Paper Short Abstract:

In this presentation, the “fog” is positioned in the central role of ethnographic research. This study examines the influence of fog on the culture of communal living, relations of production, the bonds established between animals and plants, and its role in guiding the ethnographer's perspective.

Paper Abstract:

For an extended period, ethnographers have presented the world through a limited and hegemonic framework that centers on human beings. However, humans have been able to create distinctive cultures through entangled relationships with non-human others in their environments. Multispecies ethnography invites the consideration of all natural actors as stakeholders in our research. The inclusion of non-human beings in research while observing the flow of everyday life offers diverse and creative methodological approaches. However, research with animals, plants, fungi, microbes, and other natural actors presents unpredictable situations, challenges, and obstacles.

In this presentation, the “fog” is positioned in the central role of ethnographic research. This study examines the influence of fog on the culture of communal living, relations of production, the bonds established between animals and plants, and its role in guiding the ethnographer's perspective. These investigations are based on ethnographic observations and examinations conducted as part of ethnographic research in the high plateaus of Artvin Province in northeast Turkey during the previous summer. The ethnographer's camera is not only a record of existing phenomena, but also an indicator of how the researcher perceives the world. In this presentation, the play between fog and a camera is proposed as an experimental way of doing research and writing with non-human others.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines human-mountain relationships in the Swiss Alps through interconnected assemblages of ice, grass, and herds. Using fieldwork and a sensory bricolage methodology, it explores how multi-species entanglements craft vibrant mountain worlds shaped by climate change and global interconnections.

Paper Abstract:

This presentation rethinks human-mountain relationships in the Swiss Alps through three interconnected and dynamic assemblages: ice, grass, and herds. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork projects and a multi-sensory bricolage methodology, it explores how glaciers, grasslands, and livestock are co-created through entangled ecological, cultural, and economic processes. Moving beyond human-centered perspectives, it engages with the active participation of more-than-human entities in shaping mountain environments.

Glaciers, with their cold, textured surfaces, invite touch and evoke intimate connections while vividly reminding us of global warming’s impact, as their retreat disrupts water cycles essential to alpine ecosystems. Grasslands, maintained by grazing, offer fresh fragrances and sweeping views, connecting humans to these ecosystems and their role in maintaining soil vitality. Herds of cows and sheep bring rhythm to the landscape—the steady sound of cowbells and earthy scents of livestock connect humans to pastoral practices while supporting ecological and economic systems. Grazing animals transform water and grass into milk, meat, and manure, tying local pastures to global markets through branded products like cheese and chocolate. Human actions—including grazing practices, the use of fertilizers, and feed supplements—intersect with demands for idyllic landscapes driven by tourism. These dynamics influence the balance of these assemblages, sometimes supporting stability, but also risking disruption and ecological fragility.

This paper unwrites with non-human others by foregrounding bricolage and sensory methodologies to explore these assemblages. It examines how multi-species entanglements challenge conventional methods and narratives, offering fresh perspectives on vibrant mountain worlds and their global interconnections.

Paper Short Abstract:

How does one create a written account of sensory experiences in collaboration with multiple species whom one cannot control? Reflecting on our collective fluency in microbes and watery creatures, our paper offers insights about the messiness of being in relation with the worlds we study and shape.

Paper Abstract:

The novelist Zadie Smith disagrees with the idea that writing is creative. This word doesn’t strike her as right. In contrast, she considers gardening creative. Although she admits to never having planted a tulip bulb, at least not yet, to do so “is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation.” Writing, in other words, is not about creation or even creativity. “Writing is control,” she argues. “The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department” (2020, 5). In response, our contribution to SIEF 2025 examines the relationship between creation, control, and collaboration to consider what Smith’s claim implies for understandings and practices of “unwriting”—specifically in the context of ethnographic encounters with other lively beings.

In dialogue with the panel’s exploration of more-than-human worlds, we focus our attention on a term that often performs as its synonym—multispecies—and the productive tensions between control and care, sensing and species, writing and worlds. With attention to sensory and pluralistic experience, we ask: how does one create a written account of multisensory encounters in collaboration with species whom one cannot control? Reflecting on writing and its intimate (yet often awkward) relationship with sensing and in tandem with our collective fluency in microbes and watery creatures, we offer insights about writing about the messiness of being in relation with the worlds we study and shape.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines eco-semiotics as a bridge between science, art, and Indigenous knowledge, combining the perspectives of a soil scientist, a bio-artist, and a researcher in traditional ecological knowledge. By exploring (un)written methodologies, such as hearing, tasting, intuition, and feeling.

