The emerging field of multispecies research brings diverse bodies of knowledge into conversation to explore a lively world in which animals, plants, people and things bring one another into being (Ogden et al., 2013). Unsettling a given notion of species, multispecies inquiries develop new sensitivities and attunements to entangled relations and coevolutionary histories that go beyond the common dialogic focus (such as human-animal). “Species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations. It is this coming together of questions of kinds and their multiplicities that characterizes multispecies studies.” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p. 1). The dynamics in focus “include, but always also exceed, dynamics of predator and prey, parasite and host, researcher and researched, symbiotic partner, or indifferent neighbor” (ibid., p. 3). 

 Multispecies research approaches are often characterized as “modes of immersion” or arts of attentiveness. They involve attunement to the exchange and emergence of meanings in webs of signification that might be linguistic, gestural, biochemical, and more. Simultaneously with attending to multispecies assemblages, questions gather around the human subject and the ways in which human lives, lifeways, and accountabilities are folded in more-than-human entanglements. The long histories of relational, agentic thinking from indigenous peoples are also informing multispecies research.

 The “vast chorus of voices and temporalities” (Hillman, 2011) of the multispecies world highlights the need to question human mastery and pushes qualitative inquiry in new directions. The issue at stake is not simply to replace a focal animal with a plant or bacterium, or include other than human beings as extensions to frameworks that fundamentally remain the same. As Pedersen and Pini (2017) point out, these kinds of solutions only reproduce and maintain the human-centric thinking habits (temporal, ontological, epistemological) leaving much of the specifics and variation inside and across species categories as well as animate/inanimate boundaries intact.

This workshop engages with questions such as: 

•   How to develop practices of attentiveness that begin to uncover the blind spots created by human exceptionalism? 
•   What has to be unlearnt in order to move beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans? 
•   How to approach the shared but incommensurable temporalities and histories of very different beings, such as humans, insects, rats and slime molds? 
•   How does the microbial perspective challenge our ideas about bodies and environments?
•   How might the arts or the multi-and cross-disciplinary collaborations help us? How does the multispecies perspective reframe political questions: 
•   How do colonialism, capitalism, and their associated unequal power relations play out within a broader web of life? In concrete terms, how to craft projects and studies based on entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty? 

This workshop engages with questions such as: 

1. A hands-on approach: we seek to sensitize outselves to multispecies worlds through experiments involving movement, silence, memories, as well as sensory and writing exercises.
2. Engagements with some of the core theoretical influences in the fields of multispaces inquiry, multispeciesjustice and critical multispecies studies. We will also familiarie ourselves with existing research that incorporates the multispecies provocation in different levels. 

References

Van Dooren, T., Kirksey, E., & Münster, U. (2016). Multispecies studies: Cultivating arts of attentiveness.

Hillman, B. (2011). Engagements with light. Northwest Review, 49(2), 47-50.

Ogden, L. A., Hall, B., & Tanita, K. (2013). Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography. Environment and society, 4(1), 5-24.

Pedersen, H., & Pini, B. (2017). Educational epistemologies and methods in a more-than-human world. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1051-1054.

Tsing, A. (2012). Unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species: for Donna Haraway. Environmental humanities, 1(1), 141-154.