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.