Paper Abstract:

With the Enlightenment era of individualism and scientific reason, humans made significant leaps toward understanding the surrounding environment and ecosystems we inhabit. Yet, this pursuit of reason also propelled us into human-centric and ego-centric narratives, which lie at the heart of Eurocentric science and ontology. Before Westernised science, there were magic, alchemy, and Indigenous knowledge. These systems were rooted in (un)written epistemologies, empirical and spiritual ways of knowing passed down through generations. One such example is traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), which relies on eco-semiotics, the study of the signs and meaning-making processes that connect humans, more-than-humans, and ecosystems across time and cultures.

In the current era of climate breakdown, melting glaciers, shifting streams, and the rapid loss of biodiversity brought on by human activity, it is imperative to turn back to these (un)written knowledge systems to re-learn and adapt practices that preserve the diversity of life. Eco-semiotics offers a framework for understanding the interconnections between nature-made symbols and their communicative meanings in cultural and ecological contexts. This paper explores how eco-semiotics emerges across rational sciences, artistic research, and Indigenous knowledge, through the combined perspectives of a soil scientist, a bio-artist, and a researcher of Indigenous knowledge. Grounded in their distinct yet interconnected practices, the authors examine their shared connection with the more-than-human world through their work. By employing (un)written methodologies of knowledge gathering, such as observing, tasting, hearing, intuition, and feeling, they uncover pathways to preserve and use Indigenous knowledge while fostering new insights for sustainable biodiversity conservation.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper offers a glimpse into the contested spaces in and between San Francisco’s sidewalk gardens. Tracing how their human and vegetal inhabitants chart new trajectories through these sites, following lines that may be inaccessible or invisible, I advocate for methodologies of not knowing.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the crevices and margins of San Francisco’s sidewalk gardens, this paper engages ‘hostile’ garden architectures and the humans and plants that continually re-map and re-purpose them. Re-charting San Francisco’s garden planters ‘according to their own competencies and rhythms,’ tactical performances enacted by and with plants demand attunement to forms of spatial intervention that flourish in different timescales and terrains– gestating beneath the surface and becoming visible only in dramatic moments of rupture (Barua 2023: 4; Marder 2013: 103). Present one day and absent the next, plant tactics, like all tactics, are ‘fugitive’ and fleeting, ‘contingent’ on brief opportunities, small lapses, and unlikely ‘alliances’ with ‘various human and nonhuman actors that are simultaneously benefited or empowered’ by their presence (Marder 2013: 28; Robbins 2004: 146; De Certeau 1984). Lingering in San Francisco’s transient corridors and alleyways against the grain, sitting alongside planters while sketching their inhabitants, I gradually learn to spot these tactical interventions which so often leave only subtle impressions that haunt these sites in their wake. Thriving in ‘darkness and obscurity’, partially concealed beneath the soil, plant tactics call for approaches that similarly accept ambiguity and mystery– demanding methodologies of not knowing (Marder 2013: 30). Choosing to study and depict plants without uprooting them to reveal that which remains hidden in the subterrene, both in the literal and figurative sense, this paper draws on anthropologies ‘of ignorance’ as an ethical framework for engaging plants without capturing or confining them (Mair, Kelly & High 2012).

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper discusses the role of listening to locate whales in tourist settings in the Norwegian Arctic. It explores not only what kinds of human-whale relations the hydrophone affords, but also the poetics of sound and silence, absence and presence that define this mode of sensory engagement.

Paper Abstract:

This paper attempts to account for the sonic component of human-whale relations during whale watching tours and discusses some issues raised in this process. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork across two summers, carried out in the Norwegian Arctic town of Andenes. During whale watching tours, an underwater microphone called a hydrophone is lowered into the water and used to locate, with a fair degree of accuracy, the sperm whales emitting clicking noises below. I will first explain how this process works, before discussing the history of how the hydrophone came to be so vital to both scientific research and tourism in Andenes. I am interested in how listening to – or perhaps more accurately, eavesdropping on – whales remoulds expectations of what a tour can be, precipitating a shift from sight to sound. By telling fieldwork stories, I explore not only the different kinds of human-whale relations that the hydrophone affords, but also the poetics of sound and silence, absence and presence that define this mode of sensory engagement. Finally, I will discuss how listening to whales as a method in ethnographic research opens up the listener conceptually and practically to not only whale sounds, but also to other, less welcome sounds in the form of underwater noise pollution, which is known to be a worsening problem for cetaceans.

Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores the possibility and potential of two methods in linguistic anthropology—language socialization and multimodality—to understand human-elephant co-socialization in Kerala, India.

Paper Abstract:

Asian elephants have been integral to social life in India for centuries—in wars, heavy labor, temple rituals, and as status symbols. Unlike most other animals that live and work with humans however, elephants are not biologically domesticated. Rather, they are wild animals, captured and socially tamed to co-habit with people. In the south Indian state of Kerala, this process is understood to transform forest elephants (kattana) into a ‘Kerala elephant’ – nadan aana, signifying something or someone native to Kerala. Here, not only are elephants socialized to become Kerala elephants, but handlers are socialized to become elephant-people (aanakar).

I examine these co-socialization interactions, where humans and elephants learn to navigate the uncertainties of interspecies field and attune to each other through multiple modes including speech, touch, gesture, gaze, voice modulation, and body posture. The paper draws on two methods—language socialization and multimodality—to explore their possibility and potential in understanding human-elephant co-socialization. Language socialization studies how human individuals come to acquire local subjectivity through everyday communication (Kulick and Schieffelin 2004). The multimodal turn (Stivers and Sidnell 2005) that attends to more-than-verbal forms of communication (such as posture, gesture, gaze, voice modulation) make this approach well-fitting to examine interspecies socialization.

Paper Short Abstract:

In my recent ethnographic research on the Viennese horse-drawn carriage industry, I wanted to give equal attention to the agency of the horses and thus challange the way animals are part of anthropological research. This led me to use visual methods that enabled me to explore how horses likely perceive and navigate Viennese urban environments and how humans and horses co-create their interspecies working relationships.

Paper Abstract:

The title of my presentation highlights the role of horses in Vienna's urban environment, explored through multispecies studies, sensory anthropology, and (French) ethnozoology. Inspired by Philippe Descola’s challenge to anthropocentrism, my research examines interspecies relationships between horses and coachmen in Vienna's horse-drawn carriage industry, focusing on recognizing horses’ agency and subjectivity.

Initially, I used observational methods, filming with a handheld camera in the city center. However, I realized this approach marginalized the horses, failing to capture them as active participants. To address this, I turned to sensory anthropology, experimenting with technologies like the GoPro, attaching it to the horses to film from their perspective. This shift allowed me to better explore their sensory experiences and agency.

This approach was not without challenges, as camera placement often required negotiation with the horses, sometimes causing discomfort. These moments underscored the complexities of fieldwork with non-human participants but also revealed the potential for collaborative, interspecies research.

Through this presentation, I demonstrate how technologies like cameras can enhance our engagement with animals and inspire innovative ways of representing their agency. By focusing on body language and sound, these visual methods move beyond traditional, human-centric storytelling, fostering experimental collaboration between researcher, coachmen, and horses. This approach offers new perspectives on interspecies relationships and their representation in (visual) anthropology.

Paper Short Abstract:

Multispecies anthropology offers the promise of new understandings of human relations with other creatures. But what kinds of knowledge can anthropological research provide about these relations? This paper considers how practices such as birding could create distinctly anthropological knowledge of other creatures that augments less direct or scientific approaches.

Paper Abstract:

The multispecies turn in anthropology emerged from many inspirations but a central element was the promise of generating new understandings of human relations with other species that avoided cutting those relations in two, with humans in society and other creatures in nature. These beings would no longer be explained in terms of what people made of them, either materially or conceptually, but could be researched as active, lively agents that affected and responded to humans. But several years on from the turn, the question lingers as to what exactly anthropologists can really know about other creatures and by what means. Are anthropologists still left relying on the knowledge of other humans, from indigenous peoples to scientists, or can they develop new knowledge of other creatures more directly?

This question has troubled my own work, which has sometimes been rooted in traditional anthropological approaches, such as interpreting the meanings people give to their relations with other species. While this approach has value, in this paper I will examine how more direct multispecies practices can generate new insights that arise from observation and participation in multispecies lifeworlds. I use the example of my own birding practice to examine the sort of knowledge this generates and how it intersects with and augments other ways of knowing birds. I argue that birding produces knowledge that is both post- and pre-scientific in that it both draws on and anticipates scientific research, as well as being embedded in familiarity with environments that are shared with birds.

