Symbiotic Methods | EASST-4S 2024 Panel | Call for Papers
The ERC BOAR team has a Call for Papers for the panel, ‘Symbiotic methods: more-than-human companions for knowing’ to be held at EASST-4S 2024 Making and Doing Transformations to be held in Amsterdam, 16-19 July 2024. Please find the panel abstract below and on the conference website Open Panels – EASST-4S 2024 (easst4s2024.net)
The deadline for abstract submission is 12th February 2024. We invite presentations that partner with more-than-human individuals, kinds, body parts or ecological relations to propose novel ways of doing research beyond routine academic paradigms. The panel is open to standard papers, as well as alternative media or experimental forms of presentation.
Submissions can be made only via the online forms on the conference website (not via email) Call for Abstracts – EASST-4S 2024 (easst4s2024.net).
If there are any questions, feel free to contact any one of the convenors – Paul, Kieran, Laura, or Marianna.
We look forward to receiving your paper proposals.
Symbiotic methods: More-than-human companions for knowing
Paul G. Keil, Kieran O’Mahony, Laura Kuen, Marianna Szczygielska
Abstract
Despite aspiring otherwise, too often more-than-human research superficially engages with other organisms and treats them as subordinate to social theorising. We are influenced by scholars who remain curious and in touch with the lives of their nonhuman companions, and the socio-ecological worlds they dwell in. Other beings are more than merely good to think with – their biological, relational, fleshy and creative capacities can carry and augment our thoughts. A scholarly indebtedness and ethical obligation that requires we seriously acknowledge how their lives and deaths compose our conceptual activities.
In this panel, we explore how our other-than-human intellectual partners inspire us towards other-worldly methods. Their unique modes of breathing, eating, sensing and connecting offer instruction for knowing, and open challenging conversations about how we conduct research. By following and corresponding with the bodies and behaviours of other beings we can generate new questions, processes, and techniques. For example, what can moles teach us about digging and accommodating to fuzziness (Parreñas 2023), or fungi and bacteria about collaboration (Tsing 2015; Benezra 2023)? How do eels help us understand transformations (Kaishian 2022), or how are plants entangled in knowledge-making (Kimmerer 2003, 2013)? And what do porcine tastes tell us about the omnivorous intellectual consumption of scholars?
We invite presentations that partner with more-than-human individuals, kinds, body parts or ecological relations to propose novel ways of doing research beyond routine academic paradigms. The panel is open to standard papers, as well as alternative media or experimental forms of presentation. We hope for thought-provoking insights into living organisms, ones that think through the ethical, political and epistemological possibilities of research. How can a symbiotic, methodological conversation generate new reflections on our more-than-human companions and what they do to our ways of knowing?
References
Benezra, A., 2023. Gut Anthro: An Experiment in Thinking with Microbes. U of Minnesota Press.
Kaishian, Patricia Ononiwu (2022) “The Magnetism of Eels.” Ecotone, Issue 33. https://ecotonemagazine.org/nonfiction/the-magnetism-of-eels/
Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2003) Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. Oregon State University Press.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall (2013) Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Parreñas, J.S., 2023. Ethnography after anthropology: Become moles, not mining corporations. American Ethnologist, 50(3), pp.453-461.
Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.