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?