Paper Short Abstract:

In this paper I analyze the cultural aspects of palliative care for pets, focusing on social narratives on their dying and death. I propose the concept of „empathetic pathographies” and discuss different aspects of building anthropological knowledge about companion animals experience of illness and dying.

Paper Abstract:

This paper, based on ethnographic research among companion animals caregivers, analyzes the cultural aspects of palliative care for pets, with particular emphasis on social narratives on their dying and death. It presents multispecies ethnography perspective, which involves extending the field of interest of anthropology to animals, understood as social actors, and their inclusion in the research process.

Disease, aging, physical suffering and death are natural elements of life, common to both human and non-human animals. However, animals’ dying is an experience to which humans, due to their limited ability to communicate with them, have limited access. This condition creates both ethical and methodological problems. Animal suffering is an experience that cannot be directly expressed or can be distorted by language; before it reaches human consciousness, it must overcome a number of "filters", including cultural ones. This fact, however, leads us to the methodological question: are we, and if so, to what extent, able to present the subjective reality of the animal, or can we only reach social interpretations of their experience (e.g. caregivers’ view)?

Therefore, I propose concepts of „empathetic pathographies” and „reading disease” understood as caregivers’ narratives and methods to learn about companion animals' experience of illness and death. I argue that the knowledge derived from empathetic pathographies arises within the framework of human-animal relationships, based largely on the social perspective of caregivers, which allows us for partial insight into the animal's experience itself.

Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on a long-term individual and collective ethnographic engagement with plants, this paper presents phyto-anthropological research as a method for transdisciplinary knowledge production and inquires into the practicalities of undoing and rewriting ethnographies with plants. 

Paper Abstract:

There seems to be agreement that ethnographies of more-than-human worlds require breaking down disciplinary boundaries (Tsing, 2010), but the practicalities of transdisciplinary approaches remain ambiguous. In relation to ethnography, concepts such as the 'mode of wonder' (Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013) or the 'arts of noticing' (Tsing 2015) speak to our imaginations but tell us little about research methods and strategies. Drawing on a long-term individual and collective ethnographic engagement with plants in Istanbul (Turkey) and Gdańsk (Poland), this paper introduces what we call “phyto-anthropological” inquiry as a method for transdisciplinary knowledge production. By focusing on the process of developing research methods within an interdisciplinary team, this paper brings to light the practicalities of research, with its muddiness, ambiguity and unpredictability.

The paper unfolds as follows. First, it presents the process by which research methods were developed within an interdisciplinary team and through plant-human affective encounters. Second, it explores limitations and potentials of transdisciplinary approaches. Third, it addresses the questions of more-than-human agency, representation and genre, and inquires into the practicalities of undoing and rewriting ethnographies with plants.

Paper Short Abstract:

'Estuary / Artery' is a written ethnography and multimedia documentary combining a meshwork of data collected walking along the Thames estuary. Using mapping and sensory methods, the landscape is explored through and beyond the voices of its human and more-than-human 'dwellers'.

Paper Abstract:

'Estuary / Artery' is a written thesis and experimental ethnographic documentary accumulated over 3 months of fieldwork walking the Thames estuary. Combining a meshwork of audiovisual data collection, this thesis approaches the ethnographic fieldsite of the estuary as produced through and beyond the socio-cultural and ecological imaginaries of its 'dwellers'. Rooted in embodied and theoretical reference to the site's spatial configurations as urban edgelands, this thesis reflects on the physical and virtual experience of moving through an in-between landscape - discussing how the estuary has been produced as a speculative frontier for redevelopment and the growing impact of climate change. Delving into the fieldwork process using mapping and sensory methodologies, ethnographic encounters with humans and non-humans along the estuary are discussed with close reference to the film. Considering the estuary as an 'urban wasteland' and ecological brownfield site, the potentiality of sensory attunement - with an emphasis on sound - is explored, asking how embodied practices can be utilised to bring us closer to imagining multi-species entanglement on this planet in late capitalism.

Paper Short Abstract:

Toxoplasmosis gondii is a single-celled parasite infecting the brains of nearly 30% of all people in the world today, and it influences how people--and many other mammals-- think, and behave. This talk will explore its influence on culture, and toxoplasmotics as a inter-special folk group.

