Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

The ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences in the 1990s was a transformative shift that challenged the dominant epistemological framework of a singular and objective reality by recognizing multiple coexisting realities (Viveiros de Castro, 1998; Descola, 2013). Such a radical perspective served to decenter fundamental assumptions of Western ontology, particularly the separation between humans and nonhumans. While this was seen as a radical and novel concept in Western philosophy, no such separation existed in Indigenous worldviews, which are based on a relational ontology according to which “people and entities (are) coming together to help and support one another in their relationship” (Hart, 2010, p. 3).
 
Indigenous relationships to land are derived from profoundly different ways of knowing and being – culture, health, spirituality, country, identity, law, kinship, governance systems, and relationships – with living and non-living entities all constitute the meaning of ‘land’ (Kwaymullina, 2005). Unlike the tenets of Western science, nature is not ‘out there’ but embedded in relations between the living and nonliving. Indigenous peoples’ diverse and complex relationships with land, nature, forests, trees, rivers, and mountains cannot be understood by a singular notion of property or resource, which are the two dominant worldviews in management and organization studies (MOS) (Ergene et al., 2021).
 
Simultaneously, an increasing number of MOS scholars have joined in the lively conversation of more-than-human or multispecies studies. Inspired by feminist new material or post-humanistic traditions (see, e.g., Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), scholars have problematized the Western understanding of the privileged place of the human as a master of Earth and highlighted instead the agency of various earthly beings, as well as their entanglements, interdependence, and relationalities (e.g., Calás & Smirchich, 2023; Cozza et al., 2025). Studies have employed, for instance, feminist notions of care, naturecultures, and response-ability to pave the way for more just and livable futures for humans and non-humans alike (Beachman, 2019; Ergene & Calás, 2023; Valtonen & Pullen, 2020). This scholarship has also contributed to theorizing knowing as relational, where knowledge is created with non-humans (Sartoris, 2023).
 
MOS scholars have also developed a range of methods to investigate more-than-human worlds. For instance, more-than-human/multispecies ethnography (e.g., Beachman, 2019; Nadegger, 2023a; Sartoris, 2022; Wels, 2022), curiography (Valtonen & Salmela, 2023), walking-with methods (Salmela & Valtonen, 2019; Rantala et al. 2020), to mention a few. In the same vein, scholars have developed various ways of representing field experiences from more-than-human studies, from poems to storytelling and fairytales and drawings (Valtonen & Pullen, 2020; Nadegger, 2023b) fueling the lively feminist ‘writing differently’ debate. Many of these openings are inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of scientific fabulation/speculative fabulation (SF), where SF becomes a “mode of attention, a theory of history, and a practice of worlding” (Haraway, 2016, p. 230) able to disrupt familiar ways of knowing, by shaking their ontological foundations and imagining other discourses from the ones we are accustomed to.
 
In the same vein, more-than-human research with Indigenous communities requires decolonizing methodologies (Motta, 2023; Ybiskay et al., 2023) and Indigenous relational ontologies, for example, a ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ approach that offers an inclusive and culturally sensitive approach by adopting both an ‘Indigenous eye’ and a ‘Western eye’ (Arjaliès & Banerjee, 2024). This hybrid approach enhances the depth and breadth of qualitative inquiry and promotes a more inclusive research landscape that reflects multiple worldviews. Importantly, Indigenous ontologies do not reflect a romanticized picture of a dead past but are deeply rooted in land and living systems, which can offer new ways to frame problems of climate change, conservation, and biodiversity loss (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021). Scholars working with Indigenous communities need to be constantly vigilant about the risks of Indigenous ontologies becoming depoliticized and coopted, where ontology becomes “just another word for colonialis” (Todd, 2016, p. 4).
 
In this sub-theme we focus on discussing the potential of more-than-human scholarship to transform conventional thinking in MOS studies to understand the ‘poly crisis’ or network of multiple crises and our inability to accept alternate epistemic understandings of the world. While much of the existing research is future-oriented in the sense that they seek to cast paths for livable multispecies futures, we ponder: what is multispecies theorizing in the future and in what ways does it impact on our current ways of relating with the world in which live?
 
We invite conceptual and empirical papers that explore a wide range of themes and questions including, but not limited to, the following questions:
 
Theorizing

• What does more-than-human mean in terms of theorizing?

• How do we think of theorizing with more-than-humans in and for the vulnerable world?

• Could they prompt re-newing the very idea of theory-making?

• How do we rethink scholarly practices to define the impact of research outside academia if we take more-than-humans seriously?

• What new narratives, forms, and styles are needed to decenter the human voice and represent humans and non-humans as interconnected agents within shared realities?

Power and politics

• Who benefits from more-than-human research?

• Does it benefit career-oriented scholars or the more-than-human entanglement?

• How do we politicize the often-times romanticized accounts of living-with ‘nature’?

