Initiated by three students exploring waste, Hindu nationalism, and rural home-rearing practices in India and Egypt, this multispecies ethnography speaker series and collective reads, discusses, and engages with emerging texts exploring humans, animals, jinns, and plants in various parts of the world. Together, we explore possibilities, challenges, and politics of writing, researching, and thinking with other species.

Inspired by the work of our faculty members Naisargi Dave and Shiho Satsuka, along with current postdoc Muhammad Kavesh, this group discusses the developments, challenges, and limitations of multispecies ethnography. Some of the questions that this series might tackle include: What are the possibilities of a multispecies ethnography? What understandings of ethics, politics, and subjectivity (or lack thereof) can a multispecies ethnography offer? How do we situate multispecies ethnography within and beyond an anthropological genealogy (and a contemporary “trend”) of sorts? What does the label multispecies ethnography do to a text, fieldwork, or ethnographic experience? What are narratological tools that we can borrow from other disciplines to write nonhuman worlds?

While it is planned as a speaker series, the convener is hopeful about the possibilities of reading, writing, and developing a collective interested in multispecies ethnography within and beyond UofT.

Conveners:

Group convener: Noha Fikry
Co-conveners: Bradley Dunseith and Ridhima Sharma