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This talk critiques more-than-human approaches in STS, arguing they remain grounded in human interpretation. It proposes a “return to the human” through people-focused multispecies research examining how humans engage with non-human worlds.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, science and technology studies (STS) and related fields have shown growing interest in the “more-than-human,” reflected in approaches such as multispecies ethnography, the ontological turn, new materialism, and Anthropocene scholarship. These perspectives aim to decenter humans and foreground the agency of non-human entities—animals, plants, technologies, and environments—in social life. While these approaches have generated important insights, this talk critically examines their epistemological promises and ethical implications.

Drawing on debates in STS and anthropology, I argue that attempts to produce symmetrical analyses of humans and non-humans often remain grounded in human interpretation and representation. Despite claims of moving “beyond the human,” ethnographic research still relies on human categories, experiences, and narratives to describe non-human worlds. This creates a tension between the theoretical ambition to grant equal analytical status to non-humans and the practical limits of ethnographic methods.

Rather than attempting to fully transcend the human perspective, I propose a more modest and ethically grounded approach: returning analytically “back to the human.” This does not mean ignoring non-human actors. On the contrary, it means examining how human interpret, engage with, and act toward non-human beings and environments. By emphasizing clarity, ethnographic richness, and ethical responsibility, I argue for “people-focused” multispecies research. This perspective keeps human practices and power relations at the center while still taking seriously the entanglements that shape life in the Anthropocene.

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AI systems in dairy farming promise objective and precise knowledge about animal welfare. Drawing on multispecies ethnography in Swedish dairy farming, this paper reflects on how becoming attentive to cows opens alternative ways of knowing animals beyond algorithmic welfare metrics.

Paper long abstract

What does it mean to produce knowledge about animals when their lives are inevitably interpreted through human concepts, methods, and sensory capacities? This question became central to my fieldwork as I entered dairy farms where cows were central actors yet remained interlocutors I could not interview, their lives becoming knowable only through mediated forms of observation and interpretation. Engaging with this tension, the paper offers a reflexive account of what it means to conduct multispecies research in practice. The paper draws on ongoing multispecies ethnographic fieldwork on AI-driven welfare monitoring in Swedish dairy farming. Precision livestock farming systems promise to render animal lives legible through data derived from sensors and machine-learning models, presenting the animals and their welfare as something that can be continuously measured and managed. As such, these systems privilege a particular way of knowing animals grounded in measurable behavioural indicators and algorithmic interpretation. In response, my research attends to the multiple forms of knowledge that coexist in this space. Through multispecies ethnographic methods (including farm observations and engagement with farmers, animal health and welfare experts, industry actors, engineers, and the cows themselves), I examine how different ways of knowing animals are enacted in practice and how animals make themselves known through their embodied engagements with technological infrastructures and farm environments. Reflecting on my process of learning to notice cows differently, the paper contributes to debates on how STS might cultivate knowledge practices more attuned to more-than-human futures.

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Winemaking mobilizes multiple non-human actors (e.g., vines, yeasts, soils, insects). Following grapes across their transformations, this paper reflects on four methodological strategies to approach non-humans in STS: art of noticing, traces, interdisciplinarity, and highlighting fragilities.

Paper long abstract

Wine production emerges from dense multispecies entanglements in which numerous non-human (e.g., vines, yeasts, soils, insects, animals, and pathogens) participate in the transformation of grapes into wine. In the context of the Anthropocene, attending to these actors is crucial, as they are central to the processes that produce the singularity of a wine and its terroir.

Based on an ethnographic inquiry that follows grapes across their successive stages of transformation—from vineyard ecosystems to fermentation—this paper examines how non-humans can be approached empirically in STS research. Inspired by multispecies ethnography (Tsing 2015, Kirksey & Helmreich 2010) and sensory ethnography (Pink 2009), the study documents the “contaminations” (Tsing 2015) and encounters through which humans and non-humans and between non-humans mutually transform one another during viticulture and vinification.