• What does the practice of decentering the human imply in our self- centered competitive academic world: is there space for more-than-me thinking?

Ethics, sustainability, responsibility

• How can researchers and practitioners ensure that their engagement with more-than-human ontology is respectful and avoids instrumentalizing non-human entities for purely human-centered organizational goals?

• How do more-than-human ontologies align with or challenge current approaches to sustainability and environmental responsibility in organizational practices?

• How do we conduct response-able research?

Knowing

• What is the role of traditional know-how, i.e., the lived experiences of those who have always practiced and lived with the more-than-human settings?

• How do we integrate this situated embodied knowing to academic knowing?

• How do we affirm and enact knowledge of marginalized knowers?

Space

• To date, studies have concentrated on exploring life on Earth. Given the expansion in space exploration and utilization from satellites, space junk and debris to space tourism, as well as space mining, what it would mean to address these phenomena from a more-than-human perspective?

• What kinds of narratives and imaginaries would describe and resist colonialization of space?

• What would political ontologies of space look like? 

References

• Arjaliès, D.L., & Banerjee, S.B. (2024): “‘Let’s Go to the Land Instead’: Indigenous Perspectives on Biodiversity and the Possibilities of Regenerative Capital.” Journal of Management Studies, first published online on October 3, 2024, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joms.13141.

• Banerjee, S.B., & Arjaliès, D.-L. (2021): “Celebrating the End of Enlightenment: Organization Theory in the Age of the Anthropocene and Gaia (and why neither is the solution to our ecological crisis).” Organization Theory, 2 (4), https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877211036714.

• Barad, K. (2007): Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Blaser, M. (2009): “Political Ontology: Cultural Studies without ‘cultures’?” Cultural Studies, 23 (5–6), 873–896.

• Beacham, J. (2018): “Organising food differently: Towards a more-than-human ethics of care for the Anthropocene.” Organization, 25 (4), 533–549.

• Calás, M.B., & Smirchich, L. (eds.) (2023): A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

• Cozza, M., Carrer, A., & Poggio, B. (eds.) (2025): Ethics of Engagement in Research Practices: Response-ability in Organization and Management. New York: Routledge.

• Descola, P. (2013): Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Ergene, S., Banerjee, S.B., & Hoffman, A. J. (2020): „(Un)Sustainability and Organization Studies: Towards a Radical Engagement.” Organization Studies, 42 (8), 1319–1335.

• Ergene, S., & Calás, M.B. (2023): “Becoming Naturecultural: Rethinking sustainability for a more-than-human world.” Organization Studies, 44 (12), 1961–1986.

• Haraway, D.J. (2016): Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

• Hart, M.A. (2010): “Indigenous Worldviews, Knowledge, and Research: The Development of an Indigenous Research Paradigm.” Journal of Indigenous Voices in Social Work, 1 (1), 1–16.

• Kwaymullina, A. (2005): “Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country.” Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6 (11), 12–15.

• Motta, S.C. (2023): “Decolonising feminist methodologies: an epistemological politics of the racialised and feminised flesh.” In: S. Katila, S. Meriläinen, & E. Bell (eds:): Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies in Management and Organization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 220–239.

• Nadegger, M. (2023a): “Reassembling more-than-human sustainability: Relations with snow.” Annals of Tourism Research, 101, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2023.103613

• Nadegger, M. (2023b): “Carving Lines through Melting Lands: A Diffractive Engagement with Troubled and Troubling Relations of Alpine Skiing in the Anthropocene.” Leisure Sciences, 46 (8), 1106–1128.

• Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017): Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

• Salmela, T., & Valtonen, A. (2019): “Towards collective ways of knowing in the Anthropocene: Walking-with multiple others.” Matkailututkimus, 15 (2),18–32.

• Sartoris, C. (2022): “Multispecies Organizing. How Humans and Plants Organize Embroidering Hills and Growing Bridges.” Academy of Management Proceedings, 2022 (1), 12367.

• Todd, Z. (2016): “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology, 29 (1), 4–22.

• Valtonen, A., & Pullen, A. (2020): “Writing with rocks.” Gender, Work & Organization, 28 (2), 506– 522.

• Valtonen, A., & Salmela, T. (2023): “Exploring earthly relations through curiography.” In: M.B. Calás & L. Smirchich (eds.): A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 141–159.

• Valtonen, A., Salmela, T., & Rantala, O. (2020): “Living with mosquitoes.” Annals of Tourism Research, 83, 1–10.

• Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998): “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4 (3), 469–488.

• Wels, H. (2020): “Multi-species ethnography: methodological training in the field in South Africa.” Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 9 (3), 343–363.

• Ybiskay, G., Motta, S., & Seppälä, T. (2023): “Decolonial feminist solidarity/ies.” In: S. Katila, S. Meriläinen, & E. Bell (eds:): Handbook of Feminist Research Methodologies in Management and Organization. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 297–314.