Critical posthuman ethnography: grappling with human-more-than-human interconnection for critical public health

Abstract

ABSTRACT To address the intertwined health issues of our time, from climate change to colonialism, from mass extinction to mass consumption, this commentary argues that critical public health must grapple with relationality onto-epistemologically. In it, I offer the provocation that entangling ethnography, both as method and methodology, with critical posthumanism can offer the potential to hold the tensions, nuances and multiplicities needed to account for human-more-than-human relationality as multiple inputs of data. This argument is made in three parts: first, via a discussion of relationality within public health; second, by means of a cartography of critical posthumanism; and third, with a discussion of how a critical posthuman ethnography might disrupt anthropocentric approaches to health. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of, and potential for, critical posthuman ethnography in public health research. In summary, critical posthuman ethnography provides one way of methodologically approaching some of the intertwined health issues of our time.