Daniel Schniedewind

DANIEL SCHNIEDEWIND, then a graduate student at University of California, Santa Cruz, California, received a grant in April 2019 to aid research on ‘Politics of Belonging and More-Than-Human Practices in the Hudson Valley,’ supervised by Dr. Andrew Mathews. The more-than-human landscape of the Hudson Valley region in New York state bears the enduring marks of racial slavery and ongoing colonialism. Everyday practices involving nonhumans in the present day are both continuities and disruptions of what came before. Invasive species managers confront the biological fallout of long-term ecological disturbance and global commercial circulation. Small-scale animal farming practices replicate the impacts on native plant communities that resulted from their introduction centuries earlier. Entwined with these practices in the present is the generation of social belonging that is also connected to deep histories of genocide and enslavement. Ethnographic fieldwork with anti-invasive species practitioners and small-scale animal farmers, combined with archival and field ecology methods, enables a rich account of patterns and discontinuities that evidence the inseparability of nonhumans and landscapes from the realms of politics and self-making over the long term.