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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?

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Wild Asian elephants are increasingly living precarious lives, with widespread loss and fragmentation of their habitats and traditional movement pathways, across rapidly urbanising India. The subsequent close-range regimes of association between the two species appear to generate finely-nuanced sensory geographies of human–elephant cohabitation, which we document in a forest–farm habitat matrix in Assam, northeastern India. Such mutually co-evolved sensory geographies involve actively experienced, vernacular knowledges and ideations of one another’s lives, and also allow elephant individuals and groups to initially generate sensible geographies, involving the creation of their own spatio-temporal maps of the landscape, their ‘elephant spaces’. These counter-maps allow them to exert their agency against the sociopolitical maps¬—representing ‘elephant places’—created by the local human communities. Our paper employs etho-ethnographic approaches and methods to comprehend the experiential methodologies that elephants and humans employ to create their respective sensory visuo-audio-tactile-smellscapes and generate carefully planned sensible geographies, through which they make sense of one another’s in/direct presence and their underlying intentionalities. The variability and the often-troubling inconsistency of these sensory knowledge systems typically result from the momentary or prolonged nature of specific interspecies encounters or their dependence on semiotic, occasionally difficult-to-sense, evidence. The active making of such vernacular agential knowledges, nevertheless, inform their sensible geographies, wherein elephants and farmers resist one another and map out their personal space and time to become uneasy neighbours, sharing mutually forced and mutually agreed-upon lives, which are increasingly marginalised in the synurbising world of the Indian Anthropocene.

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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)?

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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.

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Star-nosed moles are small yet mightily skilled subterranean designers. In the concealed depths beneath our notice, star-nosed moles create architectures of tunnels and chambers. With the aid of their tentacled snout comprising 17,000 nerve endings, they carve out these spaces in boggy, air-poor environments that strategically link zones of ideal foraging and refuge. Understanding their ways of knowing and doing proves challenging without invasive tools on the field or lab-controlled environments.

To speculate on the spatial intricacies, vibrational and odorous atmospheres, and subjectivities of star-nosed moles, I created visual vignettes through the artistic and intuitive methods of hybridized digital and analog drawing. The process revealed gaps in our understanding of the spatial and material decision-making of the star-nosed mole, prompting further speculation. Questions emerged, ranging from the formal—What should the length of this tunnel be from here to there—to the sensorial and subjective—How does the mole feel when he plunges into the cold aquatic atmosphere at the end of his tunnel to catch prey?

The resulting visual spatial vignettes not only function as tools for comprehending the spaces shaped by star-nosed moles but also serve as a medium for epistemic exploration. I will present my process of layering and speculation in creating the vignettes to better understand the star-nosed mole’s subterranean lifeworlds. I will show how these drawings extend beyond ‘mere’ speculation but offer a powerful tool for more deeply engaging with and asking about other animals.

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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.

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A buzzing mess of forces traverse the more-than-human constituting the field of social relationalities. Global capital and its new toy, assorted securitization projects of all scales, continue their post-pandemic triumphant march; so too, tenaciously, the micro-level critical relationalities connecting all, otherwise. Of interest is a state of being wherein human and non-human relationality becomes a transformational force, at times dissolving even the material world. This is a state wherein the human approaches the feline; wherein humor is not exclusively human. Life, as death, is different here. Violence, too. The proposed paper-collage is part of an on-going project that seeks to track and further open up this ground.

I examine how the practice of entering and exiting different realities, via intimate sociality across the human-animal divide, empowers a form of vision that transcends conventional (always social) sight. This enables alternative forms of knowledge and sharpens critical understandings of the ways with which current notions of the human, and of “the natural world,” work to foster relationalities that are supremacist.

The method is of necessity piecemeal. There is an intermingling of forms of analysis; scholarly work along with verbal and non-verbal images, dare I say studies, of such critical relationalities. Objective: to fortify a politics of vision that destabilizes established ways of knowing. In this part of the series, I focus on the feline as generative of practices of vision and of thought that can short-circuit dominant patterns of power, yielding another tool for the crafting of other worlds, more socially just.