The More-Than-Human World of an Infant: A Multispecies Ethnography

• In Event: Roundtable Session 37
  In Roundtable Session: Entanglements Beyond and Inside the Young Child

Abstract

The ways that children and animals relate to each other has begun to be explored from new materialist perspectives, although less is known about how pre-verbal children might experience the more-than-human world. In this study, the daily experiences of an infant and his mother are empirically examined using multispecies ethnography, an emerging method of social analysis that attempts to account for forms of life beyond the human. This paper addresses how multiple species of living things play significant roles in early childhood, and how early childhood is a rich site for reconfiguring the distinctions between nature and culture. The conceptual instrument of “multispecies publics” is offered as a way to make visible and viable these multiple forms of agency.

Author

• Deborah Silvis, University of Washington - Seattle