Living in Multi-Species Worlds

Our world is fundamentally a “multi-species” one. Co-inhabiting our shared globe, each species experiences and creates it for itself in fundamentally different ways, with different sensoriums and varying needs and capacities. While so much of our work has focused on understanding the world and its processes from the point-of-view of the humans doing the investigating, more recent paradigms have asked: What is it like to be a non-human in this shared world? What is it like to be a bat? A dog? A cow? A whale? A bird? How might we approach this ultimately unknowable question? Centering this approach enables us to investigate culturally and historically specific attitudes towards, and epistemologies about, other species, now and in the past, and to imagine new futures.

Living in Multi-Species Worlds invites us to take up these provocative questions across all parts of the university and beyond. It asks--with all of our shared knowledges--what can or do we know beyond the human? What difference might that make to our laws, ethics, acts of representation, interpretation, values, designs, and more, if we challenged the specifically anthropocentric starting points of so much that we do and know? How might such a reorientation reconfigure our disciplinary knowledges? Our methodologies? Social formations? Challenge our imaginations? Reshape some of the foundational questions that our scholarly and creative work engages? Ultimately, how might it expand the range of contributions we hope our universities can make in the future?