More-than-human Interconnections: Remedies against the new ‘Cosmopolitan Normal’ of Precarity?

Abstract

The essay addresses a disjuncture between the discourse on cosmopolitanism and migrants’ everyday experience from a feminist and political ecology point of view, combining theorising with ethnographic observations. Migration as well as urban studies work validating the forms of organisation and ‘economies of perception and collaborative practice’ (Simone 2004) devised by individuals and communities in states of marginality, particularly in decolonised countries, informs a reflection about more-than-human interconnections emerging from migration between Bangladesh and Italy. Instead of male horizons of potent survival, experiences based on slow, subtle, often hardly visible, non-city-centric cooperations between human and vegetal cohabitants are foregrounded. Can the discourse on cosmopolitanism, seemingly dormant in migrant and activist circles, be activated by tying it more explicitly to movements opposing socio-economic precarity and ecological destruction?

Keywords

• New cosmopolitanisms
• Feminism
• Social/Environmental movement
• Migration
• Bangladesh
• Italy