Exploring Ratty Places With Young People: How Can Ecological Research Open Opportunities for More-Than-Human Participation?

• In Event: Participation in More-Than-Human Research: By Whom? For Whom?

Abstract

Natural sciences—in particular ecological inquiry—tend to be based on the narrative of human researchers studying nature around them. Active participation in knowledge production is limited to human subjects, whereas nature and non-human animals remain objects to be known and manipulated. Realization that such a human-centered premise of knowing serves poorly in the current times of biosocial destruction has led to the growth of posthumanist approaches that dismantle human exceptionalism over other forms and materialities of life (e.g., van Dooren et al., 2016). Since posthumanist critique towards natural sciences questions the subject-object premise at the heart of scientific inquiry (e.g., Neimanis, 2014), little effort has been made to explore how scientific research and posthumanist approaches might intersect and co-exist. In this paper, we explore how participation in natural scientific inquiry could be reconceptualized to include more-than-human actors as subjects in knowledge production.

We analyze a case of ecological citizen science inquiry on urban rats to explore how more-than-human entanglements unfold during the inquiry process and how these might open opportunities for increasing attentiveness to multispecies worlds. Theoretically, we draw from the concept of atmosphere and from the work on the active and dynamic role of materiality. Grounded in social science and human geography, the concept of atmosphere has allowed examination of the complex sensory and spatio-temporal background of various societal phenomena (e.g., Stewart, 2011). We show how ecological inquiry requires attuning to atmospheres in which other animals are acknowledged as atmospheric subjects (c.f. Lorimer, 2019). Paying attention to atmospheres allows disrupting the nature/culture binary and understanding them as entangled. Furthermore, new materialist and agential materialist approaches have offered us ways to account for materials as agential, dynamic and active participants in different activities (e.g., Bennet, 2010). We explore how such understanding of materiality can alter the conventional subject-object setting of ecological inquiry. We show how the materials used in the research, such as track plates, can be re-conceptualized as living and transforming participants of the research process.

Both of these reconceptualizations—the non-human animal as an atmospheric subject and the dynamic role of materiality in the research process—encourage to consider the other-than-human species as collaborators in the production of new knowledge rather than objects to be known. We suggest that reconfiguring participation in scientific inquiry as multispecies collaboration helps us to reinforce and communicate more-than-human attentiveness in contexts that traditionally promote the view of nature as an object for human scientific activity. At the same time, ecological sciences could provide a potential ground for pursuing non-anthropocentric understandings on a wide societal scale. Both of these approaches are important in developing new practices of participation and knowing that are needed for a more sustainable future.

Authors

• Anttoni Kervinen, University of Helsinki
  Presenting Author

• Riikka Hohti, University of Oulu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Maria Helena Saari, University of Oulu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tuure Tammi, University of Oulu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Tuomas Aivelo, University of Helsinki
  Non-Presenting Author