Multispecies Studies: An Overview

Multispecies Studies Overview

• New discoveries, relationships, and obligations arise from immersing oneself in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants
• This article introduces the field of multispecies studies
• Explores methods of classification and categorization
• Examines paying attention to the diverse modes of life that constitute worlds
• Species are always multiple, multiplying their forms and associations
• The coming together of questions of kinds and their multiplicities defines multispecies studies
• Collaboration with scientists, farmers, hunters, Indigenous peoples, activists, and artists are catalyzing ethological inquiry

Theoretical Context

• The article explores the broader theoretical context of multispecies studies
• Considers the epistemological, political, and ethical implications of learning to be attentive to diverse modes of life
• It is asked whether all living entities are biological, or if things like tornadoes, stones, and volcanoes can undergo similar immersion
• Explores what it means to coexist in entangled worlds marked by contingency and uncertainty
• Analyzes inhabiting and coconstituting worlds effectively
• Explores the development of "arts of attentiveness" which include ways of paying attention to others while creating meaningful responses

Multispecies Existence

• All living things grow and thrive in multispecies communities
• Life is dependent on the “organism-in-its-environment" and cannot be sustained in isolation
• Organisms exist in intertwined histories, go beyond simple survival
• Beyond survival, varied ways of life emerge from living, dying, and becoming in a larger world
• The intimate connection between a flower and a pollinating bee enhances and enables both life forms by a shared heritage
• Isabelle Stengers calls this entanglement "reciprocal capture"
• The flower and bee emerge through co evolutionary histories and rich processes of cobecoming
• This includes exchanging meanings, immersion, and webs of significance through methods like linguistic, gestural, and biochemical exchanges
• The world features a lively communicative system with signs and wonders, seen in visual and scent markers
• Multi species relationality attuned to temporal and semiotic registers demonstrates a world where being is always evolving and being
• Multispecies studies comprehends the world by including knowledge from the natural sciences
• Considers how responsibilities and human lives are folded into these entanglements

Indigenous and Scholarly Understandings

• Scholars engage with histories of relational and agentic thinking from Indigenous peoples
• As Anna Tsing notes, “Human nature [in all its myriad forms] is an interspecies relation”
• Stories based on social destruction will not serve anyone
• Current destruction is from mass extinction to climate change to gloabalization to terrorism
• The present condition requires attentiveness to become consequentially related with others
• Multispecies scholars study the political questions, how colonialism, capitalism, and unequal power play out
• It is asked what will count as conservation and how to rethink what “the human” must be
• Complex and vital questions are explored by immersing scholars in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants

Scholarship and Research

• Multispecies studies aims to open new spaces for interdisciplinary and collaborative research
• New forms of scholarly inquiry in both 'the animal' and 'the environment' have been subjects of study
• Multispecies scholarship promises something different
• Multispecies scholarship takes up, a broader taxonomic scope of inquiry
• Rather than replacing a focal animal with a plant or bacterium, a multi species approach focuses on how lively agents bring one another through entangled relations
• Dynamics include predator and prey, parasite and host, researcher and researched, symbiotic partner, and indifferent neighbor.
• These are complex "ecologies of selves" that are shaped and reshaped through the sharing of "meanings, interests and affects"
• This multiplicity is key to what multispecies studies is about
• The immersive approach is applied to forms of liveliness that many, but not all, consider to be nonliving like stones, weather, AI and chemical species
• Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret articulate a cosmo-ecological approach that brings gods, ancestors, and spirits into our accounts of the forms of life that make up worlds.
• Biocentrism, from this perspective, is no longer a counter to anthropocentric approaches but itself as an unjustifiable bias
• Grounded in insights including new materialisms, political geology, and indigenous metaphysics--the liveliness of the abiotic is brought to the fore

Abiotic Liveliness

• Entities might themselves be thought to have distinctive ways of life
• Ways of life encompass histories, patterns of becoming and entanglement, that is, ways of affecting and being affected
• Abiotic entities too might become subjects of ethologies in the Deleuzian sense of the term
• How these multispecies approaches might shed light on the consequential work done by various forms of boundary making remains open for now
• The term species in multispecies studies gestures to particular ways of life and to any relevant gathering together of kin and/or kind
• It is not intended to imply that kinds are fixed or homogeneous, nor should the term be taken to assume a specifically Western, scientific mode of taxonomy
• Humans are not exceptional in our ability to classify and categorize
• The term species holds open key questions: How do entangled agents torque one another with their own practices of classification, recognition, and differentiation?
• The world explores how kinds of being are enacted and sensed
• Multispecies studies draws together diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches
• Diverse approaches include multispecies ethnography, etho-ethnology, anthropology of life, anthropology beyond humanity, extinction studies and more-than-human geographies
• Approaches show shared interest in better understanding what is at stake for different forms of life caught up in diverse relationships of knowing and living together
• Each is an example of new science studies grounded in "passionate immersion in the lives of the nonhumans being studied."
• Research is grounded with engagements and collaborations with scientists, farmers, hunters, IPs, activists, and artists

