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- Convenors:
-
Paul Keil
(Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Laura Kuen (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Marianna Szczygielska (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
Kieran O'Mahony (Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences)
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- Discussant:
-
Juno Salazar Parrenas
(Cornell University)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- NU-4A06
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how other-than-human partners inspire researchers toward other-worldly research methods. We invite contributions that examine the complicated intellectual and ethical obligations to lively organisms and processes in our epistemic practices.
Long Abstract:
Despite aspiring otherwise, too often more-than-human research superficially engages with other organisms and treats them as subordinate to social theorising. We are influenced by scholars who remain curious and in touch with the lives of their nonhuman companions, and the socio-ecological worlds they dwell in. Other beings are more than merely good to think with - their biological, relational, fleshy and creative capacities can carry and augment our thoughts. A scholarly indebtedness and ethical obligation that requires we seriously acknowledge how their lives and deaths compose our conceptual activities.
In this panel, we explore how our other-than-human intellectual partners inspire us towards other-worldly methods. Their unique modes of breathing, eating, sensing and connecting offer instruction for knowing, and open challenging conversations about how we conduct research. By following and corresponding with the bodies and behaviours of other beings we can generate new questions, processes, and techniques. For example, what can moles teach us about digging and accommodating to fuzziness (Parreñas 2023), or fungi and bacteria about collaboration (Tsing 2015; Benezra 2023)? How do eels help us understand transformations (Kaishian 2022), or how are plants entangled in knowledge-making (Kimmerer 2003, 2013)? And what do porcine tastes tell us about the omnivorous intellectual consumption of scholars?
We invite presentations that partner with more-than-human individuals, kinds, body parts or ecological relations to propose novel ways of doing research beyond routine academic paradigms. The panel is open to standard papers, as well as alternative media or experimental forms of presentation. We hope for thought-provoking insights into living organisms, ones that think through the ethical, political and epistemological possibilities of research. How can a symbiotic, methodological conversation generate new reflections on our more-than-human companions and what they do to our ways of knowing?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This presentation interrogates swine as bewildering companions that are not only important subjects of our individual and collective research practices, but ones to whom we continuously return as guides for our methodological thinking.
Paper long abstract:
As researchers, we collectively encounter pigs, whether it be in farms, archives, forests, or scientific articles. Pigs love to rootle: to sift, sniff, shovel, search, and connect with the environment through their snouts. Rootling is a deeply grounded, multi-sensory, and social porcine activity. In this presentation, we unpack our ongoing development of a method that takes seriously the mundane embodied practices of our more-than-human guides.
We are inspired by pigs. As ethnographers, historians, and online dwellers, we continuously return to rootling to help question the limits of scientific methods and find cross-species kinship in our research. And ask if we, as all-too-human researchers, can methodologically adopt, appropriate, or mimic porcine ways of knowing. How can a concept and method of rootling be valuable for doing better research about pigs, for pigs, and for doing scientific research in general?
From our observations of porcine presences and traces, as well as ethological accounts, we propose rootling as a model for exploratory and nourishing research practice. Although rootling might appear haphazard and chaotic, for pigs it is purposeful and meaning-making. For researchers, rootling can recenter curiosity and playfulness: it allows us to take up unexpected lines of inquiry, ones that leap across different approaches, perspectives, and sources.
As we go, we are unearthing new questions about our relations to pigs. What obligations do we have to our more-than-human research partners? How do we translate across species difference, and what is lost in translation? What are the scales and politics of symbiotic methods?
Paper short abstract:
Starting from an ethnographic analysis of the practices of engineers and biologists who study fish swimming performances in order to preserve their life in human-altered rivers, we aim to explore ways to work with fish as our epistemic companions and better attune ourselves to their worlds.
Paper long abstract:
Our proposal stems from joint reflections that emerged within the framework of a research project in which we are involved, titled “Dialoguing Species - Designing Common Worlds through Ethnography”.
