How the non-human turn challenges the social sciences The case of environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France By BULLE SYLVAINE

https://www.academia.edu/122619335/How_the_non_human_turn_challenges_the_social_sciences_The_case_of_environmental_struggles_at_Notre_Dame_des_Landes_France?nav_from=402976e0-a76a-4f5f-8be3-8b9f6158851c How the non-human turn challenges the social sciences The case of environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, France Sylvaine Bulle 0000-0002-4587-9093 In Territories, Environments, Politics; edited by Andrea Mubi Brighenti and Mattias Kärrholm, Routledge, 2022 The chapter reviews recent theoretical debates in the so-called 'ontological turn.' The new approach is important but it also runs the risk of missing important dimensions in the logic of political mobilisation, which both social movement studies and a pragmatically-inspired political sociology are better equipped to account for. The case study analyses the environmental struggles at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France. Squatting started in 2014, and more intense debates took place after the eviction carried out in 2018. Mid-twentieth-century territoriology first offered a specific vision of the possible collaboration between the social and the natural sciences; today, in current times of climate crisis, it offers new topics for research and knowledge, spurring innovative work (Brighenti and Kärrholm 2020). Recent literature has explored the interweavings of different forms of territorial life, understood not only in terms of life environments, but as 'acting' environments. Territoriology thus joins the trajectory of other sciences, all of which appear transformed in the age of Anthropocene and Capitalocene. In similar research approaches, non-humans appear to be key players, capable of challenging the separation between nature and culture. 'Nature defending itself,' animals, even shamanism and spirituality, are all part, not only of life environments, but of a theoretical space that has expanded its domain of enquiry beyond social and normative criticism. The so-called environmental humanities question anthropocentrism and criticise the Western idea of Nature. They resonate widely across human geography and urban planning, science history and the arts, as well as in the public discourse. In environmental struggles, for instance, multiple living collectives are evoked, such as forests and animals, who appear as agents or 'actants' in the environment, and even actors in a series of struggles. New theories and ethnographic methods emphasise participation in the modes of existence so as to create new alliances and new controversies. By contrast, sociology, a classical science, has so far made limited use of the relation between humans and non-humans. Is this an oversight, or does it respond to a necessity to keep at a distance from a perhaps too enthusiastic relational ecology? Questions indeed arise about the