Theory and Practice

• Transforms noticing into attentiveness
• Cultivates skills to others and responsively crafts modes of living and dying in a richly varied yet fundamentally shared world
• Passionate immersion involves attentive interactions with diverse lifeways
• Scholars aim to provide "thick" accounts of the distinctive experiential worlds and bio cultural attachments of other species
• Its about bringing attention to how they craft the shared lives and worlds
• Passion to be enthusiastic does not mean being unqualified, it means support
• Cultivates attentiveness
• Passionate immersion means entangled with the knowledge that everyone cares a little differently

Accessing Archives - Intellectual Allies

• Scholars in reach deep into humanities and social sciences to the archives
• Some wrote before the "two cultures."
• The American Beaver and His Works (1868) was wrote before biology was established as distinct studies
• Early thinkers also thought of attention to life of other species, like Aristotle's The record of animals
• Observation and theoretical imagination stood out to be like philosopher Goethe
• Philosopher Michael Marder worked with European philosopher to be current with discussions of species
• Gary Steiner had similar minds for animal minds
• Natural scientist provided knowledge to reconstruct better understanding of others in literature
• Philosopher Despret developed bodies of work with baboons and sheep

Deconstruction and scientific Knowledge

• Historical contexts and knowledges are shaped by positions of observer and complex practices
• Plant and insect agency and Darwinism was discussed by researchers Carla Hustak
• Scholars interviews scientists and study plants
• These studies are tools to observe animal behaviour by Konrad Lorenz
• Reinventing practices knowing, acknowledging situation with partners as researchers
• Biologists and other who enter domain are charged with anthropormihism
• They charge for using anecdote metaphor, but also promote them
• Plum wood says it closes discussion and the need is to open inquiry
• Crist also suggests efforts to be neutral show human projections
• Field experiments lack repeatability but appreciate improvisation
• Some ethologists note anecdote can be to explore typcial behaviours
• It's about recognizing individual and social capacity and diversity that is creative in other modes of life
• Nature are not the only way to know in the practices and knowledge to change nature
• It is to also decolonize challenge to assumptions with expertise from authorities

Cultural Diversity and Immersion

• Biocultural diversity is a thread to to study
• Work has focused on dreamings that sing in relationships
• Perspectives change natures with scientists accounts
• Artists are participants to explore immersion Nature
• Create media and performance interventions
• Contributions are in image sound poetry with mountain pine beetles
• Experiments in the collection are by Eben Knirksey
• Scholars study how life might be by engaging speculation of artists
• They do this cite the Joseph Beruys
• Contemporary artists help people think about their living
• Illustrating connections with Berringan is part of the Salon where drawing in blood

Contested Survival and Engagement

• Enacting of relationship of suffering and care is performed to engage violence
• It helps livers with medicine
• Artists such as Katly, simun, augment sensorioum to reconfigue
• Scholars seek to more work than observe during performnce
• Engagements that reveal animals and plants are in relation
• They give rise to a new empirical knowledge
• They create practices living with people who help create site encounters
• Center for feline studies by Bussolini and Mukherjea create new lab to conduct daily life
• Study can tell about traditions those studied
• People decide questions

Knowledge and Understanding

• Diverse engagements and viral videos give nonstop stream footage that connects relations
• If TV has helped shape the scientist then there's now new responses
• This helps scientist understand the data
• Complex and skilled teams are created to support the expertise
• Knowledge is not only provided as manuscripts in solo by academic work
• Multispecies offers collaborative approaches in certain disciplines
• Moving beyond projects put biologist create method, address shared questions or research
• Enable the borders that were Science Wars in the 1900s to enable promiscuous movements
• To summarize many contributions are coauthored

Empiricality and Accountability

• Artists, philosophers, ethnograohers often comprise data collection teams
• Learn how use frogs with the speculative
• One might encounter assemblages, team of philosphers and biologists shepherds and microbiologists in elephants meet up
• None of science can be unmeditated
• Multiplying leads to value world
• It's about how which modes of iniquiry adopted performmed making as well
• Multiplying is about relationships with care

Navigating Complexity

• Multispecies one through to ethics
• Its a questions of knowledge
• Not realist or relative of world
• Particular realisms exist
• Each agent exerts to process in assembly
• work in studies understanding as real cultures
• Made not made up
• Travel under nature

Dualisms and Actions

• Re figure the the dualisms
• Not work actions
• Interplay and relation
• Real shaped and engagements do

Contact and Attention

• Modes of attention in natural histories
• Attention to parts is matter
• What emerges
• To how come matter does
• Multi species is a part
• Engaged in world of action action