The first phase of the project sees us both engaged in an ethnographic analysis of the practices of engineers and biologists at the Politecnico di Torino who study fish swimming performances through the use of particular devices. Their research work is aimed to collect data that will presumably enable other engineers to design and construct more effective fish passes and ladders, in order to mitigate the disturbance created in the fluvial habitat by human built barriers.
Embracing a multispecies perspective, we are interested in exploring: i) what ways of knowing fish these scholars articulate through their practices and techno-scientific devices; ii) how fish respond or resist to such ways of questioning and knowing them.
Particularly, some crucial questions for us are the following: how can we learn from these scholars to interrogate fish while keeping a critical gaze on their ways of knowing? For instance, initial interviews showed how they label the attitude of some groups of fish that appear to be uncooperative as “weird behaviour”. For that, these groups are discarded. What can we actually learn from the resistance of these fish? What if fish were epistemic companions in our research? How can we help to develop new methods and devices for interrogating fish that may also be relevant to them (Despret 2016)?
Paper short abstract:
Feral Wool is an ongoing research-through-design project, situating in South Tyrol, Italy, exploring the abandonment of sheep wool as a disturbing matter and its (over)flowing state with a speculative and multispecies design approach.
Paper long abstract:
Sheep wool in South Tyrol, Italy has been increasingly losing significant value with a decline of sheep numbers with endangered species, sheep grazing practices, and the human-sheep conviviality. Today, 50 tonnes of local wool have become waste annually which result in multiple economic, ecological, and social crises.
Feral Wool, an ongoing research-through-design project as part of PNRR-iNEST, situates in this local reality and explores the concept of (over)flowing wool. By calling wool "feral”, we highlight the abandonment of a precious and highly vital matter. In our inquiry, “feral wool” acts as a metaphoric tool to regenerate the narratives of plural ecologies shifting from anthropocentric, productionist,and extractivist view to more-than-human angles. Addressing wool as an extension of sheep and an interspecies binder, our inquiry aims to reveal sheep perspective to explore untold, hidden, and disturbing narratives. To do that, we engage with diverse actors including shepherds, small-scale farmers, artisans, local producers, scientists, and their relationship with the sheep by asking “what do sheep dream of?”. We acknowledge the difficulty of making animals participate in such processes, there is a need of new tools in which design can be catalyst.
The research includes a speculative and multispecies design approach, embracing interviews with actors of wool web networks, design ethnography, co-creative methods for imagining possible futures and design interventions as forms of inquiry. One of the outcomes will be multispecies mappings and provocative design intervention that trigger a more-than-human dialogue with public and opening critical questions towards new ways of knowings and makings.
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects critically on the multispecies ethnography developed as part of my doctorate research on/with rivers in European and Latin American contexts, exploring some of the ethical-political implications of engaging with rivers not only as research subjects but also as research partners.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents a critical reflection on the process of my doctorate research with rivers. Drawing on theoretical contributions from different disciplines, including political ecology, multispecies justice and ethnography, ecofeminist, posthumanist and Indigenous studies, I reflect on the possibility of understanding and engaging with rivers not only as research subjects but also as research partners. Critically exploring concepts of subjecthood, agency, and voice beyond the human, I analyse the ways in which three different rivers (the Mondego in Portugal, the Piatúa in Ecuador, and the Maas in the Netherlands) have inspired me to pursue a doctorate program studying rivers as living subjects, and social movements mobilising to protect them; have helped frame my research questions and my research methods; and have led me to navigate complex ethical questions regarding my positionality and the political implications of conducting more-than-human research. The paper is guided by one central question: “What might it mean to understand and engage with rivers not only as research subjects but also as research partners, meaning, to view and relate to rivers not only as subjects to be known but also as partners in the process of knowing?”. I argue that answering this question is not only (a valuable) philosophical exercise but that it has important ethical-political implications as well, which can guide us in the transformation of prevailing modes of relationship with rivers and the multispecies communities that they are embedded in.