Rather than claiming to speak for non-humans, the paper proposes a methodological reflection structured around four mechanisms developed during fieldwork and their respective limits. First, placing nonhumans at the center of attention through what Tsing (2015) calls an “art of noticing.” Second, focusing on the traces non-humans leave in practices, materials, and transformations, which become sites of encounter for the researcher. Third, engaging an interdisciplinary approach (e.g., oenology, microbiology, agronomy) to multiply interpretative perspectives on these traces. Finally, acknowledging and working with the inherent fragilities of such inquiries (Damian et al. 2026), recognizing how epistemic uncertainty and methodological limits shape multispecies research.

By reflecting on these practices, the paper contributes to ongoing debates about the possibilities and limits of including nonhumans in STS research.

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This paper develops "affective perspectivism" through ethnography of Chinese migrants relocating to the UK with pets, asking what rigorous non-human inclusion looks like when humans remain the primary interpretive instrument.

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What happens when humans, animals, and bureaucratic institutions are forced into the same space—and none of them speak the same language? This paper examines the three-way entanglement between Chinese migrants, their companion animals, and the regulatory systems governing cross-border mobility from China to the UK, asking what "more-than-human" research can realistically deliver when institutions actively deny the relational nature of multispecies life.

Drawing on semi-structured interviews and digital ethnography, I develop the concept of affective perspectivism: a situated perceptual capacity cultivated through sustained cohabitation, enabling humans to navigate between institutional demands that classify animals as cargo and the cross-species bonds that resist such categorisation. I trace three interconnected perspectival positions—the "pure human perspective" enforced by bureaucratic compliance, the "animal-facing perspective" cultivated through embodied cohabitation, and the "owner's perspective" as a site of absorbing contradictions between incommensurable worlds.

What emerges is not a triumphant story of multispecies solidarity, but a more uncomfortable one: institutions shape what animals can become in transit; animals' distress and needs restructure human subjectivity; and humans absorb the contradictions neither system acknowledges. Grounding the framework in controlled equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004), I argue that this three-way friction—rather than any one actor's perspective—is where the methodological and ethical challenges of more-than-human research actually live.

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We present our embedded STS study of an interdisciplinary biodiversity renewal project, rethinking ecological practice through a ‘people in nature’ (PiN) approach. We place PiN in dialogue with MTH concepts to analyse multiple positionings of human-environment relations in 21st century conservation

Paper long abstract

It has become commonplace to assert that interdisciplinary research is necessary to address ecological disruption, yet *how* to collaborate in practice, particularly with more-than-humans, remains uncertain. This paper discusses an embedded STS study of a large-scale biodiversity renewal research project that is rethinking ecological practice through a ‘people in nature’ (PiN) approach (IUCN, 2016). Through this relational move, the project is advancing a wider step-change in ecology and conservation science, away from traditional approaches protecting a 'nature' that is conceptually and materially separated from humanity. However, in a biodiversity project that (unusually) involves significant and heterogeneous involvements with humanities and social science (HASS) scholars, a multitude of ideas theorising human-environment relations rub up against each other.

Thinking explicitly across PiN and ‘more-than-human’ (MTH) concepts, this paper examines how shared ideas about agency, relationality and care are conceptualised and implemented in multiple ways across the project. While PiN approaches often explore individualised human-nature relationalities, in the project the term functions as a strategic umbrella repositioning people *within* ecosystems, creating a broader space for productive dialogue with other concepts including political ecology, environmental justice, ecopoetry, ecosystem services and STS inflected MTH. While understandings of agency and relationality vary drastically across the project, care, in its different ethical stances, for and towards the environment has emerged as a shared obligation that drives research. We tentatively argue that this approach is changing practices of ecology in unexpected ways and reflect on the negotiations and tensions of human-nature relationalities in impact-focused environmental research.

