Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods (forthcoming)

Edited by Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer, Véronique Servais, Catrien Notermans and Natasha Fijn

Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods explores the potential of multimodal art practices in doing qualitative research beyond the human. Through artful endeavours such as creative writing, photography, filmmaking, drawing and poetry, the volume aims to overcome the shortcomings of conventional, anthropocentric and logocentric methods in multispecies research. To move beyond the limitations of language and linguistic communication, the contributors build on the long tradition of visual and sensory anthropology while also engaging in and consciously reflecting on innovative, creative and artistic methods. Taking a multispecies and more-than-human perspective – ranging from snow and trees to animals and an AI oracle – the volume investigates ways to touch, speak, listen, feel, walk with and reach across different species.

This book and accompanying multimedia website advance the frontier of publishing artful expressions of academic research by highlighting how creative practices can be the very core of data collection, analysis and the communication of research. As such, the artful pieces are not ‘just’ illustrations of textual representations, but are practised as part of an iterative process of data collection and analysis. 

The contributions by well-established scholars, early career researchers and postgraduates who carry out new, cutting-edge research offer an engaging range of analytical, methodological and empiric orientations, while conversing at the intersection of multispecies ethnography and artful methods. 

This book is Open Access through the support of the Open Book Collective, The University of Liège and The Australian National University.

About MEAM
The international  MEAM network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods was founded by Andrea Petitt, Véronique Servais, Anke Tonnaer and Catrien Notermans in 2022, when an online workshop was held. The same team organised the hybrid inaugural MEAM conference in Liège, July 2023. 

THE EDITORS

Andrea Petitt is currently working as a researcher at Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle (LASC) at Université de Liège, Belgium, and is affiliated with the Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. Andrea has worked on long-term multispecies ethnography research projects based on fieldwork in Botswana, Sweden and Colorado (USA), with shorter stints in Nepal, Canada, Ethiopia and Tanzania. Increasingly, Andrea has worked with, and developed, artistic and ‘artful’ research methods for data collection, analysis and dissemination and has given a number of workshops on the subject for Ph.D. students and Faculty across Sweden and internationally. 

Anke Tonnaer is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research interests developed from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous Australia, studying the intersection of nature and culture in tourism, to rewilding initiatives and the challenges of multispecies cohabitation and conservation practices in north-west Europe, especially the Netherlands. Her desire to narrate the more-than-human world in alternative ways alongside the rational dominant ways in ecology has brought her to exploring art-based methodology and sensory ethnography. In 2023, Anke worked with Catrien Notermans in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.

Véronique Servais is Professor in Anthropology of Communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Liège, Belgium. She is interested in the profound bio-social relationships that exists between human beings and animals (and other living beings). She conducted research in the field of ‘animal assisted therapies’ and ‘enchanted encounters’ between human beings and animals. She also studied visitor-primates interactions at a zoological park and dolphin-trainers’ affective communication at a Seaquarium. More recently, she has been doing research on the experience of encountering the forest, using microphenomenological interviews.

Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research line is on social relatedness with and beyond the human and focuses on the intersection of kinship, gender and religion in India, West Africa and Europe. Her most recent projects are on interspecies communication in women’s economic and religious activities in Rajasthan (India); and on storying human-river relatedness in the Netherlands. Her projects are based on visual, sensory and arts-based ethnography which are the methodologies she also teaches at the Anthropology Department. In 2023, Notermans worked together with Anke Tonnaer in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen. 

Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career ARC Future Fellowship to conduct research on ‘A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza’ (2022–2026). Natasha wrote a seminal multispecies ethnography based in Mongolia, Living with Herds: Human-animal Coexistence in Mongolia (2011). She has co-edited five books and several journal volumes, including three special issues oriented toward visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking, and three engaging with multispecies and sensory anthropology in the journals Inner Asia (2020), The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2020) and Anthropology Today (2023). She recently published a co-edited book with Routledge, Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-human World in 2023. 

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer, Véronique Servais, Catrien Notermans and Natasha Fijn

1. WRITING A SONG FOR AIIA. SPECULATIVE FICTION IN AN ART-SCIENCE COLLABORATION
Text: Catrien Notermans and Anke Tonnaer
Visuals: Marcel van Brakel
[essay, poetry and AI visuals]

2. EARTH SWIMMERS / ON CAPTURE: A PRACTICE-BASED ETHNOGRAPHY OF MOLE CATCHING AND FILM MAKING IN NORTH YORKSHIRE. 
Hermione Spriggs in collaboration with mole catcher Nigel Stock
[essay and film]

3. THE SOUNDS OF SNOW: AN EXPLORATION OF HUMAN-SNOW RELATIONS IN ILULISSAT, KALAALLIT NUNAAT
Nanna Sandager Kisby
[essay, photos and sound]

4. THE ENDURING PRESENCE OF THE EUCALYPTUS TREE: A PHOTO ESSAY
Natasha Fijn
[photo essay]

5. ARTISTIC CO-DISCOVERY IN MULTISPECIES COLLABORATION 
Bartram+Deigaard
[essay and image composites]

6. ATTENDING TO FIREBUGS: ARTISTIC INVESTIGATIONS FOR RESPECTFUL CORRESPONDENCES
Charlotte Dorn
[photo essay]

7. FARMING COWS AND WORMS
Simone de Boer and Hanna Charlotta Wernersson 
[essay and multimedia montage]

8. TO TOUCH LIGHTLY IN PASSING 
Merlijn Huntjens, Nina Willems and Leonie Cornips 
[essay, photos, sketches and poetry]

9. FREAKS OF NATURE: USING DEEP REFLEXIVITY TO UNDERSTAND TRANSGENICS
Lisa Jean Moore 
[essay and photos]

10. ETHNOGRAPHY OF WORKING COWHORSES: RHYMING SENSORY METHODS
Andrea Petitt
[essay and poetry]

AFTERWORD
Karin Bolender

Forthcoming 1 July 2025 
ISBN 978-1-912186-93-8 (PB) – £30
978-1-912186-94-5 (ebook, MEAM multimedia) – Open Access
978-1-912186-95-2 (ebook, standard) – Open Access