Beyond Intentionality: Rethinking Resistance, Agency, and Collective Action across Human and More-Than-Human Worlds

This panel asks how we should understand politically consequential action when those actions/resistance are not clearly intentional, organized, visible, or human-centered. Social movement and resistance scholarship has widened politics beyond formal movements, yet action is only seen as political when deliberate, oppositional, and self-consciously framed. This leaves a blind spot around quiet, habitual, affective, infrastructural, ecological, attuned, and more-than-human practices that reshape power, dependence, class relations, and autonomy without appearing as conventional or everyday protest.

The panel brings together work on everyday resistance, quiet politics, more-than-human agency, autonomous logics, attunement, ecological pushback, and philosophies of action beyond conscious will. It invites papers examining forms of action, agency, and resistance that function politically without necessarily being named as political action or resistance: self-provisioning, repair, withdrawal, mutual aid, subsistence practices, parallel infrastructures, multispecies relations, climate disruption, ecological rebalancing, and ways of living/doing otherwise.

We are especially interested in cases or theoretical interventions where intentionality is ambiguous, distributed, retrospective, nonhuman, inconsequential, or perhaps not present. What happens when action emerges from dignity, pleasure, memory, necessity, inherited skill, bodily capacity, ecological pressure, or attunement to a situation rather than explicit opposition? How do inner direction, cultivated skill, actual capacity, situational openings, non-forcing action, and unforced emergence shape political effects? What conceptual tools—such as insulation, deflection, attunement, propensity, Daoist notions of wu wei and ziran, heterarchy, or more-than-human actions and resistances—help us understand action beyond sovereign will?

Rather than abandoning resistance, the panel expands how we recognize political action across human and more-than-human worlds.