As part of the TANDEM project « Home Beyond Species », Petr Gibas, Chloé Mondémé, Julien Wacquez and Ange Pottin organized and animated a two-session panel in the 2023 conference of the International Society of Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) « Living Uncertainty » that took place in Brno between June 7th and June 10th 2023.

The argument of the panel was the following :

            The interplay of humans and other living and technological non-humans has increasingly drawn the attention of social sciences and humanities. The entanglement of humans in a web of more-than-human relations is omnipresent and involves our homes, which we share with more-than-human others, voluntarily or not. Home as a place of dwelling occupies and stretches over different spatial scales, from the most personal places such as bedrooms and flats, to gardens, cities and landscapes, and ultimately the whole planet. On these many scales, humans co-inhabit and co-create home together with – or against the need and will of – other animals, plants, fungi, and others. In doing so, humans form more-than-human alliances and enter into wide and complex sets of more-than-human relations (of care) that help with but also exacerbate contemporary local as well as global uncertainties and crises. The panel sought to open novel grounds in establishing and exploring connections between more-than-human care and (widely conceived) home: in what ways do home-making practices entail attention to and care for other living beings? How do they impact other living beings in and around home?

            This panel welcomed 8 presentations on the following topics: the interactions with mushrooms in the maintenance of the Tungenhadt villa in Brno, the Home 2025 art project of homes open to urban animals, the role of plants as a means of feeling at home for Turkish immigrants in Germany, the different roles attributed to dogs in the sheltering of homeless people in Montreal, the training relationship between mahout and elephants in South India, Finnish cottages, domestic animals as a case study for antibioresistance research, nuclear residual managment in France as a paradoxical care practice. It was the occasion for very rich discussions between anthropologists, sociologists, artists and philosophers from Czech Republic, France, Canada, Austria, India, Finland and Germany.

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