Multispecies Relations Research Articles

Children, common bracken and cows at work: re-considering work in multispecies relations through childhood memories

ABSTRACT Drawing on Tim Ingold’s conceptualization of taskscape, this article explores children´s being and working within the landscape through childhood memories and walking ethnography. It examines situated relationships among children, common bracken and cows as they jointly inhabited and shaped steljniki – specific patches of land in South Eastern Slovenia. In contrast to conventional perspectives that narrowly frame children’s work as either an economic necessity or an educational endeavour, our emphasis is on the symmetrical unfolding of work in the multispecies collaboration of children, common bracken and cows in shaping the landscape in keeping with the seasons, natural rhythms, topography, soil composition and temporality. Situated in the context of the subsistence agriculture of extensive farming, where children have actively participated in work for generations, our study reimagines work within multispecies relationality. This conceptual shift responds to the imperative of challenging prevailing paradigms governing the relationship between young people and the environment.

Riotous methodological and methodointuitive reflections on (non)religion, spirituality and the multispecies turn

The ‘multispecies turn’ in the social sciences and humanities is informing many disciplines including animal studies, anthropology, Indigenous studies and, more recently, sociology of religion. Scholars working on multispecies relations employ various methods and methodologies, many of which are challenging modern, Western, Christian paradigms and practices that are anthropocentric and focus on logos/words/texts/beliefs. This discussion examines new and multiple ways of conducting multispecies focused research, that is critical, reflexive, embodied, affective and intuitive. It begins with an overview of the methods applied by notable scholars – Kimmerer, Tsing and Beaman – researching multispecies relations, and then includes four personal ‘riotous’ reflections by this article’s co-authors, on their own positionality and experiences of conducting such research. The discussion concludes by identifying key challenges in research on diverse worldviews and multispecies relations, and aims to generate creative and scientific responses to further decenter anthropocentrism in academia.

Qualitative methods in psychology after the animal turn: human-animal and multi-species relations

ABSTRACT This article makes the case for the value of qualitative methods in advancing our understanding of human-animal relations and multispecies relations in psychology, introducing the first special issue of a journal dedicated to qualitative psychology and the field of human-animal studies. It offers a thematic summary of the articles organized into four sections. Each section includes a reflection on the methods adopted in the context of broader developments in human-animal studies. To do so, Gorman’s conceptualisation of mutualistic, parasitic, mutualist and commensal relations is utilised, as a basis for deciding whether the methods adopted allow us to consider ‘who benefits and how’ from the human-animal and multispecies relationships scrutinised in this issue. Particularly in showcasing qualitative methods that centre the experience and agency of animals where they have traditionally been discounted, it is concluded that this special issue constitutes a significant moment in the development of psychology as a discipline.

The making, unmaking and adaptation of Mayeyi multispecies entanglements within the Kwando-Linyanti wetlands: eighteenth century to 1990

The Kwando-Linyanti wetlands of Namibia are known for their rivers, floodplains and woodlands with abundant wildlife and a diversity of birds and fish. Within these landscapes reside the Mayeyi, a Bantu-speaking people whose culture is closely entangled with the wetlands but whose traditional multispecies relations have been irrevocably unmade by colonialism. This unmaking has resulted in the slow, intergenerational extinction of the traditional Mayeyi way of life and the emergence of new species connections and cultural practices. This article draws on Van Dooren’s notion of entanglements to explore these processes of making, unmaking and adaptation of the Mayeyi multispecies relations within the Kwando-Linyanti wetlands. Drawing from a review of literature and archival material together with oral accounts and interviews, the article describes the emergence of the Mayeyi multispecies entanglements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the successive alienation from these entanglements as colonial authorities sought to control the tsetse fly and create conservation landscapes. Against the backdrop of contemporary policies that fail to recognise historical injustices and often continue to marginalise communities living within conservation landscapes, the article highlights the unique multispecies relations and associated culture of the Mayeyi and the ongoing impact of the severance of these relations.

Conclusion: Situating multispecies relations in Southern Africa in their local historical and political contexts

Conclusion: Situating multispecies relations in Southern Africa in their local historical and political contexts

Soil extractivism: Political ontology of soil erasure in the European Union's agricultural politics

This article examines how specific (non-relational) political ontological understandings of soils are incorporated into industrial agricultural politics in the European Union and introduces a complementary contribution to existing literature with the concept of soil extractivism. The concept is used to describe current institutionalized ways of relating to soils and their dynamics of power. Through an integrative literature review, the article links existing research on soils with the development of modern agriculture in Europe. The theoretical contribution of soil extractivism provides a conceptual tool for understanding currently dominant ways of treating soils as a key part of modernity and industrial capitalism as well as part of wider destructions of multispecies relations.

