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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we will wander across scales and images, exploring a landscape where Black holes, pines, fungi, stray dogs, sheep, and mountains, invite us to observe how relationships across social, epistemic and material spheres that are alien to one another, are being done and undone.

Paper long abstract:

My research centres on a telescope built in Central Mexico. While attempting to trace how the shapes and existence of black holes crystallize out of the astronomers’ practices, I found myself within a web of stories connecting estranged forms of life in and around the telescope. In this paper, we will wander across scales and images, in a landscape where Black holes, pines, fungi, stray dogs, sheep, and mountains, invite us to follow how relationships across social, epistemic and material spheres that are alien to one another, are being done and undone. On the Pico de Orizaba, overseeing the telescope, a dog named Citla has been honoured with a tombstone adorned with plastic flowers, candles and offerings of different kinds. The cherished dog, as stories go, came as a puppy with workers building the telescope and escaped to the neighbouring mountain; she had always lived there since, her body adapting to the altitude, and she had saved climbers from getting lost trying to reach the summit. How can non-humans become guides directing our attention amidst troubled landscapes, cosmological models, complex engineering and politics? This paper is an invitation to outline a speculative ethnography that seeks to come to terms with the outcomes and (cosmo)politics of astronomy, and the need to nurture connections in a troubled world. What does it mean to write as if more-than-humans were the ones threading relations of knowledge, care, extraction, predation, or indifference?

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The paper explores our engagement with elusive atmospheres of more-than-human configurations in landscape. Inspired by Braidotti's post-humanities and Mathews' dramatic modes of attention, we present our use of experimental walking to document more-than-human configurations as dramatically emergent.

Paper long abstract:

This paper documents our engagement with elusive atmospheres of more-than-human configurations as they emerge in walking – in this case in three protected areas in the Ralsko region in the Czech Republic. They, as the whole area of Ralsko, were in the 20th century deeply affected by the establishment of a military training area and uranium mining. Each of these protected areas hold unique relic flora and fauna. They also bear traces of human activities – including mining, military presence, and more recently tourism. Our field research centred on exploring the more-than-human configurations emergent through experimental walks designed to overcome epistemological and methodological limitations of recent landscape geographies and post-phenomenological research. Drawing inspiration from Braidotti's conceptualization of the post-human subject (2019), and Matthews’ concept of dramatic modes of attention (2018), we aspired at becoming guided by the emergent more-than-human traces and configurations while emphasizing the theatrical nature of our exploration and in turn documentation. In doing so, our research embraces the diverse perspectives of the Anthropocene configurations as dramas unfolding in the Ralsko region not dissimilar to a theatrical production staging a multiplicity of coherent but partial worldviews. In our presentation, we address the methodological and epistemological challenges we have been made to face throughout our more-than-human field research. We aim at prompting discussion on how our research choices weaves the complexities of the more-than-human world with dramatic modes of attention, enriching our understanding of the landscape in the Anthropocene while opening walking as a productive tool for more-than-human research.

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This paper engages with the multispecies assemblage of German activists and nonhuman entities, co-created through the tactic of tree-sitting. The aim is to highlight the empirical challenges of exploring this elusive form of more-than-human resistance as composed by entangled and hybrid subjects.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relation that connects climate activists and the non-human natural entities they encounter through the practice of tree-sitting. Tree-sitting is a direct action tactic quite widespread across German environmental movements (Kroije 2019, 2020) and it involves living on structures built on trees, in order to prevent their cutting. On one hand, this contribution advances the thesis that tree-sits are places of multispecies assemblages (Tsing 2014, 2015) and companion species (Haraway 2003, 2008, 2016) that creates unexpected shapeshifting lifeforms. On the other hand, my aim is to bring to the light the difficulty to grasp this viscous strings figure (Haraway 2016). Based on an ongoing ethnographic study, my contribution addresses the methodological challenges, the theoretical risks, and the ethical doubts of engaging with this form of more-than-human resistance (Kurik 2022). In particular I would focus on the inconsistency of the neo-liberal notion of individual subject, which is unsuitable for inquiring the posthuman dimension of both activists and the occupied environment. Despite the uncertainty about its realism, I suggest that the material and affective coexistence of tree-sitters and trees, mud, and wild animals, makes them considerable as “entangled subjects”, embodying this more-than-human encounter and rendering them hybrid.

