We invite you to register for our workshop on ‘More-than-human Collaborations in Geographical Research’, being held on February 10th and February 17th 2021.

This workshop will explore the motives, methods, and material and affective entanglements that arise from engaging with animals, plants and other nonhumans as collaborators in more-than-human (MTH) geographical research. Emergent bodies of multispecies scholarship increasingly attend to animals and others as relational and agential beings, exploring the ways in which they collectively shape worlds, identities, and knowledges (Bear, 2001; Haraway, 2008; Hovorka, 2015, 2018; Lorimer, 2010; Marder, 2013; Tsing, 2015; Whatmore and Thorne, 2000). We aim to provide a venue for extending this dialogue by bringing together researchers engaging diverse interventions with the aim of encountering nonhumans as collaborators in knowledge production. What can we learn from working with animals, plants and other nonhumans rather than working on or watching the life and work of nonhumans (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2014; Barua, 2018)? This online event will have three panel sessions, organized around the key workshop themes, and we are delighted to have a keynote address from Clara Mancini on ‘Animal-Computer Interaction: Animals as Co-Designers of Multispecies Technologically Supported Ecosystems’. 

1. Modes and Motives for Collaboration: In what ways and to what ends might we take seriously collaboration with the MTH?
2. Methods of Collaboration: How does collaboration take place (through what technologies, strategies, frameworks)? Who generates knowledge, what counts as expertise, and how do the politics of knowledge production enter into MTH collaborations?
3. Ethics of Collaboration and Imagining Collaborative Futures: How can/should researchers negotiate dynamics of beliefs, boundaries, encounter, representation, etc. when engaging in MTH collaborations? What opportunities or challenges for engagement, care, and responsibility emerge in MTH collaborations, and how do these impact the lives of the more-than-humans we work with? How are alternate and emergent ontologies, technologies, etc. shaping opportunities for MTH collaborations?

This workshop is structured as three panel sessions, organized around these key themes, and we are delighted to close with Clara Mancini delivering a keynote address on ‘Animal-Computer Interaction: Animals as Co-Designers of Multispecies Technologically Supported Ecosystems’. Clara will be accompanied by discussants Beth Greenhough and Alice Hovorka.

Our panellists will each prepare around 10 minutes of thoughts on the theme of their session to share with the group. The discussion will then be open to the floor for all workshop participants to discuss their ideas around the given theme.

Please get in touch with workshop organizers in advance of the event with any accessibility requests:

• lauren.vanpatter@queensu.ca
• jennifer.dodsworth@ouce.ox.ac.uk
• jjt44@cam.ac.uk