| Sumario: | Overflows that interrupt the ‘normal state of affairs’ are generative events that make visible the agential force of nonhumans. Practitioners of posthumanist disciplines - such as STS, ANT, economic performativity and animal studies - have exposed how nonhumans take part in the making of ‘the social.’ Due to their predominantly small-scale perspective, these efforts have left broader sociopolitical effects mainly unattended. Here I explore how the political agency of nonhumans can provoke sociopolitical consequences when approached through political ontological lenses. I argue that by conceiving reality as the precarious effect of struggles between competing ways of performing the world, human/nonhuman associations can be understood as part of non-dominant ontologies, revealing the world’s multiplicity and expanding the borders of political communities. To do so, I study a citizen/swans association that emerged in Valdivia, Chile, in response to a disaster that since 2004 has affected the Río Cruces wetland and its colony of swans, following the installation of a new pulp mill by Arauco. This unprecedented mobilization provoked the breakdown of Chile’s environmental framework and forced reform. I find that the suffering of the swans was ‘the’ most agentive force within the struggle, leading all sorts of actors to act in response. Based on an ontological reading of Rancière’s understanding of ‘the properly political’ and on Critchley’s notion of the ethical call that drives political action, I show how, through their ‘doings,’ the swans - previously unaccounted - became overtly political actors, ontologically reconfiguring the political community
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