Patchy Anthropocoasts: A transdisciplinary perspective on dunes, plants, rabbits, and humans in the United Kingdom

In recent years, there has been increasing societal awareness of the crucial role that coastal dunes play in protecting against rising sea levels, mitigating climate change impacts, promoting biodiversity, and providing recreational opportunities. In some regions, dune management has been particularly focused on biodiversity and ecosystem restoration and the presence of alien species on dunes raises concerns about how these species become 'native,' 'invasive,' or 'hybrids' and whether they belong in their new ecosystems. These concerns illustrate how certain animals and plants assume different statuses according to normative categories associated with varying objectives. This article explores how perceptions of coastal dunes in the UK have transformed over time, from marginal resource frontiers to highly valued environments shaped by multispecies relations. In addition, this work explores how dunes around the UK emerge as ‘patchy anthropocoasts,’ that is, uneven landscapes designed by human purposes linked to economic activities, conservation, rabbit populations, unwanted vegetation, and the control of unpredictable sand movements. Bringing together diverse historical materials and scientific literature, this article links human and nonhuman histories with present debates on dune restoration from a transdisciplinary perspective rooted in anthropology, environmental history, and the natural sciences.

Feminist political ecologies of agrarian technologies: knowing the digital differently

ABSTRACT As digital technologies become increasingly ubiquitous on farms, we need to reconsider relationships between technology and agriculture. Critical agrarian studies offers some analyses of digital technologies, but rarely engages feminist perspectives, risking the repetition of problematic assumptions about scale, subjectivity and power. We draw from the strengths of feminist political ecology to think through three digital technologies – remote sensing satellites, agricultural advice apps, and automatic milking systems – that are transforming agrarian policy, practice, and social life. In doing so, we expand critical agrarian studies’ approach to the digital by attending to situated knowledges, gendered labor, and emotional, intersectional, multi-species relations.

A Multispecies Caribbean

In an era of deepening social and ecological calamity, artists from Puerto Rico currently address perennial questions of catastrophe in ways that foreground the island archipelago’s multispecies relationships: the dynamic assemblages of human and more-than-human organisms that confront the ongoing depredations of environmental colonialism. This essay takes a first step toward establishing a field of multispecies Caribbean studies by analyzing the work of the contemporary Puerto Rican artist Dhara Rivera. Rivera’s installations critically reimagine multispecies relations by crafting an aesthetics of ecological reinvention that neither hearkens back to a falsely harmonious ecological past nor foretells an entirely apocalyptic planetary future. Caribbean multispecies studies complicate commonplaces of ecocriticism by troubling the neat division between spectacular disaster and slow violence, questioning the mobilization of the assemblage as a straightforward and positive compositional attribute and bringing together environmental justice and environmental humanities scholarship with an eye to a livable present.

Coarticulation: Mutual Transformation in Human and Nonhuman Relations

Abstract: “Representation” and “articulation” are important terms in discussions of multispecies relations. In this article, I propose the term “coarticulation” that describes a process of mutual intelligibility between a human and a nonhuman and of rendering each other capable in new ways. This article argues that the concept of “coarticulation” offers a way to enrich our understanding of our human-nonhuman relations and give ontological consistency to various types of nonhumans that matter to us. It traces the reciprocal imprints that nonhumans and humans make on each other. Not least, it provides an alternative way to think about politics with nonhumans: a politics of cohabitation.

A multispecies cinema of apprehension

This essay theorizes the cinematic experience of apprehension accompanying representations of multispecies relations in the age of global pandemics. Globally synchronous experiences of cascading epidemics in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made spectators aware of the microbes that inhabit ‘us’, the animals that carry ‘them’ and the mediums (water, air, soils) that sustain all these forms of life. In this historical situation, cinematic zoonoses generate fear, anxiety and foreboding alongside creative prehensions of living as multispecies: this is the ‘pandemic viewing condition’. I elaborate the claim in three films – Prateek Vats’s first fiction film Eeb, Allay, Ooo! (2020), Amit Datta’s artistic Saatvin Sair (The Seventh Walk) (2013) and Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes (2023) – that articulate multispecies encounters as spatial experiences. On the one hand, aesthetic compositions of cinematic zoonoses lure spectators into textured cinematic milieus of multispecies encounters, even as the protective cinematic frame provides the comfort of distance; on the other, the historical contingencies of spectatorship induce projections of cinematic surrounds where the multispecies continuum surfaces sensorily, affectively and intuitively. Together the cinematic milieu and cinematic surrounds orient spectators towards their actual living milieu, an unsettling space where neither bodily integrities nor species distinctions hold any longer.

