| Project Detail |
Collaboration with animals communicators and animals to develop dialogic multispecies methods
The ERC-funded project ANICOM collaborates with animal communication experts and various animal species on four continents to develop novel multispecies approaches. It explores intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), a technique for achieving detailed, two-way conversations with non-human animals. Until now, the increasing presence of professional animal communicators worldwide as well as Indigenous knowledges on the subject have been ignored, because they do not fit established Cartesian frameworks. ANICOM explores the intersection of new materialism, posthumanism, Indigenous studies and knowledge systems with biosemiotics and animal cognition. Considering non-human animals as full research participants, the project aims to establish a foundation for dialogic multispecies methods (DMM), a transdisciplinary scheme to engage with animals perspectives, experiences, and knowledges within academia.
As the ‘social’ in social sciences is rethought beyond the human, multispecies research across disciplines increasingly asks how to speak with and for non-human others. I pose that intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), a strategy practiced by successful animal communicators to engage in explicit, detailed, two-way communication with non-human animals, holds uncharted resources for doing research with rather than on animals. Research on IIC has been curtailed to specific domains and mythologized, while the worldwide boom in professional animal communicators has been ignored. ANICOM’s unique engagement with animal communicators’ practical strategies for relating across nature/culture and mind/body dichotomies is ground-breaking in the often largely theoretical discussions of the ontological and species turns. It simultaneously unsettles continued divides between humans and animals as well as dominant and subjugated ways of knowing. The project triangulates participant observation, Q method, interviews and audio-visual methods (including video-diaries and video-elicitations) with natural science approaches, to collaboratively work with six expert animal communicators and a variety of animals in Europe and Africa. It addresses unexplored possibilities for cross-fertilization between new materialism and posthumanism on the one hand, and Indigenous studies and knowledge systems on the other, while relying on the latest insights in biosemiotics and animal cognition. It thus develops transdisciplinary innovations that include non-human animals as full research participants, while achieving a deeper reflexivity on the limitations of humans thinking animals outside the human-animal relationship. It’s ultimate objective is to establish the resources and foundation for dialogic multispecies methods (DMM), a dynamic set of conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches and tools to engage with the views, experiences and knowledges of non-human animals in academia. |
