Call for papers: Special issue on multispecies care

Multispecies care in socioecological transformations: relationalities, methodologies, and representations

This special issue of Trace explores how relational perspectives to multispecies care and reproductive work shift thinking, research, and practice for socioecological transformations. Socioecological transformations refer to interrelated processes that influence material and existential conditions and challenge many taken for granted ontologies and practices in human societies (Ramilovic-Suominen 2025).

Early feminist work on care foregrounded the need to pay attention to the life-sustaining, reproductive work performed by women that was rendered invisible and undervalued (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984). The concept of multispecies care implies deep interdependency and kinship between all living beings, and consists of practices that seek to maintain, continue and repair our “world” so that humans and non-humans can live in it as well as possible (Fisher & Tronto 1990, 40). While care is often considered to invoke an obligation to foster life and recognize that our entanglements with others enable not only our survival but our mutual flourishing in sustainable multispecies futures (Lonkila 2021), caring relations may equally present themselves through exclusions and absences (Sage 2025). While relations of care extend beyond individuals (both human and non-human) and should be treated as complex entanglements and shared accomplishments within heterogeneous communities, it is equally crucial to understand the politics involved in defining who benefits from caring relations, who decides how care is to be enacted, and who undertakes caring labor (Cusworth 2024; Dombroski 2024; Martin et al. 2015).  

Previous research on multispecies care has focused, for example, on the complexities of care in insect‐human relations (Madersen & Elsner-Adams 2024; Moore & Kosut 2014; Yee & Sharp 2023); care in human-soil relations (Krzywoszynska 2019; Puig de la Bellacasa 2015; Sharp et al. 2024); care in interactions between humans, animals, and technology (Lundström & Lindblom 2021; Siimes et al. 2026), care as a method for multispecies ethnographies (Castello 2024), care in the time of extinctions (Münster et al. 2021), and earthcare and ecological care work (Barca 2024; Houtbeckers 2023; Perdibon & McSherry 2023). 

In this special issue, we invite scholarly, practitioner-based and artistic examinations of what multispecies care implies in the era of ecological crises, and what orienting with care may mean for building just and sustainable futures. Specifically, we want to direct attention to two themes. 

First, what kinds of implications – including, but not limited to political, ethical, societal, historical, temporal – do relational perspectives have for socioecological transformations? Care carries transformative potential as an orientation towards life-sustaining practices, which is in stark contrast with current worldviews based on neoliberal capitalism and considering nature as a resource to be used endlessly. More research is needed, however, to explore how the potential of life-sustaining practices can be harnessed in the politics of socioecological transformations, such as towards counter-hegemonic struggles and the creation of pluriversal futures (Hurtado Hurtado et al. 2024). It is critical to understand how the concept of care could be developed to better understand the broader metabolisms of care (Cusworth 2023), and to attend to violent, ecologically degrading, or extractivist systems and relations (Jauhola et al. 2025). We invite submissions that ask how to extend caring relations to wider spatial scales, and that account for the potential futures that become excluded through our current multispecies entanglements (Hollin et al. 2017).

The second theme invites examinations of care as a methodological orientation and as a research practice. Feminist literature has long examined reflexivity in research practice as key for attending to the positionalities and power relations between researchers and research subjects, calling for rethinking ethics from the perspective of situated responsibilities (cf. Edwards & Mauthner 2002). Methodological reflexivity and experimenting with novel methods is also critical in thinking about multispecies care. In essence, research practice based on care takes as a starting point the obligation to foster life and attend to the relations sustaining it. Care as research practice also calls for epistemological reorientation. A caring perspective highlights that researchers must cultivate their response-ability (Haraway 2015;Krzywoszynska 2019) to the needs of more-than-human others and cultivate intra-species mindfulness that aims to de-center humans as the sole interlocutors (Moore & Kosut 2015; Siimes et al. 2026). Multispecies scholars have also emphasized the potential for non-humans to care for and with humans (Haraway 2015; Perdibon & McSherry 2023; Yee & Sharp 2023). Daring to place oneself at stake in the world and to being affected (van Dooren 2015) is critical for multispecies research practice that makes space for capacities to respond and affect, both for the researcher and the research subject (Lonkila 2021). 

Other orienting questions:

• What other contexts and fields of inquiry are interested in care and what does it entail for them? How does care travel and change through different contexts?
• According to Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), care and justice are different ethical lenses, but both are needed for resisting injustices to all beings. How does the concept of multispecies care relate to the increasing calls for multispecies justice?
• In what ways are reproductive labour and care related? How are they being appropriated for maintaining the status quo, and harnessed to challenge it?
• How can multispecies research ethics based on care be situated within existing institutionalized practices of research ethics?
• How can we better understand the complexities of and moralities in caring? How does care present itself as good, or bad, beautiful, or ugly? 
• How does care enter into research practice and methodologies (e.g. Dombroski 2024, Sharp et al. 2024)? What kinds of considerations and reflections are mobilized when thinking with/out care?   

