How do social movements respond to the ecological crisis? In this paper, we reframe social movements as ‘more-than-social movements’ to highlight the fact that many contemporary mobilisations do much more than target recognised social institutions and political governance; indeed, they are practically transforming eco-societies with and within both the human and the nonhuman world. What constitutes the core of more-than-social movements’ action is the capacity to set up alternative ecologies of existence, or ‘alterontologies’, as we call them in the paper. (...) In what follows, we engage with the imaginaries and practices of agroecology, AIDS treatment activism and permaculture in order to rethink what autonomy and justice might look like in the context of today's ecological crisis. (shrink)

Recently, a beekeeper discovered the metabolic wizardry of wax worms, their ability to decompose polyethylene. While this organism has usually been perceived as a model organism in science or a pest to beekeepers, it acquired a new mode of being as potentially probiotic, inviting us to dream of a future without plastic waste. In this paper, I explore how wax worms are entangled with material practices of care and narratives that give meaning to these practices. These stories, however, are marked (...) by manipulation, exploitation, and extermination, and call for a questioning of our modes of caring. Consequently, I offer a counter-narrative that questions our anthropocentric practices of caring and the stories we attach to them. Borrowing Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of ecopoetics, I tell another story based on my participation in the making of an art installation hosting wax worms. The installation creates an opening of a world of curiosity and cultivates a sensibility for wax worms expanding their modes of being and our capabilities of appreciation. In the end, I argue that by mattering and storying differently, we have the opportunity to challenge anthropocentric interests and make a different world of caring and co-existence possible. (shrink)