Biodesign is an emerging field that brings together a wide range of practices, connecting fundamental research, applied sciences and creative approaches. Within this spectrum, a tension exists between instrumental uses of biological processes and a growing sensibility that acknowledges the agency of living materials and organisms. This study proposes reconciliation as a guiding concept for biodesign, understood not as a metaphorical gesture but as a concrete and plural perspective that promotes species coexistence and conservation. We contextualise reconciliation through restoration, reciprocity and relationality as distinctive yet interconnected design and ecological principles that extend beyond normative human exchange, promoting multispecies coexistence. Through a mix of reflexive thematic synthesis and the analysis of selected case studies derived from the authors’ own projects, employed as a practice-based methodological inquiry and primary source of empirical and reflective insight, we explore how reconciliation is enacted and experienced in practice. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework to address reconciliation in biodesign, offering guiding concepts and key questions to discuss and support ecological flourishing in multispecies collaborations.

In this paper we argue that performance and the arts invite a deliberate sensorial connection with the body and can support a bodily turn or return, in order to help artists, scholars and communities more broadly, better attune to increasing climate instability, through collaborative, supportive and reflexive storytelling. Drawing on the three “weather” symposia, the paper focusses on the second symposium which featured a keynote presentation by Rachael Swain, co-artistic director of Marrugeku, Australia’s leading Indigenous Intercultural Dance and Performance Company. Responses to Marrugeku’s work Cut the Sky are collectively presented to illuminate what Swain argues are, “Dramaturgies of consequence” (2020), that emerge from working and thinking with the choreopolitical platform of Marrugeku’s practice, and how this is felt in the bodies and the actions of audiences. Such a focus on thinking and feeling with and through our bodies, is crucial in preparing to respond and adapt to the myriad evolving political, environmental and social crises we are enmeshed in. By focusing on Cut The Sky we argue that contemporary performance, which foregrounds the body, is an exemplary practice which can ignite visceral and kinaesthetic responses in spectators for activating change through Marrugeku’s choreography of resistance.

What is access and how has accessibility—as a perceptual frame, a discourse, a box to check, and a relationship—infiltrated our everyday lives and become a means for adjudicating whether we live in inhabitable worlds in India and internationally? This article draws from a roundtable discussion at a 2024 disability studies and disability justice conference held in Kolkata, India, as well as interviews and participant observation conducted with disabled Indians to explore the meanings of access and to think about alternative concepts or frameworks that are used instead.

The Maputo Accord process in Mozambique is regarded as a rare success story in a context where international peace mediation as a tool of conflict resolution is in decline. Drawing on empirical research conducted with parties to the process, we outline two framing elements that constitute the practice of ‘peace listening’. The first is human-centred and value-based mediation, which centres the needs of the parties. The second foregrounds the flexibility of peacemaking actors to create an ‘enabling environment’ for peacemaking, challenging the structural and hierarchical nature of international peace mediation. We present two novel contributions to the field of peace mediation. The first is to present a qualitative case study of the Maputo Accord process in Mozambique based on the perspectives and testimonies of the participants themselves. Secondly, by centring the participants in the research, we highlight the potential of relationality as an underpinning theory of successful mediation. We ask what made the Maputo Accord process ‘different’ from previous attempts in the long and complex history of peacemaking attempts in the country, and in so doing, we address an ontological and theoretical gap in the literature on ‘Track One’ processes when it comes to relationality.

This paper revisits the longstanding debate over the nature of suffering, focusing on the divide between subjective and objective accounts. I defend a Personalist conception of suffering, rooted in an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing, that recognizes suffering as both universally human and deeply personal. On this view, suffering is neither a purely sentient, inner experience nor reducible to external conditions, but a disruption of flourishing that arises when love or justice is violated or absent—and that calls for a communal response. Understood through this lens, suffering, I argue, invites a shared practice of meaning-making—not as sentimental optimism but as a form of grounded hope: realistic, responsive, and attuned to the dignity of both the sufferer and those who accompany them. Even when suffering cannot be cured or fully comprehended, it can be met with deeper engagement, mutual responsibility, and a reaffirmation of our commitment to a life lived in relation and shared purpose.

Archaeologists have long identified quarries as a ubiquitous part of the landscape in which precolonial Maya populations built their world. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have begun to move away from viewing these quarries simply as places where stones were extracted to recognizing them as important nodes in the social, political, and cultural fabric of the Maya Lowlands. The four articles in this Special Section discuss some of the most recent insights into the lives of those who intimately worked with limestone, inhabited the cratered landscapes created by its extraction, and crafted their worlds through the relationships forged and maintained in the practices of quarrying, processing, and utilizing this material. In this introductory paper, we set the scene by reviewing previous research and outlining the main approaches involved in the documentation, analysis, and interpretation of Maya limestone quarries and production loci. We continue with a discussion of the relevance of quarry investigations for the general study of precolonial Maya societies. We conclude with a brief overview of current methodological trends, followed by a look ahead to the ways in which researchers could take such investigations forward and integrate them into future research agendas.

