Post-Anthropocentric Movements: Rethinking Agency, Justice and Social Change Beyond the Human

Social movements are and have been key actors producing knowledge about the negative human impact on the planet – locally, transregionally and globally. Our presentation employs the idea that political-sociological thought must begin to expand beyond anthropocentric frameworks to engage with broader, more-than-human relations of justice and conceptions of social change. In real live, we can see already various forms of post-anthropocentric movements, which remain largely overseen and/ underconceptualized. We suggest we need novel ways of conceptualizing justice, agency, and knowledge that decenter human exceptionalism and recognize the entanglements between human and non-human actors. Using examples of diverse forms of environmental, interspecies, and relational justice, the paper explores how a post-anthropocentric lens can reframe debates on the distribution of harm, responsibility, and rights across species and ecosystems. Drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial epistemologies, we seek to challenge dominant knowledge systems that prioritize human interests while marginalizing non-human entities. Central to this inquiry is the question of whose knowledge counts in understanding justice in the Anthropocene, particularly in a world shaped by interconnected ecological crises. We suggest that looking at what we call ‘eco-democratic knowledge practices’ forged by social movements in one way of recognizing the agency of non-human entities (rivers, animals, forests), we consider it as essential to envisioning a more equitable and sustainable future. Bridging and building on existing research on social movements including prefigurative politics, and intersectional alliances with the literature on political ecology, including socio-ecological transformations, nature-society relations, and community-based modes of living could help rethinking sociological approaches to post-anthropocentric justice and social change - compelling us to engage with complex, multi-species relationships and to support the construction of real-life laboratories of socio-ecological, democratic change.