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In the Anthropocene, humans are considered the sole intentional driving force of ecological change. Non-human animals, instead, remain driven by their DNA and subjected to natural selection. For understanding ecological change, this contribution argues, all animals should be granted intentionality.

Paper long abstract

In mainstream evolutionary biology, non-human animals are considered to be without intentions. Scholars like Richard Dawkins (2009) consider them to be driven by their DNA, which pre-inscribes their behavior from birth and determines all their actions. Humans, however, are exempted because – in contrast to other animals – they are assumed to behave intentionally. Human biological exceptionalism has a long tradition in evolutionary theory, going back to Alfred Wallace (1823–1913), who believed humans’ higher mental faculty enabled them to escape natural selection.

This paper argues that this reasoning – mistakenly! – informs current understanding of the Anthropocene. As the name suggests, it assumes humans to be the sole intentional driving force of ecological change. Unlike other animals, humans are not subjected to natural selection, can escape predestination, and are capable of altering the future shape of Earth. This reasoning bears a close resemblance to Kant’s Copernican revolution of the human mind as the epistemic center of the universe; yet, in the Anthropocene, it is the human body, its intentions and actions, that is at the center of universal change.

Drawing on insights from ethology and multispecies studies, this contribution argues that for understanding current ecological change and destruction, the Anthropocene poses a conceptual deception that amplifies human exceptionalism and reduces other animals to meaningless clumps of matter that passively react based on their genetic disposition. This contribution argues for a conceptual counter-Kantian revolution, by decentering humans as the radiating sun in the center and granting other animals intentionality, too.

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Recent zoological and philosophical thought suggests the problem of comprehending and representing other animals’ agency is due to human cognitive biases, an issue addressed here by drawing on sensory-perceptual systems in ecological psychology, enactivist literary theory and science fiction.

Paper long abstract

Recent zoological and philosophical thought suggests there is a problem of misrecognition in comprehending and representing other animals’ agency, which is due to human cognitive biases (de Waal 2017; Meier 2019). This paper draws on ecological psychology, enactivist literary theory and science fiction (SF), in order to develop approaches for addressing this through understandings of sensory-perceptual cognitive systems as embedded in and inseparable from their environments. Namely, that other animals’ differing perceptual systems have co-evolved in and through the affordances of their environments (Gibson 1966, 1979); which can be applied to analysing the simulation of lifeworlds in fiction through cultural and sensorial cues (Kukkonen 2019) that enactively produce somatic empathic responses in readers (Caracciolo and Kukkonen 2021); lifeworld simulation techniques that are both deployed and inverted through SF’s cognitive estrangement and alien animals or animal aliens.

It will make its argument using examples of octopus-based (octopoid) figures from contemporary science fiction. In examining the culturally and sensorially simulated lifeworlds of octopoid characters such as Octavia Butler’s faceless multi-sensory tentacled Oankali (2000), Karen Traviss’ unknowable Bezeri (2004-2005), or the anthropogenically-evolved semiotic octopuses of Adrian Tchaikovsky (2020) and Ray Nayler (2022), it speculates on what these reveal about our own naturalcultural cognition while testing a range of posthumanist positions on the question of the animal. In this, it aims to contribute new tools for recognising and ethically representing other animals’ agency in multispecies social science research.

Keywords: Animal studies, cognitive literary theory, ecological psychology, science fiction (SF), posthumanism, octopuses

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This paper examines the methodological and ethical limits of more-than-human research through a French law regulating fences and wildlife mobility.

