Short Abstract:

This panel explores the ways of doing research and (un)writing with non-human others: animals, microbes, fungi, and plants. It concerns ethnographies with and without methods and invites reflections on the paths leading to methodological choices.

Long Abstract:

This panel concerns ethnographies in/of more-than-human worlds and explores the ways of doing research and (un)writing with non-human others: animals, microbes, fungi, and plants. The aim of the panel is twofold. First, to contribute to the ongoing discussion about “methods”: the call to abandon them in favor of creative, open-ended, and collaborative engagement with the world (Laplante, Scobie & Gandsman, 2020), moves toward sensory anthropology (Howes, 2022), and the premises of transdisciplinary collaborations, experiments, and artistic interventions. If conducting fieldwork with non-human others is possible, what would this mean for anthropologists entangled in interspecies politics and hierarchies? We invite papers that focus on “know-hows”: practicalities, strategies, choices as well as unpredictabilities and ambivalences of doing research with animals, plants, fungi and microbes. The aim is to open a discussion between those who think with methods, and those who choose to think without them, and to contextualize such choices within ethnographies of ethnographic inquiry.

Secondly, the panel aims to explore the ways of (un)writing with non-human others that would illuminate multi-species entanglements, and accentuate non-human subjectivities and agencies, while remaining understandable and approachable for wider audiences. We invite papers or other creative interventions that explore collaborative modes of knowledge production, possibilities for multi-species engagement and communication, premises and limitations of technologies and mediators in research and (un)writing, as well as the questions of response-ability, ethics, and care.

We invite reflections on the paths leading to the selection of particular methods, or their abandonment, both in research as well as in (un)writing.

This Panel has so far received 8 paper proposal(s).
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