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?

SPRING 2026 GRADUATE SEMINAR
CAS 587 | ANTH 515
FRIDAY | 1pm-3:50pm | DAVENPORT HALL 109A

Structured as an exploratory laboratory, this seminar invites participants from across the university to think deeply about how humans live and have lived in multi-species worlds, in culturally and historically specific ways. A special focus will be on the theories and challenges of multi-species ethnography as a mode of research, on experiential mappings of relationships across species, and on imagined futures in the Anthropocene. Drawing on key themes in human-animal studies, we will examine topics such as notions of multi-species justice, animals as agential subjects, living in shared environments, practices of extraction/extinction/de-extinction, art about and by animals, the scientific/cultural dimensions of “One Health,” and social media storytelling. Readings and guest speakers will be drawn from across the humanities/social sciences/arts/law/and biological sciences. Open to graduate and professional students from across the university. 
Limit of 18.