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What do Germs and Ghosts have in common? How do they intersect in times of crisis? This paper explores how pandemics and spiritual landscapes intersect in post-conflict Timor-Leste. Building on recent fieldwork it explores how we might investigate the ethereal through audio collaborations.

Paper long abstract:

What do germs and ghosts have in common? How do these ethereal yet sometimes tangible forces intersect in times of crisis? Anthropologists have long studied the way animistic beliefs connect health to the wider physical and spiritual environment. Ghosts, spirits, ancestors and supernatural forces contribute to the well-being of communities in Southeast Asia. With the threat of climate change and pandemics, global health institutions recently turned their attention to the intersections between health and the environment. How do we investigate the ethereal, the invisible, giving voice and atmosphere to things that often go unseen?

This paper draws on doctoral and recent postdoctoral research to investigate animistic encounters with ghosts and germs, alongside biomedical knowledge-making in Southeast Asia. It proposes using audio documentary-making with community radio stations to capture voices and soundscapes of customary events and health encounters. In Timor-Leste, community radio stations document important customary practices and events about spiritual well-being. At the same time, these radio stations are a key source of disaster management and recovery, as well as health promotions for national and global health interventions in rural communities. Many health messages however come top-down from global health institutions and NGOs and do not reflect local realities or concepts of health and environment.

This project is in the process of to co-producing a radio documentary podcast with community radio journalists and local health advocates to communicate situated environmental health knowledge to communities and inform global health professionals and policymakers about community approaches to health and the environment.

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This paper proposes a speculative and convivial history of the Anglo-Gorkha borderlands (1750-1816) that considers the role played by non-human animals and beings. It also considers the epistemological and methodological conundrums posed by such an exercise.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the possibilities of writing a speculative history of the Anglo-Gorkha borderlands. It explores the tangled and conflicted histories of communities and states in the borderlands that separated the English East India Company and the Himalayan kingdom of Gorkha (present-day Nepal) during the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-1816. Previous studies on the war have never fully considered the role of non-human animals and beings, whose fleeting presence can be found in the historical record. The paper then employs a broader notion of dwelling that acknowledges the gap between the structure of the world (that includes non-human beings and non-living things) and the limits on human thought and language to represent it, or what Eugene Thacker has called the “nightside” or that “strange and enchanting abyss,” lying at the core of work in the humanities. Following the lead set by historians, ethnographers, and philosophers, this paper speculates that a broader multispecies notion of dwelling and assemblages might lead to writing more-than-human and anthropocentrically decentered accounts of the world. It might also yield a more convivial history of borderlands—one that points to the interconnected and interdependent co-presence of various forms of life inhabiting a world that has been historically elusive and possibly even foreclosed to the work of human thought and language. The paper will adopt a multidisciplinary perspective that draws on evidence from the historical record pertaining to the Anglo-Gorkha war while dwelling on the epistemological tight corners that an enchantment with writing convivial history necessarily entails.

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Our paper explores mutually co-evolved sensory geographies of wild Asian elephants and local human communities at the forest–farm–plantation interface in Assam, northeastern India. This turns into sensible geographies, wherein people and elephants mould their personal space and time to co-habit.

Paper long abstract:

A continuum of interactions, ranging from positive to negative, between wild Asian elephants and local human communities have been well documented across their now-shared forest–farm–plantation habitat matrix in Assam, northeastern India. These often-nuanced interactions, which have arisen from the long-term, close-range cohabitation between the two species, appear to have led to mutually co-evolved sensory geographies that involve actively experienced, vernacular knowledge and ideations of other-than-elephant and other-than-human lives respectively. Applying approaches, concepts, and methods from etho-ethnography, our paper attempts to comprehend the experiential methodologies that elephants and humans employ to generate sensory visuo-audio-tactile-smellscapes through which they make sense of one another’s in/direct presence at various spaces and times. Such personalised sensorial geographies, created experientially, however, tend to be specific and localised, and even then, uncertain, tentative, and often fallible. The variability and the often-troubling inconsistency in these knowledge systems automatically result from the nature of the interspecies encounters, whether momentary or prolonged in their range, or when a protagonist may be entirely absent or may have left the space without a physical meeting but leaving behind semiotic, occasionally difficult-to-sense, evidence of their presence. Importantly, the active making of such vernacular knowledge of one another’s agency also invokes, in its turn, sensible geographies, wherein elephants and farmers act to mould their personal space and time to become uneasy neighbours, sharing mutually forced and mutually agreed-upon lives, as they both become increasingly marginalised in the synurbising world of the Indian Anthropocene.