This special issue is edited by Annika Lonkila, Eeva Houtbeckers and Nikolai Siimes. We invite research articles that undergo double-blind peer-review as well as overviews, commentaries, discussion papers and book reviews that are not peer-reviewed (but handled by the guest editors). For submission guidelines, please consult https://trace.journal.fi/about/submissions.

We ask all interested contributors to submit a short abstract of 300 words and the type of submission you want to make by 14 January 2026 to Annika Lonkila annika.lonkila [ at] syke.fi. This way we can ensure the fit of the full-length submissions for the special issue. The deadline for full-length submissions is 31 March 2026. Submissions must be made through the journal’s online submission platform https://trace.journal.fi/about/submissions. Indicate that your submission is for the special issue on multispecies care.  We aim for publishing the issue in 2027.

References

Barca, S. (2024). Workers of the earth: Labour, ecology and reproduction in the age of climate change. Pluto Press.

Castelló, Pablo P. “Care as Method for Multispecies Ethnographies.” The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals. Routledge, 2024. 267-281.

Cusworth, George. “Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate.” Progress in Environmental Geography 2.1-2 (2023): 58-76.

Dombroski, K. (2024) Caring for life: a postdevelopment politics of infant hygiene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Diverse economies and livable worlds).

Edwards, R. and M.Mauthner, ‘Ethics and Feminist Research: Theory and Practice’, in M.Mauthner, M.Birch, J.Jessop and T.Miller (eds), Ethics in Qualitative Research (London: SAGE, 2002), pp. 14–31.

Fisher, B. and J.Tronto, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in E.K.Abel and M.K.Nelson (eds) Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 40–62.

Haraway, D. 2015. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 105.

Hollin, G,  I.Forsyth, E.Giraud and T.Potts, 2017. (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and Ethics, Social Studies of Science, 47(6), pp. 918–41.

Houtbeckers, E. (2023). Miten tulla toimeen planeetan rajoissa?: Kestävyysmurros transformatiivisen työn tekijöiden näkökulmasta. Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja, 37, 45-63.

Hurtado Hurtado, Joshua, et al. “Care as pluriversal strategy? Caring in counter-hegemonic struggles in the degrowth and environmental justice movements.” Globalizations 22.2 (2025): 263-283.

Jauhola, M., Oguz, A., Sundström, S., Steiler, I., & Zamora, V. G. (2025). Centring feminist ethic of care in socio-ecological transformative movements. In Socioecological Transformations (pp. 89-106). Routledge.

Krzywoszynska, A. (2016). What farmers know: experiential knowledge and care in vine growing. Sociologia Ruralis, 56(2), 289-310.

Krzywoszynska, A. 2019. Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: The role of attentiveness in more-than-human ethics. Trans Inst Br Geogr, 44, pp. 661–675.

Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. John Wiley & Sons.

Lonkila, A. 2021. Care-full research ethics in multispecies relations on dairy farms. cultural geographies, 28(3), pp. 1–15.

Lundström, Christina, and Jessica Lindblom 2021. “Care in dairy farming with automatic milking systems, identified using an Activity Theory lens.” Journal of Rural Studies 87 (2021): 386-403.

Maderson, Siobhan, and Emily Elsner‐Adams. “Beekeeping, stewardship and multispecies care in rural contexts.” Sociologia Ruralis 64.2 (2024): 202-221.

Moore, L.J. and M.Kosut, 2015. Among the Colony: Ethnographic Fieldwork, Urban Bees and Intra-species Mindfulness, Ethnography, 15(4), 2014, pp. 516–39.

Münster, Ursula, Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, and Hugo Reinert. 2021. “Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction

Perdibon A and McSherry A (2023) The Mother Herb: Plant Storywork, Grief & More-Than-Human Care in Compromised Times. Journal of Ecohumanism 2(1): 39–53.

Puig De La Bellacasa, M. (2015). Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social studies of science, 45(5), 691-716.

Puig de La Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (Vol. 41). U of Minnesota Press.

Ramcilovic-Suominen, S. (2025). Socioecological Transformations: Linking ontologies with structures, personal with collective change. Routledge.

Sage, D. (2025). Soil and Organization Studies: Unearthing a ‘more-than-relational’ ethics towards non-humans. Organization Studies, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406251317257

Sharp EL, Yee K, Makey L, et al. (2024) Diverse methodologies of care: Thinking with and practising (soil) in situated, affective and enactive ways. Asia Pacific Viewpoint: apv.12429.

Siimes N, Lewis N and Sharp EL (2026) Pro-biotic approaches to agricultural microbiomes: collaborations in biodynamic wine cultivation. Gastronomica 26(1).

van Dooren, T. 2015. A Day With Crows: Rarity, Nativity and the Violent-Care of Conservation, Animal Studies Journal, 4(2), pp. 1–28.

Yee K and Sharp EL (2023) Complexities of care in insect‐human relations. New Zealand Geographer 79(2): 86–96.