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Who speaks for the wild boar? This paper critically engages with the methodological and ethical challenges of more-than-human research through an empirical case: a 2023 French law regulating fences, designed to limit their proliferation, facilitate wildlife movement, and potentially restrict human access to private land. Through interviews with human stakeholders (hunters, landowners, hikers, government officials, members of parliament) and planned fieldwork along fence lines, we examine how more-than-human actors (wild boar, deer, plants colonizing fence structures) are represented, enrolled, and sometimes instrumentalized in political processes that claim to act in their interest. Fences, we argue, are not merely infrastructures of separation: they materialize and transform relations between human and more-than-human actors, making them a productive site for studying how these relations are legally and politically constructed. Yet our research relies primarily on human accounts. We interrogate the heuristic value and limits of stakeholders’ narratives as a methodological device: what can they actually tell us about more-than-human experience, and what do they foreclose? Rather than treating this mediation as a methodological failure, we examine it as a constitutive feature of more-than-human research that deserves explicit analytical attention. We ultimately ask – including of our own research – whether frameworks that claim to go beyond the human can genuinely account for more-than-human agency or whether they merely repackage anthropocentric hierarchies of representation in environmental language.

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Based on fieldwork in Czechia, this paper analyzes a situation described by local herbalists: plants begin growing near the home of a person who needs their healing properties. These encounters are considered a prompt to develop discussion of intentionality beyond anthropocentric categories.

Paper long abstract

Humans depend on plants with which they share air, landscapes, and households. Despite the constant entanglement of human and vegetal life, plants remain elusive objects for the methods of multispecies ethnography (Hartigan, 2018). Drawing on ongoing anthropological research on the use of herbs in Czechia, this paper examines how herbalists generate knowledge about herbs through intimate relations with them and how their practices can inform mapping the possibilities and limits of multispecies ethnography.

In my research, one type of claim is frequently repeated: plants begin growing near the home of a person who needs their healing properties. Various herbalists observe specific species of herbs suddenly appearing around their homes—species new to the place and with healing properties relevant to the herbalist’s health problem. Herbalists regard this situation as plants offering their medicinal power to humans. In this paper, I consider these everyday encounters as a prompt to develop discussion of intentionality beyond anthropocentric categories.

Building on multispecies ethnography of human–plant entanglements (e.g., Myers, 2018; Hartigan, 2018; Shepard, 2022), I ask: What can multispecies ethnography learn from mundane herbalism when examining plants’ intentionality? This paper analyzes the “art of noticing” (Tsing, 2015) practiced by herbalists and conceptualizes their attention to plant growth as recognition of “body intentionality” (Kim, 2020). Herbalists value plants without reducing vegetal life to mechanical movements and acknowledge that plant bodies are capable of intentions even without consciousness comparable to the human mind.

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Taking dogs seriously as eaters, this paper reflects on visual methods used to study human-dog feeding relations. It explores methodological and ethical tensions in visibilising non-human experiences and contributes to STS debates on the limits of multispecies research.

Paper long abstract

In many approaches to studying food and consumption, eating is implicitly framed as a human activity, while non-human animals appear primarily as the ‘eaten’. Yet around one billion companion animals worldwide, along with numerous other domesticated species, also eat. Viewing dogs as eaters raises broader questions for science and technology studies (STS) about how non-human actors can be meaningfully included in social research.

Drawing on research exploring human-dog feeding relations through visual food diaries and qualitative interviews, this paper reflects on methodological attempts to visibilise dogs within the research process. Visual methods, in particular, were used to decentre the human and create analytical space for canine experiences of eating. Yet these efforts exposed persistent tensions in the practice of more-than-human research, given that dogs’ experiences remained mediated through human participants and interpretation. First, a methodological tension emerged between increasing canine visibility and achieving meaningful inclusion. Second, an ethical tension arose between involving dogs in research and the risk that such inclusion may reproduce human-animal power relations through practices of observation, representation, or inconvenience.

Rather than resolving these tensions, the paper treats them as generative sites for reflecting on the limits and possibilities of including non-human animals in social inquiry. By critically examining the attempt to centre dogs as eaters, the paper contributes to STS debates about the methodological and ethical challenges of multispecies research, particularly around how, and whether, non-human experiences can be understood within human-led research practices.

Keywords: dogs, more-than-human, visual methods, food, inclusion

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Synthetic biology destabilizes the category of the non-human by producing living technical objects: organisms dependent on human sociotechnical networks. Drawing on ethnography in biotechnology labs, this paper proposes the notion of anthropogenic creatures to rethink the human/non-human divide.