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Scientific researchers and birders are interested in how cryptic birds can be revealed through technology. I consider two ways they do this, the passive recording of nocturnal bird migration and the use of thermal imagers, to examine the hidden aspects of place and environmental change revealed.

Paper long abstract:

Both scientific researchers and birders are interested in how normally cryptic birds can be revealed through technology. I consider two ways they do this, the passive recording of nocturnal bird migration and the use of thermal imagers, to examine the hidden aspects of place and environmental change revealed.

Nocturnal migration recording, or ‘nocmig’, involves passively recording bird calls as they pass overhead calling at night. Species and movements that would otherwise not be noticed are revealed through this practice, leading to new understandings of the status of species and the places and routes they use. Thermal imagers are used to reveal the presence of cryptic species that are normally hard to find because they are skulking and camouflaged. Knowledge of Jack Snipe, a wading bird normally almost impossible to see on the ground, has increased greatly through this practice. There is now a growing understanding of how they are affected by small changes in conditions and how they move around the landscape.

I argue that these technologically enhanced enquiries enable new appreciations of places that were otherwise familiar. Nocmig reveals the ecological significance of the night sky for migratory birds, indicating that birds rely on spaces well beyond their normal diurnal habitats. Uncovering cryptic birds through thermal imaging enables new kinds of intimate encounter that shift perceptions of habitat and behaviour at fine-grained scales. While both practices give fresh insights, this in turn leads to further puzzles that emerge in new gaps in knowledge.

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This paper explores how a focus on care practices for those living with chronic vulval infection can respond to methodological challenges of microbial ethnography. It examines chronic infection care as creating particular forms of microbial intimacy that can aid studying human-microbial worlds.

Paper long abstract:

Important innovations in life sciences show the human body as a multispecies microbial self, comprised of complex communities of bacteria, microbes and fungi that collaboratively maintain health. In optimal conditions, these microbial workings often go unnoticed. However microbial infections can highlight the intricate symbiosis of the body, with imbalances manifested sensorially in bad smells, discharge, rashes. For those with chronic infections, the persistent nature of their conditions leads to intimate familiarity with their microbial communities. An arsenal of daily care practices is employed, aiming to nurture, cleanse and kill microbes, with the effects carefully watched, noted and measured. Through a focus on chronic infection care, human-microbial knowings, relations and values are enacted, and potential responses emerge to the methodological challenge of studying microbes as invisible beings. How do people with chronic vulval infections care for their microbes? What can this tell us about studying human-microbe worlds together?

This paper explores this methodological question, focusing on care practices those with chronic vulval candida and bacterial vaginosis infections as ways to ‘with-ness’ microbial entanglements. Methodologically speaking ‘with-nessing’ attends to microbial knowing as relational, contextual and contingent. It focuses on the tools, knowledges, practices and agents in human-microbe assemblages as key sites of knowledge making. Through eating, cleaning and killing practices, this paper explores not only different ways to engage methodologically with microbes through care, but also what microbial entanglements can teach us, such as how they come to act as a catalyst for re-evaluations of what constitutes a ‘good’ and ‘natural’ life.

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This paper looks at human/geological relations in Mongolia's capital city as a site of competing notions of life, non-life, and liveliness in the context of mineral extraction. It argues for poetry as a method for engaging with uncanny geological beings both on the ground and ethnographically.

Paper long abstract:

In Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar, urban residents experience the affective abilities of geological forms via their effect on the urban atmosphere. This talk focuses on the four mountains that ring the city: Bogd Khan, Chingeltei, Songinokhairkhan, and Bayanzürkh, which assist in causing the atmospheric inversion that traps coal smoke and car exhaust in Ulaanbaatar, causing wintertime conditions that render it one of the most polluted cities in the world. These mountains, like many “worshipped” mountains in Mongolia, are understood as “lively,” neither living nor non-living but capable of intentionality that directly affects the human communities with whom they are in close and intimate relation.

