Ant logic and necrolocutors

As environmental research increasingly values and foregrounds traditional knowledge in a reinvigorated participatory turn, many of the original problematics and harms re-emerge through ostensible collaborations with knowledge-holders. These issues are not just instances of ethical oversight; they are the result of ant logic: narrow, spatialized conceptualizations of power, knowledge, and death as contained and fixed within bodies and space and preoccupations with visibility that produces ontological conceptions of local communities, traditional knowledge-holders, state actors, and neoliberal forces. This article unwinds the tight Foucauldian grip with which environmental social sciences are held to reveal power, knowledge, and death as vibrant, immaterial actors and explores the role of ant logic as an actor itself. In doing so, another key environmental actor is uncovered, one who leverages the death-centric form of articulation to define power and knowledge: the necrolocutor.