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).