Feeling Life: Emotions, More-Than-Human Worlds, and Social Transformations

In recent years, scholarly attention to the relationships between humans and the diverse forms of life with which they coexist has intensified. Environmental crises, accelerating biodiversity loss, global pandemics, biotechnological interventions into living matter, and evolving practices of care have contributed to a renewed sociological engagement with more-than-human worlds. In this context, living entities are understood in a broad sense, encompassing organisms across scales and domains, including animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms (such as bacteria and viruses), as well as human and nonhuman bodies, bioengineered life forms (e.g., organoids and cell cultures), and ecological assemblages such as ecosystems.

While these transformations have generated important theoretical and empirical developments across environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and multispecies scholarship, their emotional dimensions remain comparatively underexamined. This session proposes to address this gap by foregrounding the role of emotions in shaping relationships with living entities and in informing the ways societies conceptualize, classify, value, and govern life. Emotions are not reducible to individual psychological responses; rather, they operate as socially and culturally embedded forces that contribute to boundary-making processes, moral economies, collective identities, and forms of political engagement.

We invite theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that examine emotions in human–nonhuman encounters, multispecies relations, environmental mobilizations, conservation practices, health and biotechnological contexts, food systems, and everyday engagements with living beings. Particular attention will be paid to analyses that elucidate how emotional dynamics participate in the reconfiguration of key concepts such as life, agency, vulnerability, interdependence, and coexistence within contexts of profound socio-ecological transformation.