Imagining animalternatives with Marcus the hedgehog: A multispecies intersectional perspective on alternative organizing

This paper develops a multispecies intersectional perspective on alternative organizing. It opens with the story of Marcus, a rescued hedgehog whose survival depended on an informal, invisible network of grassroots carers. Building on this encounter, the paper takes an animal-centered position, drawing on Animal Organization Studies and critical ecofeminism, to read alternative organizing through the situated vulnerabilities and unevenly grievable lives of other-than-human animals. From this very position, the paper argues that alternative organizing scholarship, including its recent more-than-human turn, tends to figure animals as nodes in entanglements or as parts of lively matter recruited into human projects, rather than as subjects whose lives are themselves organized. To address this, the paper rearticulates the three foundational principles of alternative organizing—autonomy, solidarity, and responsibility—through the lens of multispecies intersectionality. It proposes (1) alterbiopolitical autonomy as the situated making of livable conditions across species, (2) multispecies political solidarity , “traitorous” organizing that refuses sacrificial human–animal relations while attending to intersectional exclusions, and (3) multispecies response-ability as the organized capacity to notice, to be-affected-differently within unequal entanglements. Together, these moves outline an anti-anthropocentric agenda for parsing, imagining, and cultivating alternative organizing.