With its Marxist-derived focus on the political and economic dimensions of environmental change, political ecology has become a dominant approach in understanding the Anthropocene. While sometimes critiqued for its own anthropocentrism, in recent years, this critical interdisciplinary field has taken into consideration other-than-human actors such as non-human animals, microbes, plants, and fungi (Barua and Sinha 2019; Jaffe 2024; Brives 2026), in the creation of political ecological assemblages. Despite this expanding understanding of who or what counts as an environmental actor, political ecology rarely if ever attends to spiritual entities such as deities, ghosts, ancestral spirits and other presences that exist beyond the physical realm. More broadly, this largely secular field often overlooks the role of religion and spirituality in shaping resource production and distribution, structural inequalities, and territorial governance.

In this workshop, we seek to explore what a post-secular political ecology might look like. We seek to extend and connect a more established anthropological interest in the connections between religion and environment (Becci et al. 2021, Gottlieb 2006), to more-than-human geographies that include other forms of life and agency in the production of ecological relations. We are also interested in the possible connections to scholars associated with the so-called ontological turn, who question “universal” Western or scientific categorisations of human, animal, or spiritual agent as separate forms of reality and think more expansively of atmospheric entities, energies, or spirits as co-constituting the material world. In so doing, we also seek to bridge an often implicit division between urban environmental issues that are largely addressed through the secular lens of political ecology and, more recently, more-than-human approaches, while the ontological perspective remains contained within remote wilderness landscapes. 

This workshop encourages scholars to think beyond dominant approaches to environmental struggles by engaging with notions of sacredness, sacred places, invisible or material agents, religious atmospheres, and/or moral values, not classified a priori as “beliefs” but rather taken seriously as (potentially material) actors shaping urban and non-urban ecologies. 

How do notions of sacred places and sacredness influence urban inequalities, gentrification or access to public space? How can rivers maintain their spiritual properties despite environmental pollution (Kanoi 2023)? How do spiritual practices change the way we make use of cities (Gosh 2023)? Can the spirits of slaughtered birds haunting factory farms predict the next zoonotic epidemic (Kéck 2019)? Can spiritual entities teach us how to deal with the consequences of an ecological disaster (Capponi 2023)? How do moral values enter our production and consumption systems? What values do they retain or create outside of such systems? The workshop will consider these and other questions to explore, towards a post-secular urban ecology, whether and how ‘sacredness’ presents a salient category of experience and meaning in urban-ecological settings.

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