Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods

Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods explores the potential of multimodal art practices in doing qualitative research beyond the human. Through artful endeavours such as creative writing, photography, filmmaking, drawing and poetry, the volume aims to overcome the shortcomings of conventional, anthropocentric and logocentric methods in multispecies research. To move beyond the limitations of language and linguistic communication, the contributors build on the long tradition of visual and sensory anthropology while also engaging in and consciously reflecting on innovative, creative and artistic methods. Taking a multispecies and more-than-human perspective - ranging from snow and trees to animals and an AI oracle - the volume investigates ways to touch, speak, listen, feel, walk with and reach across different species.

This book and accompanying multimedia website advance the frontier of publishing artful expressions of academic research by highlighting how creative practices can be the very core of data collection, analysis and the communication of research. As such, the artful pieces are not 'just' illustrations of textual representations, but are practised as part of an iterative process of data collection and analysis.

The contributions by well-established scholars, early career researchers and postgraduates who carry out new, cutting-edge research offer an engaging range of analytical, methodological and empiric orientations, while conversing at the intersection of multispecies ethnography and artful methods.

Andrea Petitt is currently working as a researcher at Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle (LASC) at Universite de Liege, Belgium, and is affiliated with the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Andrea has worked on long-term multispecies ethnography research projects based on fieldwork in Botswana, Sweden and Colorado (USA), with shorter stints in Nepal, Canada, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Increasingly, Andrea has worked with, and developed, artistic and 'artful' research methods for data collection, analysis and dissemination and has given a number of workshops on the subject for Ph.D. students and Faculty across Sweden and internationally.

Anke Tonnaer is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research interests developed from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous Australia, studying the intersection of nature and culture in tourism, to rewilding initiatives and the challenges of multispecies cohabitation and conservation practices in north-west Europe, especially the Netherlands. Her desire to narrate the more-than-human world in alternative ways alongside the rational dominant ways in ecology has brought her to exploring art-based methodology and sensory ethnography. In 2023, Anke worked with Catrien Notermans in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.

Veronique Servais is Professor in Anthropology of Communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Liege, Belgium. She is interested in the profound bio-social relationships that exists between human beings and animals (and other living beings). She conducted research in the field of 'animal assisted therapies' and 'enchanted encounters' between human beings and animals. She also studied visitor-primates interactions at a zoological park and dolphin-trainers' affective communication at a Seaquarium. More recently, she has been doing research on the experience of encountering the forest, using microphenomenological interviews.

Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research line is on social relatedness with and beyond the human and focuses on the intersection of kinship, gender and religion in India, West Africa and Europe. Her most recent projects are on interspecies communication in women's economic and religious activities in Rajasthan (India); and on storying human-river relatedness in the Netherlands. Her projects are based on visual, sensory and arts-based ethnography which are the methodologies she also teaches at the Anthropology Department. In 2023, Notermans worked together with Anke Tonnaer in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.

Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University's Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career ARC Future Fellowship to conduct research on 'A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza' (2022-2026). Natasha wrote a seminal multispecies ethnography based in Mongolia, Living with Herds: Human-animal Coexistence in Mongolia (2011). She has co-edited five books and several journal volumes, including three special issues oriented toward visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking, and three engaging with multispecies and sensory anthropology in the journals Inner Asia (2020), The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2020) and Anthropology Today (2023). She recently published a co-edited book with Routledge, Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-human World in 2023.