Drafts of the below papers have been completed and are awaiting publication. Please get in touch if you’d like to see any of them.

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Multispecies Storytelling in Catastrophic Times

For Humanimalia.

Drawing on and thinking through a collection of stories of critically endangered snails from the Hawaiian Islands, this article offers an overview of multispecies studies as a field of scholarly inquiry that draws the humanities, the natural sciences, and a variety of other ways of knowing/living, into dynamic conversation. The article focuses on three key topics. Firstly, what is it that characterises multispecies scholarship as a distinctive way of understanding and describing the world, perhaps even, as Bruno Latour has framed it, as a genre of ‘alternative natural history’? Secondly, what does it mean to centre the role of storytelling in multispecies research: how does doing so open up new possibilities for not only engaging but transforming publics? Two particular interests in this regard are the ‘ethical charge’ of storytelling, and the capacity for multispecies stories to create new openings into questions of intra-human inequality and oppression. Thirdly, the article explores the ‘species’ category: what work do taxonomic divisions do in multispecies scholarship, and how might thinking with and against species help us to both see and inhabit worlds differently? Drawing these threads together, the article concludes by outlining the significance of multispecies storytelling as a creative and ethical practice in and for what Isabelle Stengers has termed ‘catastrophic times.’