Paper long abstract

The category of the non-human and its conceptual offshoots have become central to the study of science and technology. Developments in synthetic biology, however, unsettle the stability of this category by producing organisms whose existence depends on human sociotechnical arrangements. To reconsider the onto-epistemological divide between humans and non-humans, this paper introduces the notion of anthropogenic creatures: beings that retain a degree of autonomy while emerging entirely from human practices.

Based on ethnographic research on human–nonhuman entanglements in synthetic biology laboratories, as well as interviews with researchers, this paper examines how fungi, bacteria, and insects designed to serve economic goals emerge as living technical objects. Supplementing established STS concepts such as black-boxing and punctualization (Callon 1991; Law 1992) with Simondon’s analysis of individuation (1958), Badiou’s notion of count-as-one (1988), and Landecker’s attention to anthropogenic biology (2025), this paper approaches biotechnology as a platform for the production of beings that lie neither inside nor outside the conventional boundaries of humanity.

Anthropogenic creatures’ continued existence depends on chains of interdependence linking organisms, environments, technical infrastructures, and labor. Their production unfolds through shifting units of attention and care, as genes, organisms, and populations are successively stabilized as singular entities within experimental practice. The resulting account complicates the distinctions such as autonomy and dependence, naturalness and fabrication, by showing how non-humans can be human fabrications without being reducible to artifacts. The human/non-human divide appears less as a given ontological boundary than as the outcome of situated operations through which beings are counted and differentiated.

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Using the case of tissue-based biohybrid robots, we identify three key features of these more-than-human entities - interrupted co-evolution, distributed yet minimal agency, and biocentric bias - and argue for a gradual, context-sensitive ethics.

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In this paper, we draw attention to a new class of more-than-humans: Litbea, or life-in-the-border-entities (Gómez-Márquez, 2024) - borderline forms of life created, stabilised and interpreted at the intersection of the biological, the engineering and the computational. This category includes artificial cells and genomes, chimeras, xenobots, brain organoids, and biohybrid robots. Our analysis focuses on tissue-based biohybrid robotics, which we have studied over the past two years as part of the Biohybrid Futures project at the University of Southampton through expert interviews and participatory workshops with researchers and stakeholders.

We show why biohybrid robots matter for more-than-human studies, especially posthumanist biopolitics. Unlike more familiar nonhuman actors in STS, such as dogs, bacteria or fungi, tissue-based robots present a distinctive ontological and ethical challenge. We identify three key features. First, they have a partial or interrupted co-evolutionary status. Their living components have an evolutionary history, but in engineering experiments they are extracted from ordinary life cycles and placed in controlled laboratory environments. These robots do not reproduce or evolve autonomously; instead, they exist as temporary assemblages sustained through human intervention. Second, their agency is distributed yet minimal. Their behaviour emerges as an effect of the laboratory assemblage, while remaining tightly constrained by experimental design, short life spans, and the disposable character of most specimens. Third, interpretation of these entities remains strongly biocentric. Debates about their ontology and ethics repeatedly collapse into the question of life. We therefore argue for a gradual, context-sensitive ethics better suited to such unstable more-than-human entities.

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This paper argues that more-than-human research requires transforming the researcher, not representing nonhumans. Drawing on ekosophy, it proposes that "including" nonhumans fails because it leaves intact the very separation it seeks to overcome. The question is how we know, not what.

Paper long abstract

More-than-human research faces a paradox: we cannot "include" nonhumans without the human interpreter remaining central. This paper argues that this impasse stems from treating relational ontologies as content to be applied rather than processes requiring transformation of the researcher themselves.

Drawing on ekosophy - wisdom for living within the whole of life while becoming oneself as part of it - I propose that the methodological challenge is that relational philosophies cannot simply be transplanted into conventional research frameworks. Just as plants require appropriate soil, relational methodologies demand what I call existential transformation - changes in our ways of knowing, being, and acting, not merely new conceptual vocabularies.

