human relations with the environment and other humans. As an alternative to the more established rewilding, feralizing explicitly confronts the fact there is no pristine wild to return to. Although many takes on rewilding do problematise this (Ward 2019; Moorhouse and Sandom 2015; Lorimer 2015), the term remains burdened with unwanted meanings. As emphasised by Tsing et al. in the Feral Atlas, ferality is neither inherently good nor bad, but it is the descriptive characteristic of a more-than-human Anthropocene. It can be a strategy for fleeing oppressive governance and some learn to thrive in the feral state, but it is a state few will choose outside of a dire circumstance, as it is often marked by violence, isolation, and diminished security. Yet what is the current political, ecological, and social situation if not desperate?