Short Abstract:

For this panel, we invite contributions that engage with multispecies collaborations and critically address their ethical, practical, methodological, and theoretical challenges as well as potentialities for the production of knowledge through multimodal anthropological approaches.

Long Abstract:

For this panel, we invite contributions that engage with multispecies collaborations and critically address their challenges and potentialities for multimodal anthropological approaches.

Collaboration is a contested term in anthropology. What it means to do collaborative ethnographic work raises practical and methodological questions about conducting fieldwork and it also sheds light on ethical problems and the historically colonial asymmetrical power relations of anthropological knowledge production. Although much has been written about the difficulties and benefits of collaborative ethnographic work, there is still much to be explored when it comes to collaborations between humans and more-than-humans in anthropological research and the particular questions it poses. Therefore, we are interested in exploring the specific challenges and potentialities that arise from multispecies and more-than-human collaborations in the production of multimodal anthropological knowledge (Henare et al. 2006, Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009, van Dooren et al. 2016, Ingold 2017, Tsing 2017, Woodward 2019, Latour & Weibel 2020).

Considering that these unexpected collaborations demand equally unexpected and creative methodological engagements, we are looking for presentations that speak to questions such as: How can more-than-human collaborations enrich anthropological knowledge? What are the ethical, practical, methodological, and theoretical challenges of collaborations that de-center the human? How can multimodal approaches help or hinder these collaborations? How can more-than-human agencies help us challenge the dominance of vision and the hierarchy of the senses in knowledge production? What are the different kinds of affectivities, sensorialities, and corporealities when collaborating cross-species through multimodal approaches?

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