Elsewise: Speculative Landscapes in the Climate Pluriverse

Climate capitalism, technofixes, diffusion of responsibility: apocalyptic horsemen, etched into the foundations of hegemonic structures and inscribed in political dynamics.Often invisible, these forces permeate our everyday lives, our political decisions, our very existence.How we respond to the climate crisis-today and in the future-is therefore also a consequence of persistent habitats of political conduct in a perpetually unequal world.Or put differently: the 'climate subject', introduced in this book, is not a carefree fluttering butterfly that fulfills itself only through independent, reflective self-expression, as the humanist ideal suggests.Rather, it is also the result of its sociocultural and historical surroundings.The closer a subject resides on exploitable margins, the more likely it is not only to slip beyond the horizon, but also to bear the true costs of the crisis-often through creeping or acute violence (Parsons 2025).This is exactly where 'business as usual' pushes toward collapse-hidden in smog, toxic incineration fumes, and microplastics too small to see, it keeps grinding on.By exploring more-than-human practices of repair, care, and collective response to climate-related crises in urban Southeast Asia-particularly in Ho Chi Minh City and Phnom Penh-this contribution seeks to reconfigure dominant approaches to resilience.It does so through a series of ethnographically speculative vignettes: some closely grounded in fieldwork, others more freely imagined.I call these vignettes 'speculative' because they navigate the tightrope between ethnographic data and storytelling, aiming to create and reconfigure reality-across histories, presents, and possible futures-in order to illuminate what remains unseen and untold.This feminist approach writes not only against 'a realistic real,' but inhabits the "interstices of what presents itself as reality," as Isabelle Stengers puts it (Stengers 2018, quoted in Jensen and Thorsen 2018: 4).Speculative fabulations are to be understood in this way as a mode of attention, a practice of worlding that materialize an elsewise that goes beyond the otherness (Haraway 2016; Gramlich 2020).While 'otherwise' casts the other as a distinct counterpart, set apart from the one who observes, elsewise gestures toward a more porous sense of otherness-one that is not only different, but also elsewhere, or otherwise still.This view