Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods
Workshop 30-31 May 2022

Multispecies ethnography is expanding across a range of different fields, both in research and education, engaging a vast array of analytical frameworks. Regardless of what species or combination of species and inorganic entities that ethnographers work with, we are brought together in a series of diverse yet overlapping methodological issues. The opportunities and challenges of multispecies ethnography shape the research design not only in questions of data collection, but also in what analytical frameworks are operationalized throughout the research process, including how the processes of data analysis and writing emerge. Multispecies ethnographers increasingly engage in creative and artistic methods, such as different expressions of creative writing, photo and film making as well as drawing, painting and poetry, to capture relatings beyond the human. The entanglements of academia and art in different kinds of collaborations and interdisciplinary endeavors are exploding and there are ample opportunities for crosspollination between multispecies ethnography and the feminist scholarship tradition of using creative methods to further othered perspectives. We thus wish to explore possibilities, challenges and limits of artistic methods of data collection, analysis and dissemination within multispecies ethnography. With multispecies ethnography and artistic methods present in an array of diverse, overlapping and interdisciplinary fields, we wish to connect scholars from all over academia and the world, to advance discussions, expand networks and share our work. To that end we are aiming for an informal discussion climate, engaged participants and a supportive atmosphere where we can try out new ideas, present tentative work and explore potential directions of our work.

The workshop aims to further discussions around the following topics:

• Species as a power relation in the field
• Gender, ethnicity, class and other power relations in multispecies analysis
• Multispecies relations of animals, plants, fungi and inorganic entities
• Ethnographic drawing, painting, photo transfer and other visual expressions
• Ethnographic poetry, field rhymes, rapstracts and other creative writing
• Artistic methods of data collection, analysis and research dissemination

Program Layout : here 

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to email Andrea Petitt: andrea.petitt@gender.uu.se

Workshop Zoom Link

The link will be active for the full workshop. If you would like to ‘hang out’ and drink your tea or coffee in the plenum zoom or in a break out room with others, feel free to do so.