Encounters with a more-than-hu-man world: Affective attunement and co-becoming-with trees

In a world traumatized by hu-Man-led activities that continue to exploit arboreal spaces, causing socio-ecological degradation, in this paper we explore ways of affective co-becoming-with the arboreal. We draw inspiration from critical plant studies and feminist posthumanism to affectively attune our senses to the vibrant agency of trees and to become response-able-with them. Bringing together plant-thinking and affect, we engage with thinking and writing with trees as a feminist practice enacted through our sensing bodies in a more-than-human collective to underscore the generative ethical and political possibilities of more-than-human organizing that expands space to include the vegetal bodies. Our relational and affective approach pays tribute to Indigenous intellectual thoughts which inspired us to think, know, relate, write, and organize differently with the arboreal world and contest dominant anthropocentric understanding of trees as commodities. Theoretically, we bring critical plant studies to feminist posthumanism in organization studies to reveal how vegetal marginalization both reflects and enables broader systemic marginalization. Methodologically, we advance affective attunement as a form of active resistance, not simply ‘another’ research method but a refusal of extractive research temporalities, data as commodity, and modes of knowledge production that take without reciprocating.