The paper develops two interventions. First, taking seriously the 4E mind (extended, embodied, enacted, embedded) dissolves the interpreter problem: if cognition is already distributed across bodies, tools, and environments, then research is always already more-than-human. The question shifts from "how do we include nonhumans?" to "how do we acknowledge entanglements already operative?"

Second, I argue for practice-based methodologies - what I term "PhilosophyGyms" - where researchers engage in structured exercises that attune them differently rather than extract knowledge about others. This shifts inquiry from representation to response-ability.

The "more" in more-than-human may require researchers to become differently constituted - changed by their entanglements rather than reporting on them.

keywords: relational turn, inner transformation, relational ontologies, metacrisis, polycrisis

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Following Tanymecus dilaticollis across three sites, the paper shows how the weevil's affinity for monocultures exposes the political and scientific work required to maintain the stability of the agro-industrial model and the symmetrical toxicity it imposes on humans and pests alike.

Paper long abstract

Much more-than-human scholarship seeks to articulate forms of symmetry between human and non-human actors through ontological or methodological commitments. This paper proposes a reverse path and shows how the agro-industrial complex produces a material, toxic symmetry through the effects of its own logic. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a village from the Romanian Danube Plain, the paper follows Tanymecus dilaticollis, the grey corn weevil, not as a subject to be given voice, but as a situational force that persistently breaks the frames through which industrial agriculture organises itself. The relational traces of the weevil are read across three heterogeneous sites: in the damaged bodies of plants, in farmers’ narratives, and in techno-scientific entomological work. At each site, Tanymecus enacts a different disruption, in which different actors struggle to reframe what is happening, culminating in a situation in which Romania is simultaneously facing EU infringement proceedings for unauthorised neonicotinoid use and struggling to legitimise further derogations. Tanymecus’s affinity for monocultures exposes the political and scientific work required to stabilise the current agro-industrial model. At the same time, the use of pesticides puts humans, in terms of effects, in the same boat as non-human pests. This raises a challenging question that has been less addressed: what if the non-human already acts as a human ally, not through ontological symmetry, but through the material consequences it imposes on the systems that pursue it? In other words, is Tanymecus an enemy of the agro-industrial complex or its most effective internal critic?

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True symmetry between humans and nonhumans cannot be built through collaborative patchwork. It requires a new research culture with dual training across the life and social sciences to create an epistemological/methodological lingua franca. Examples are based on fieldwork and the dual program PARP.

Paper long abstract

Multispecies approaches call for rethinking social research by including nonhuman actors. Yet, human participants remain the primary interpretive instrument regarding nonhumans. Based on long-term etho-ethnographic fieldwork with “the last talking apes” and the pedagogical experience of the newly founded Primate Anthrozoology Research Program (PARP), I argue that true symmetry between humans and nonhumans cannot be built through collaborative patchwork. It requires a new research culture with dual training across the life and social sciences. The social scientist must learn the methods that make nonhuman animals’ actions legible—acquiring enough life-sciences literacy to see, hear, and question what animals are already saying—not to eliminate disciplines, but to create an epistemological and methodological lingua franca spoken with different accents across fields. By keeping the life sciences at arm’s length, we fail to address concerns such as nonhuman politics, personhood, nature-cultures, and symbol use, leaving these questions largely to the life sciences to address empirically on their own (while not fully equipped with the conceptual apparatus required). We need more social scientists willing to meddle in the mud of numbers, experimental designs, field experiments, microanalysis of gestural communication, bioacoustics, eye-tracking technologies, artificial intelligence software…not to analyze discourse about these resources but to employ them in ethnographic work, adapting them and creating new methods when necessary. Do we need symmetry? As we face an unprecedented extinction crisis, who among us would not want to help lead the effort to fathom what animals think of us—and of the world we are leaving behind?