Mongolia’s writers, and poets in particular, have long grappled with poetry as a mode of engagement with these lively and uncanny beings. This paper draws on close readings of poems, collaborative translations, and interviews with poets to demonstrate how poetry and poems can act as enchanting events in which compelling relational vectors with human performers and audiences are forged. These poetic forms create a map of the uncanny topologies of the city, in which subterranean, surface, and atmospheric relations are understood and written and spoken through alternative and poetic forms of knowledge transmission. This paper argues for poetry both as a mode of engagement across great difference and as an ethnographic method well-suited to dealing with uncertainty.

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A comparative ethnography of citizen scientists, endangered dusky langurs, and long-tailed macaques in Penang, Malaysia, illustrates how various multispecies relations are mediated through primate conservationist discourses and the semiotics of human-animal conflict.

Paper long abstract:

Affective ethologies highlight how human-monkey interactions are uneven, laden with power hierarchies, and mediated through shifting ecological relations across various landscapes (Barua and Sinha 2022, Sinha 2021). A comparative ethnography of citizen scientists, endangered dusky langurs, and long-tailed macaques in Penang, Malaysia, illustrates how various multispecies relations are mediated through primate conservationist discourses and the semiotics of human-animal conflict. Here I offer insights from preliminary fieldwork in Penang’s urban neighborhoods, tracing how citizen scientists and urban residents reconcile dualistic perceptions of monkey animality as ‘passive objects of leisure’ worthy due to their perceived biodiversity value and as ‘pests who contribute to infrastructural damage’. In tracing conservationist fieldwork practices and primate behavioral data, citizen scientists appear to capture ideas of monkey animality that transcend the commonplace frames of human-animal relations as always conflictual and exploitative. These emerging narratives push back against the state’s governance discourse around monkeys as ecologically destructive while highlighting monkeys as agential beings whose lives and relations to humans are mediated by anthropogenic activities (e.g., urban horticulture) and the structural dynamics of urban landscapes. Through autoethnography, as a citizen scientist, and via the use of primate-focused photography, I encourage paying closer attention to how shifting ecological relations mediate species management solutions and relations, while reframing the conservationist method of deterrence as a continuum of care.

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My paper explores the possibility of constructing concepts of translation based on how the Awajún people of northern Amazonas express ideas about the introduction of new knowledge forms into their society. Such changes are often brought by foreigners, such as animals, spirits, and anthropologists.

Paper long abstract:

My paper explores the possibility of constructing a concept of translation based on how the Aénts Chicham (formerly known as the Jivaro) in general, and the Awajún (a sub-group of the Jivaro also known as the Aguaruna) in particular, express ideas about the introduction of foreign/new knowledge forms into their society. And further, (2) how these ideas allows for a unconventional methodology wherein interlocutor and anthropologist are positioned vis-à-vis each other illustrative of an Amazonian flavoured insider : outsider dialectic (i.e. :: congeners : enemies :: nativos : mestizos :: aénts (Awajún word for "people") : whites, etc.). The ethnographic basis for discussing these topics are my 17 months of fieldwork in the high jungle of Northern Peru where I primarily focus on how ritual song facilitates the relationship between humans and nonhumans in the context of garden cultivation. The mythological narratives that accompany these practises furnish a idea of transformation that focuses on how "outside" aspects—the predatory attitude of wild species of flora and fauna, for example—are incorporated, e.g. made into a basis for productive social interaction. This logic of engaging the wants of outside beings in this way directly implies anthropologists as well. The explicit discussions had with my Awajún interlocutors concerning this last point birth my departure for engaging the topics presented above.

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Drawing on ethnographic work with rice farmers in The Gambia, where farmers describe the process of crop varietal development as a more-than-human collaboration, this paper explores the dilemmas and politics of apprehending beauty and sentience among plants.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s, the rice farming ecosystems of West Africa have featured prominently in anthropological work attuned to human-plant relations, particularly work on farmer experimentation. Where much early research sought to challenge the devaluation of farmer knowledge within development practice, it did so within a language of plant beingness borrowed from scientific plant breeding. For example, work on farmer plant breeding in The Gambia has shown that farmers identify and develop new rice cultivars at roughly the same rate and level of genetic uniformity as professionally-trained plant breeders, but it has also held that many farmers—citing the contributions of spirits and the efforts beautiful plants—do not understand the “true” cause of botanical change.

