Going Feral

To be feral, something must first have been domesticated — and to be domesticated, it must once have been considered wild.

Wildness is understood here as a state defined by transgression and ambiguity — between the planned and the improvised, the regulated and the untamed, the curated and the contingent. The notion of the “feral” reveals that wildness is not a natural category but a relational and social construct.

The feral therefore does not describe an original state but a movement between these categories. It marks the moment when established orders begin to fracture and the distinction between wild and domesticated becomes unstable.

“Wild” marks the point at which organisms, systems, or behaviors escape human control and become sites of ecological, cultural, and political instability. In biology, feralization describes how domesticated species change once they slip beyond human management, blurring the distinction between wild and domesticated and revealing an “ethical vacuum” in their treatment. In the humanities, wildness operates as a critical category. It challenges normative structures and resists domesticated notions of behavior, gender, pedagogy, and knowledge production. Postcolonial and urban-theoretical approaches extend the concept to infrastructures and cities that exceed control and generate unintended, often contradictory effects.

Across these perspectives, wildness — or the lack thereof — exposes the limits of human governance and points toward hybrid ecologies, runaway systems, and alternative forms of agency.