Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods

Anke Tonnaer is an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research interests developed from long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indigenous Australia, studying the intersection of nature and culture in tourism, to rewilding initiatives and the challenges of multispecies cohabitation and conservation practices in north-west Europe, especially the Netherlands. Her desire to narrate the more-than-human world in alternative ways alongside the rational dominant ways in ecology has brought her to exploring art-based methodology and sensory ethnography. In 2023, Anke worked with Catrien Notermans in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.

Véronique Servais is Professor in Anthropology of Communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Liège, Belgium. She is interested in the profound bio-social relationships that exists between human beings and animals (and other living beings). She conducted research in the field of ‘animal assisted therapies’ and ‘enchanted encounters’ between human beings and animals. She also studied visitor-primates interactions at a zoological park and dolphin-trainers’ affective communication at a Seaquarium. More recently, she has been doing research on the experience of encountering the forest, using microphenomenological interviews. She is co-founder, with Andrea Petitt, Anke Tonnaer and Catrien Notermans, of the MEAM network and co-organiser of the 2022 and 2023 MEAM conferences.

Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). Her research line is on social relatedness with and beyond the human and focuses on the intersection of kinship, gender and religion in India, West Africa and Europe. Her most recent projects are on interspecies communication in women’s economic and religious activities in Rajasthan (India); and on storying human-river relatedness in the Netherlands. Her projects are based on visual, sensory and arts-based ethnography which are the methodologies she also teaches at the Anthropology Department. In 2022, Notermans co-founded together with Andrea Petitt, Véronique Servais, and Anke Tonnaer the international MEAM network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods. In 2023, Notermans worked together with Anke Tonnaer in an Arts-Science collaboration called TASC (The Art of Science) to design a post-anthropocentric future for the city of Nijmegen.

Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career ARC Future Fellowship to conduct research on ‘A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza’ (2022–2026). Natasha wrote a seminal multispecies ethnography based in Mongolia, Living with Herds: Human-animal Coexistence in Mongolia (2011). She has co-edited five books and several journal volumes, including three special issues oriented toward visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking, and three engaging with multispecies and sensory anthropology in the journals Inner Asia (2020), The Australian Journal of Anthropology (2020) and Anthropology Today (2023). She recently (2023) published a co-edited book with Routledge, Nurturing Alternative Futures: Living with Diversity in a More-than-human World.