Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods. Edited by AndreaPetitt, AnkeTonnaer, VéroniqueServais, CatrienNotermans, NatashaFijn (Eds.), Winwick, Cambridgeshire, UK: The White Horse Press. 2025. pp. 210. £30.00 (softcover)

Through slow, fervent, and ethical engagement, anthropologists have been discovering the importance of the non-human and multispecies relations while crafting their ethnographies. Artful methods are a set of methodological tools used by researchers that elicit various ways of knowing through multimodal art practices and outputs. In 2022, the MEAM or the network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods was founded by Andrea Petitt, Véronique Servais, Anke Tonnaer, and Catrien Notermans; Natasha Fijn joins them as editors to curate a collection of essays penned by multispecies researchers and multimodal anthropologists. This book is led with a fierce curiosity to argue against anthropocentrism. Readers are encouraged to recognize the interrelatedness of the existence of humans and other life forms. Separately and together, the collection illustrates complex portraits of the non-human “ways of knowing” which are “shaped by the affective and sensorial” (Culhane, 2017, 11). Humanity is at the center of ethical concern, and through immersive strategies, it is analyzed through the interconnectedness and inseparability of human-other-than-human relationships. The essays are richly illustrated with photographs and artworks. They carry artnographic statements by the contributors who connect their artful interventions and processes to their critical reflections on interspecies relatedness. What most animates these scholars and artists is how they favor improvisation and the unexpected while crafting their ethnographies of sentient ecologies. Earth-eating worms are consumed by moles—who are trapped and killed by humans—who feed them to birds of prey; in an essay that traces forms of interspecies interdependence, Hermoine Spriggs explains the inherent violence of living. Her research and her film Earth Swimmers (2021) portray land-workers in rural Yorkshire sharing space with animals who disrupt. The vibratory, subterranean world of moles and worms restores a sense of agency and animality while the humans above the ground discern “perspectivist” knowledge production through tracking. In another essay, in order to understand how human–snow relations shape everyday practices and lifeworlds of the local residents in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat, Nanna Sandager Kisby makes use of soundscapes and photography to create a multisensory journey about her interactions with snow. Her ethnographic fieldwork is based on intuition, different ways of moving about in the snow, interspersed with interviews with locals. The multimodal outputs showcase the “vibrant materiality,” the agency of snow. Carefully and respectfully observing vividly colored firebugs, Charlotte Dorn gathers information about the insects' way of moving through film, photographs and sound recordings, and with compassion. Dorn's emphasis on Cognitive Based Compassion Training (CBCT) can be felt in her engagement with the insects. Her drawings, as well as wood and linocut artworks are to be experienced by sight, smell, and touch; they deepen her reengagement with the ecological assemblages of Saarland, Germany. Photographic processes have remained focal to attending to multispecies encounters ethnographically and artistically. A photographic narrative of human-privileged cultural sites and the accompanying text lay out Angela Bartram and Lee Deigaard's B + D method exploring human–canine and human–equine creative synergies. Grounded in improvisation as well as learned awareness “with respect and trust in all bodies” (127), they invite animals as co-investigators to enter creative spaces and processes where they can be considered as artists by virtue of their active presence. Their space-making with animals conveys tangible, constructive critique of human privilege and a commitment to what they call “reciprocal and non-hierarchical values” (139). In another essay, a series of black and white images speak of benevolence and spirit of individual eucalypt trees in Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country in Australia. Natasha Fijn speculates about the history of ecological corridor evocatively, imagining how life had flourished under and around the canopy of the ancient sentinels; this is shared alongside an urban ethnography of the eucalyptus trees' enduring presence and their uneasy existence while grassy-woodland ecosystems are encroached. “Who listens to a disenchanted world if listening equals greed?”(50). Catrien Notermans and Anke Tonnaer offer to dispel trepidation against disembodied AI technology. Prior to penning this speculative fabulation, an arts–science–society collaboration led to the creation of song lyrics, digital design, a public performance, and the fictional being AIIA. All participants fully embrace the “artistic turn,” as the authors seek inspirations from ecofeminist scholarship and posthuman feminism while imagining a post-anthropocentric future. The more-than-verbal force of artistic methods invested in storying the human–River Waal relatedness in the Netherlands also shows how “becoming is always becoming with” (Haraway, 2008, 244), beyond form and finitude. Feminist medical sociologist Lisa Jeanne Moore's project visibilizes care and mothering. Her research in a controlled facility in Utah is motivated by constructing a new theoretical framework as expounded by Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), anthropomorphism in children's books, her lived experiences with reproductivity and heteronormativity, and “Verstehen” or cultivating capacities for multispecies empathy. Her oblique invocations about freaks of nature or an identity crafted from splicing species are derived from her ethnography of transgenically modified Saanen goats who lactate spider silk protein for military and medical innovation. Human–bovine relationships are central to at least three essays. Simone de Boer's collaborative multimedia exploration and “cross ethnography” with Hanna Charlotta Wernersson are marked by insights and interpretations of shared lives in agrarian worlds. Through independent and collaborative study on regenerative cattle-farming in Sweden and Kyrgyz compost heaps, and by nurturing multisensorial experiences through photography, film, soundscapes, creative writing, they show the makings of visible and invisible multispecies care. The linked montage urges the viewer to remember how “caring and nurturing do not preclude hurting and killing and, in farming, keeping alive and ending a life are not opposites” (163). Furthering an understanding of interspecies interactions, the poetry for Piet and their herd recognizes the significance of nonverbal and emotional, affective states in bovine–human communication. Merlijn Huntjens, Nina Willems, and Leonie Cornips strive to decenter humans in (socio)linguistic research and register their artful methods and ethnography as a process of co-becoming. And lastly, “arguing for pushing the frontier of sensory ethnography” (196), Andrea Petitt's embodied work of ranching and everyday life among cattle and horses in Colorado is crafted as a rhyming ethnographic poem. The “rapstract” gives a glimpse of multispecies power relations in the American West, while her intuitive, gendered perspective seeds an intersectionality framework of “multispecies triad,” developed in details in her recently published monograph (2025). Ultimately, what continues to inspire these intrepid researchers is an experimental ethos stemming from the “failure to grasp the fullness of more-than-human worlds” (205). Echoing Karin Bolender's words—hybrid modes of attunement encourage experimental ways and radical acts toward “doing” research, where the output or a conclusion is not the goal of research. Transdiciplinary outputs aside, it is a fair question to ask if artful methods succeed in advancing any conversation on interspecies synapses and ecological crises beyond all the participants of these projects. Accessible, engaging and informative—the collection shows optimism in the studies of species interdependence, ecology and environment, and means of constructing artfully within the confines and rigors of institutional life. Few years back, I discovered the unexpected joy of interspecies potential during a performance-making residency at the Kunsterhaus Mousontrum in Frankfurt. An artist's canine companion Foxy was allowed inside the studios where we choreographed ensemble pieces. Foxy was a rescue from Romania. Having endured years of abuse, she had lost her voice; she could neither growl nor bark. She let her body express consent and contemplation. She displayed avid interest in the abundance of creative energy that flowed around her. All humans learnt to work around her. Her occasional leaning on the artists and observing our bodies closely were carried into a docu-performance series I was creating. Much like B + D method illustrated—unscripted learning restored hopeful possibilities for deep insight and playfulness by/for creating with non-human collaborators.