Wild Pedagogies for Doing Multispecies Organizational Ethnography

Abstract

Abstract Teaching and researching multispecies organizational ethnography needs a pedagogy that decentres the human animal and has a basic multisensorial approach to sensemaking in organizations, in order to try to do (more) justice to nonhuman sentience, animals, and plants, that is to be included in the research. A wild pedagogy claims that getting outdoors, and specifically avoiding lecture halls and other indoor spaces, raises awareness and skills in people for understanding multispecies and multisensorial realities, not only in organizations, but also elsewhere. For inspiration in developing such a wild pedagogy further, the authors turn to the San in Southern Africa, one of the oldest human inhabitants on earth, whose animated worldview and cosmologies have always included nonhuman sentience in animals (and plants), in non-hierarchical ways next to humans. Their environmentalist and contextualized understanding of the sense-making processes of nonhuman animals is based, amongst other things, on their renowned and critically acknowledged tracking skills. Tracking is a combination of finding and interpreting spoor, a reiterative combination and cycle of ‘Observation’, ‘Becoming with’, and ‘Reflexivity’ (OBR), that could inspire and guide teaching and researching multispecies organizational ethnography. The chapter includes teaching experiments with a wild pedagogy in a course entitled ‘Sensemaking in Organisations’ that explores possible wild ways further.