This article introduces a fungal framework, both metaphorically and methodologically, for reimagining power, resistance, and world-making in International Relations (IR). Drawing on relational ontologies and ecological insights, it examines how fungal processes of decomposition and regeneration shed light on the entangled relations that constitute the pluriverse—a world of many worlds. By centering decay as a site of transformation, the framework proposes an ethic of research grounded in humility and care. It critiques the epistemic closures that structure dominant IR paradigms and offers tools for engaging ontological multiplicity beyond Eurocentric frames. In doing so, the article contributes to emerging debates on decolonial methodology, more-than-human agency, and pluriversal ethics, advocating for approaches that accompany, rather than assimilate, multiple worlds.

Sri Lanka’s Indigenous Vedda community, also known as Vanniyalaththo, has profound relationships with nature that are not recognized by the country’s colonial history and, subsequently, its Western-influenced legal framework. This article explores how the gap between relational Vedda laws and state-based law in Sri Lanka can be bridged. It suggests that the emerging paradigms of legal personhood and Rights of Nature, which acknowledge the more-than-instrumental values of nature, can serve as a starting point for bridging this gap. By exploring the relational ontologies of Vedda law, this article advocates broader recognition of Vedda worldviews within the existing state-based law in Sri Lanka and highlights the role of Indigenous communities as non-state actors in shaping more-than-human governance.

This article examines the ceramic art practice manga allpa awana by Amazonian Kichwa women in Ecuador, focusing especially on three elderly women from Sarayaku in Sucumbios, who exemplify how elder women embody the millenary knowledge this art form withholds. This practice is inseparable from the Kichwa cosmovision, which centres the harmonious relational existence within Kawsak Sacha—the living, breathing, and sentient forest. Practising manga allpa awana therefore demands not only artistic skill but also a scientific and relational understanding of the forest. By foregrounding the material, spiritual, and epistemic dimensions of this relational art and science, the authors propose a decolonial rethinking of both “art” and “science,” showing how Indigenous relational knowledge transcends hegemonic approaches to these fields. Furthermore, the practice challenges an external colonial model that seeks to homogenise and erase the multiple worlds of the pluriverse. In this light, safeguarding manga allpa awana constitutes a central pillar of Indigenous resistance for the protection of territories, biodiversity, planetary life and futures of liberation.

While ageing in place emphasises autonomy and the preference of older adults to remain in familiar environments, and ageing and place shifts attention to their movement across multiple locations, both frameworks have paid insufficient attention to the role of social networks in shaping the spatial practices of ageing. In this article, we propose ageing in networks as a complementary approach that foregrounds relationality. Rather than supplanting place-based models, ageing in networks highlights how older adults navigate spaces—both near and far—through their social ties, and how these ties mediate access to emotional and practical support. Drawing on original survey data from 1,199 residents aged 60–92 in two Singaporean public housing areas (Hougang and Taman Jurong), we examine how older adults mobilise both strong and weak ties—including friends, co-workers, and digitally mediated contacts—across everyday sites such as hawker centres, markets, malls, and churches. These connections often span neighbourhoods, suggesting that older adults are not merely attached to their residential areas but are actively sustaining dispersed, networked geographies of care and companionship. Crucially, we find that expansive social ties can buffer the challenges of living alone. We argue that social isolation, more than spatial isolation, poses the greater risk to older adults’ well-being.

This introduction to the special issue “Performance, Projection,Provocation! Relational Creativity in Contemporary Japan” presents ahistory of group-based creative practice in Japan, from the amateur endeavors ofsākuru (circles) to the professional creativity of internationalproduction companies. The special issue applies the concept of“relational creativity” to a series of case studies to betterunderstand how creative practices shape relationships and other social forms,institutional and less institutional.

By drawing on civil chambers court observation data collected in the Vancouver Supreme Court of British Columbia, this article explores the relationship between institutional court practices and the emerging concept of person-centred justice. Despite some efforts at procedural reform, superior trial courts have been resistant to change, and access to justice challenges around cost, accessibility and complexity are stubbornly persistent. Rather than fulfilling normative visions of substantive and equal justice, several arguments and empirical studies build a compelling case that formalistic adjudicative venues such as the Supreme Court of British Columbia are vulnerable to reinforcing existing societal inequalities. Do the principles of person-centred justice—that promise to enable effective participation and engagement in justice processes—hold the answer to unlocking transformative institutional change? By engaging in a qualitative analysis that illuminates how time (or lack thereof) and relational proximity shapes institutional practices and resource distribution in Vancouver’s civil chambers courts, this article offers an initial foray into understanding what person-centricity might mean in an environment with deeply embedded institutional and epistemic practices traditionally dominated and captured by justice system professionals. By introducing qualitative evaluation of institutional practices in the civil courts of the Supreme Court of British Columbia, this article extends early conceptual debates about person-centred justice. This article further highlights the formidable challenges we face in embedding new social practices into relationally and materially unequal terrains.

This article aims to explain the strains and paradoxes of how African communities have been unable to obtain legal access and control to expropriated or stolen cultural heritage held in foreign museums despite their increased participation in international cultural heritage law. Further, it outlines the strained relationship between communities’ participation in cultural heritage governance under international cultural heritage law and cultural heritage law in Kenya. Using a postcolonial critique, this article examines these cultural heritage laws using notions of communitarianism and relationality in relation to the African Renaissance. It is demonstrated that communities should have increased participation in cultural heritage governance and, as a result, access to and control over their appropriated cultural heritage held in foreign museums. The purpose of a post-colonial critique of cultural heritage laws seeks to allow states and communities to listen to each other as opposed to one replacing the other in matters of cultural heritage.