Reflecting on this legacy, which is already attuned to a certain politics of elision, this paper explores the dilemmas and politics of apprehending sentient plant beauty in multispecies ethnography. Indeed, among rice farmers in The Gambia, people describe the coming-into-being of new crop varieties as a more-than-human collaboration involving the work of God, jinn, humans, and responsive, sensing, beauteous plants. Here, beauty is not just an outcome of human tending, but is something that is sensed, tried for, and communicated by plants. At a time when work in feminist STS and Indigenous ecologies is pointing to new modes of plant relating attuned to multispecies collaboration, apprehending plant beauty in more-than-human ethnography still raises deep questions about the translation of human-plant relations, the signification of lifeworlds, and the limits of seeing beauty and sensing plant communications.

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What are the implications and affordances of transitioning to multispecies care in Dutch horticultural practices? How do various forms of multispecies entanglements, knowledge, and caring practices challenge the modernist ambition to control more-than-human life in Greenhouses?

Paper long abstract:

The 'Emissieloze Kas', or Emission-Free Greenhouse, is a novel framework currently under development in the Netherlands. The agreement aims to implement measures that will nearly eliminate nutrient and product emissions from greenhouse horticulture by 2027. To do so, horticultural farmers experiment with novel, multispecies, ways to care for and with plants.

In this article, we contrast two approaches to transitioning to an Emission-Free Greenhouse: (1) efforts in the Emission-Free Greenhouse are rooted in modernist aims to “control” nature through automation, artificial intelligence, and precise identification of leakages; and (2) efforts in the Emission-Free Greenhouse are rooted in multispecies experiments that aim to find the right balance between elements beneficial and detrimental to life in and around the greenhouse.

Based on multi-sited ethnography in the Netherlands horticultural landscape, we argue that, while some technologies—what we refer to as “modernist”—emphasize the idea of technological fixes and control, privileging human health, other technologies—what we term “multispecies care”—seek to prevent plant diseases and minimize reliance on fertilizers and chemicals by sensitizing monitoring technologies to the specific and often elusive needs of plant species and microbial communities inhabiting the greenhouse.

As we elucidate the diverse ways greenhouse growers navigate the affordances and limitations posed by these technologies in their interactions with more-than-human greenhouse actors, our inquiry delves into various forms of multispecies care that challenge the ideal of controlling life within greenhouses. We explore how these entanglements give rise to new modes of knowing, caring, and relating with plants and microbes in a technology-driven environment.

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This paper is part of a more-than-human collaboration between an anthropologist, an artist, and the Eucalyptus globulus. Reflecting on transdisciplinary and transspecies exchanges, this paper discusses methodological and ethical aspects related to the elaboration of the Eucalyptus’ migration story.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is the product of a research-creation process started in 2021 that entangles a Brazilian anthropologist interested in art and more-than-human worlds, a Colombian artist involved with plants based on ecofeminism and witchcraft, and a plant species native to Australia that is now cultivated in more than 90 countries: Eucalyptus globulus. This more-than-human encounter, which involves subjects who are historically subordinate and subjected to different levels of violence, expropriation, and denial, was born amid the contradictions of climate justice and, more specifically, in the Brazilian forests of carbon credits. Seeking to reflect on transdisciplinary and transspecies exchanges, as well as on urgent ecological problems, this paper presents: (1) an outline of the more-than-human story of Eucalyptus globulus’ migration, which made it cease to be an endemic species in certain regions of Australia and become a commodity in Brazil, always linked to capitalist passions and interests; (2) the idea of an alliance of subordinates that gives rise to this more-than-human story; and (3) a discussion about the methodological and ethical aspects that permeate this entire research endeavour with more-than-humans. Considering the complexities of the more-than-human encounters that occur in the global South - and that eucalyptus brings us face-to-face with both stories of land expropriation and deforestation, as well as therapeutic encounters marked by affinities between local communities and the species - this paper seeks to elaborate an account that is neither innocent nor romanticised and that encompasses the relational and methodological horizons of research carried out with more-than-humans.