Multispecies Pedagogy

This event is was organised by the Environmental Studies Certificate Program and took place on Monday, 4 July from 10:00 till 12:00 at DasKloHäuschen, Thalkirchner Str. 81 (corner to Oberländerstr. at the Wholesale Market Munich, West Gate).

Eben Kirksey attained his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness and Cultural Anthropology and is currently working in the department of Anthropology at Princton University. He has published two books with Duke University Press—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). UNSW Australia recruited Kirksey as a Strategy Hire in 2012 to help found their Environmental Humanities program in Sydney. Currently he is Princeton University where he is researching and writing a new book titled Emergent Ecologies.

A novel approach to writing culture, multispecies ethnography, has come of age. Plants, animals, fungi and microbes are appearing alongside people in accounts of natural and cultural history. This talk will explore different approaches to teaching multispecies ethnography. Building on earlier approaches to multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995), anthropologists are starting to "follow the species" or "follow the organism" through human built infrastructures, databases, fragmented landscapes, and global mediascapes. Collaborations with biological scientists, artists, and other critical friends have enabled students to add novel techniques to the ethnographic tool-kit. The emergent generation of multispecies ethnographers are following Timothy Ingold to study what life was and is like at particular times and places, while joining interlocutors in their speculations about what life might or could become.

For more background on the ideas animating this call, check out Emergent Ecologies, a new book from Duke University Press.