Fledgling Farms and Failing Health: How the Polypore State Transforms the Multispecies Relations in Serbia’s Raspberry Fields

Abstract Extending from an ethnographic case study that demonstrates the existential troubles of Serbian farmers to continue raspberry production for the global market, this article anthropologically hones in on the intertwining of human and non-human labour (production) with socio-economic and techno-scientific policies of care (reproduction). Different waves of state transformation—the build-up and decay of formal employment coupled with the emergence, then exhaustion of the welfare state, its socio-liberal transformation in the early 2000s, followed by its polypore repurposing for illiberal ends since 2012, have led to a zombified hope in the state’s will to care for its population. Skilled and unskilled workers have emigrated to Western labour markets, while the climate crisis gained momentum because of the underfunding of critical infrastructures of value. Adopting a Marxist-Eco-Feminist care perspective, the case study thus embeds seemingly disconnected concerns within wider struggles on the boundaries of the (welfare) state, economy and techno-science.

Multispecies collaboratories: reconfiguring children’s more-than-human entanglement with colonization, urban development and climate change

ABSTRACT This paper shows how multispecies collaboratories work to complexify understandings of shared space with more-than-human others through collective inquiry and experimentation. Recognizing tensions produced through engaging childhood geographies research on stolen land, it proposes multispecies collaboratories as inextricably situated within the uneven flows of colonization, urban sprawl, and climate change. The authors present six collaboratory sticking points – the politics of green, confronted by the unexpected, bearing witness, boundary bursting, root problems, and troubling entanglement – to highlight possibilities and incommensurabilities inherent within. Sharing moments on Anishnaabe, Attawandaron, Lūnaapéewak, and Haudenosaunee territories in London, Ontario, and lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories in Victoria, British Columbia, they take a common worlding approach to reconsidering young children’s multispecies relations as always and already political, multifarious world-making forces. They argue for multispecies collaboratories as small but significant sites for unhinging children’s geographies from neoliberal, colonial logics, asking: What kinds of experimentation make it possible to activate a collective sense of relationality and reciprocity with the myriad of creatures with whom children share space? What is required of us to do so without retooling the colonial logics that contribute to the erasure of Indigenous peoples, more-than-human kinships, and connections to place?

Infrastructure as biopolitics: Fencing, categorizing and valuing animals for wolf conservation in Germany

This paper takes a critical look at biopolitical practices under the current regime for wolf conservation in Germany. One profound difference between human and more-than-human biopolitics is that it concerns multiple, more-than-human bodies, demanding a close examination of governance practices aimed at enabling conservation. My core argument is twofold: first, I argue that conservation policies in Germany attempt to frame wolves as collectivities and apply a population perspective on these animals. However, the very technologies that aim to monitor wolves as population, namely genetic analyses, also produce individual wolves that complicate conservation efforts due to their affective force (Lorimer, 2015). Second, as active wolf management in the form of population control is rare due to legal regulations, there is a strong focus on livestock protection measures. These infrastructuring practices (Barua, 2021) continue to fail because they rest on the idea that convivial coexistence can be quantified and ignore that technologies such as fences can alter animals’ atmospheres (Lorimer et al., 2019) profoundly. As a result, infrastructuring practices aimed at enabling coexistence may run counter to their initial purpose. With fences becoming habitats, lively and discursive multispecies relations are renegotiated.

‘Fluid Dispossessions’: Contested Waters in Capitalist Natures

ABSTRACT This special issue on ‘“Fluid Dispossessions’: Contested Waters in Capitalist Natures” examines the multiple and mutable relationships between water, dispossession and property. We use ‘fluid dispossessions’ as an analytical prompt to examine the different ways in which water’s biophysical properties, its material fluidity and movements (and the more-than-human species that move with it), shape processes of capitalist extraction, accumulation and dispossession. Fluid dispossessions go beyond the power politics of controlling water as a resource to include indirect and more-than-economic forms of dispossession. By analysing emic understandings of dispossession, we draw on ‘fluid dispossessions’ to reject binary categorisations of liquid:solid in order to reveal the diversity of ways capitalist extractive activities may disrupt existing affective, ecological, or spiritual relations with water. This can cause more-than-economic forms of dispossession such as the loss of social reproduction, emotional distress, loss of health, the rupturing of multispecies relations and local care practices of waterscapes.

How meeting with the horse may contribute to a balanced life: Co-constructing a project-based leisure

This article offers a praxiography of equine-assisted activities, defined as a particular form of project-based leisure. The article stems from a larger study whose main purpose was to work closely with collaborators, equicoaches, and horses, to co-construct activities to support work–life boundary management. The collection of data involved 27 interviews, several focus groups, and approximately 50 hours of participant observation. To make the activities more inclusive, the analysis integrates a diverse group of actors, both human and equine, allowing the authors to gain a better understanding of situated learning mechanisms emerging from multispecies relations. The analysis highlights the role of performative processes and ontological work organized around human–animal relationship building. The authors propose that this study is part of a movement in favor of the coexistence of living beings and that this is a central matter of concern shared by the collaborators involved in this project.

Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge

Weaving the pluriverse: childhood encounters with the undergound worlds of Birrarung Marr

ABSTRACT This article weaves together a series of encounters between young children, trees, and mycelium within the multispecies worlds of Birrarung Marr, an ancient Aboriginal meeting place in the city of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Using creative ethnographic methods, it focuses on children’s involvement in an immersive theatre-making project exploring the intricate subterranean networks of communication and care between She-Oak trees and rhizo-mycelial networks in the local area. Weaving ethnographic description and careful engagements with Indigenous philosophies, the concept of pluriversality is evoked to consider how multispecies worlds are variously assembled, stolen, sustained, exhausted, regenerated, and interwoven along Birrarung Marr. Disrupting Western developmental models of childhood, the article argues that children’s animistic understandings of multispecies relations can inform responses to climate change which are sensitive to the intricate dependency relations that sustain life.

Metabolic agricultural ethics: Violence and care beyond the gate

A substantial body of scholarship now exists describing an agricultural ethics of care. This work has integrated insight from feminist ethicists into research on food production, human–nature relations, and agricultural land use. As scholars elsewhere in the humanities have discussed, though, there is often a violence committed in care's name. In the case of food production and farming, I argue that the focus on affect, local multispecies relations and a proximal encounter-based ethics risks obscuring ethically significant and potentially violent food system dynamics that unfold beyond the farm gate. To better accommodate these remote yet important outcomes, I argue that scholars deploying an ethics of agricultural care should pay greater attention to the metabolisms of the farms, labs, nurseries, gardens, and allotments they study. Such an approach can accommodate those things that enter the case study site (fertilizer, animal feed, seed, etc.) and those things that leave it (vegetables, grain, pollution, etc.) as well the more-than-human transformations and interactions that take place within it. By being attentive to these material inflows and outflows, new ethical responsibilities emerge to act in the speculative hope that violence can be minimized, and care can flourish across a broader spatial range.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 39, Number 1. February 2023

Front and back cover caption, volume 39 issue 1MUTUALISM IN MONGOLIAThe front cover of this special issue on mutualism depicts Amarjargal, a young herding woman in Mongolia, holding a newborn kid who is having trouble finding its mother within the herd. Spring in Mongolia is a busy time for herding families, as they assist with the birth and nursing of newborn herd animals under rapid fluctuations in temperature of + or − 20°C within a single day. Before the sheep and goat herd head out to graze on pasture, Amarjargal, who knows each animal individually, searches for the distinct characteristics of the missing nanny goat to match the mother with her young.Before the herd is moved out to nearby pastures, the lambs and kids feed from their mothers. This activity enables the herders to scan the herd to assess whether adults or young are showing any signs of illness. Those struggling and unable to keep up with the moving herd remain behind in the encampment. Weak adults are given extra nutritional feed, while weak newborns are taken inside the circular yurt (ger) to huddle together near the warmth of the central fire. If any have diarrhoea or intestinal worms, they are treated with medicinal plants from the surrounding mountainsides or with biomedicine purchased from the local veterinary clinic.This photograph captures the mutualistic relationship between herding families and their animals in Mongolia. Herding families put a lot of time and energy into nurturing their animals, especially during spring, which is then reciprocated by the nurturing of the family through dairy products and in the form of meat, allowing for the survival of both. The accompanying article highlights how human‐animal mutualism also involves interconnections with a diversity of plants such as the pasque flower (yargui) in the surrounding ecology.DOG MUTUALISMIn this photograph, we see a Bankhar puppy – a breed of dog unique to southern Siberia and Mongolia known for its thick, shaggy, dark coat and distinctive yellow eye patches – cautiously approaching Natasha Fijn, who has brought unfamiliar smells and objects to the herding encampment.Although Bankhar dogs are not typically used for herding, they are vital to mobile herding encampments. They are respected for their role in guarding against unwanted visitors, rustlers and predators and for their loyalty and dedication to protecting the herd and ensuring the safety of the human herders. Their eye patches are thought to serve as a deterrent to ward off predators like wolves and evil spirits.This moment illustrates the intimate and reciprocal nature of multispecies relations within the domestic sphere or domus. Adult herders do not treat their animals as coddled pets, but the close contact between them within the encampment is evident, whether it be while riding a horse, hand‐milking a cow or coaxing a newborn lamb to feed from its mother.Animals like this Bankhar puppy serve as prime examples of social forms of mutualism. This reciprocal relationship, as seen in Mongolia, has existed for thousands of years, with humans providing daily food scraps and care, and dogs providing protection and loyalty in return.This photograph, therefore, captures a glimpse of the theme of this special issue: the enduring bond between humans and animals. It highlights how mutualism can involve the animal existing as a valuable member of the community rather than as a dominated and contained object.