In this article, I explore the political work that arises when human efforts to organize space interfere with the way other species inhabit and organize the same space. Such phenomena, already a feature of many organizations, can be expected to become more frequent and intense, due to the perturbations associated with the Anthropocene. Drawing from a posthumanist approach influenced by the works of Donna Haraway and Vinciane Despret, this article examines a controversy related to a municipal administration’s decision to cull the deer in an urban park. As they engage with this situation, the actors of the controversy negotiate and construct specific forms of organizing and managing multispecies relationships, on which they rely to determine who will be authorized to be a part of the collective, and under which conditions. From the analysis of this situation, I identify two modes of composition of multispecies relationships put forward by the actors, namely attachment and detachment. I also discuss how political institutions and practices, due to their anchoring in an anthropocentric modernist tradition, may be ill-suited to the challenges posed by multispecies controversies.
