Interspecies relations in Johannesburg's outdoors ecologies

Informed by methods in Black and Indigenous studies, this article attends to interspecies relations in the Black outdoors of informal settlements in the south of Johannesburg, South Africa. We decentre anthropocentric perspectives and lean into planetary understandings of the interactions between humans, plants, animals, and the cosmos as forms of relation in interspecies life. We suggest that like humans, the natural elements within these contexts express agency, survival, and resistance in ruderal ecologies. Photographs of the natural and material environment, along with verbal accounts of space were collected and analysed using an Afro-ecofeminism framework and a Black studies and Indigenous studies reading to explore interspecies relations. We concluded that interspecies relations are characterised by co-dependence that sustains precarious environmental and spiritual ecologies. In these zones of state abandonment, relations between plant and animal life, Indigenous cosmologies and humans, offer us ways to disrupt hierarchies of being in favour of a planetary consciousness.