Paper Abstract:

Nearly 30% of all people in the world live with a single-celled protozoan parasite in their brain called toxoplasma gondii. Domestic cats (in which the parasite spreads sexually, rather than neurologically) are the main vectors of this infection, and evolutionarily speaking, the primary target appears to be rodents. Rodents infected with the parasite tend to be more risk-taking… which tends to provide more meals for cats.

But humans are also very susceptible, and, as in rodents, infected humans tend to display more risk-taking behaviors. Toxoplasmosis has been linked with entrepreneurship, promiscuity, and various sorts of risk-taking ventures in humans. It has even been linked with trends in political beliefs, and physical attractiveness.

The risk-taking behavior engendered by toxoplasmosis produces villains, fools, heroes, and geniuses…all of which are staples in folklore. Toxoplasmosis has profound effects on human behavior, and hence of the wider “human” culture as well. Along with other recent findings (e.g. the influence of the gut microbiome on human thought), the recognition of the role of toxoplasma gondii helps locate human thought, agency, and culture as part of the vast network of life on earth. Further, the group of toxoplasmotics, those who tend to live on the edge, is not confined to the human, but includes several other species as well.

This talk will explore recent findings from medical research on toxoplasmosis, along with implications ranging from the historical to the philosophical in helping to understand toxoplasmosis as an agent and factor in human, and more-than-human, culture.

Paper Short Abstract:

The key questions of this paper are: What lessons can we learn about multispecies relations from skyr-making and about how such relations have been cultivated over time? And, how can the multispecies practices inherent in the making of skyr deepen our understanding of biocultural heritage?

Paper Abstract:

The focus of the proposed paper is a traditional Icelandic food item: the fermented dairy product skyr. Skyr is produced by fermentation, through which live microbial cultures curdle skim milk. In the past, differences in microbial cultures, production methods and equipment meant that the taste and texture of skyr varied between regions and households, taking local flavor from the microbiomes of the farm, the dairy, the containers, the animals, and the humans involved in making it. The past 50-100 years, however, have seen the steady depletion of this biocultural diversity.

Traditional fermentation methods and their products are prime examples of biocultural heritage, ecosystems that are the result of long-term biological and social relationships between humans, other animals, plants, soils, and microbes. Skyr might thus also be defined as an ecosystem created and sustained by relations between Streptococcus and Lactobacillus bacteria, various yeast species, mammals such as cows, sheep, or goats, their pastures and soils, as well as the humans who tend to them and eat them.

Fermentation is a collaborative task undertaken by these collectives but may also be seen as a form of communication between multiple species, one that involves not only sight and sound but also (and even more so) smell, taste, touch, and thermoception (the sense of heat). The proposed paper will bring an ethnological approach to skyr as biocultural heritage, using sensory ethnography and archival research to understand fermentation as multispecies communication between the human and non-human actors involved in making skyr.

Paper Short Abstract:

In this presentation, we examine how a sensory ethnography-based creative invention, affect cards, can be used to investigate university students’ affective experiences in multi-species encounters. Empirically, we focus on the case of Hamina walrus who ended up on the coast of Southern Finland in July 2022.

Paper Abstract:

In this presentation, we examine how a sensory ethnography-based creative invention, affect cards, can be used to investigate affective experiences and their cultural meanings in multi-species encounters. Empirically, we focus on the case of Hamina walrus who ended up on the coast of Southern Finland in July 2022. Walruses are not part of Finnish fauna; their natural habitats are in the arctic and sub-arctic regions. The Hamina walrus was an “exotic guest”, an outsider who got enormous media attention. Unfortunately, the walrus died due to weakness and starvation when vets tried to move it to the animal hospital. The taxidermist walrus ended up in the Finnish Museum of Natural History, Helsinki. In our presentation, we focus on the affective relations and cultural meanings that the case of walrus illustrated. The methodological contribution of our presentation relates to the use of affect cards in a pedagogical intervention with university students. Affective, embodied sensory information is often difficult to recognise, articulate and access, and we argue that the affect cards helped to verbalise affects and emotions in multispecies relationships, and provided ways to think about wider societal processes, as well as students’ own academic expertise and knowledge-making practices. These all are important parts of transformative learning through which thinking otherwise is possible to attain. However, affect cards is not a fixed method, but more like a tool toward engagement with creative ways of co-responding with the world and to think of how we know what we know (Laplante, Scopie, Gandsman 2020, 1-3).