Learning to Be Affected With, About, and From the Birds

• In Event: Redefining Care in a Global Pandemic: Problematizing Relational Models in Socio-Ecological Systems

Abstract

Purpose/Theoretical framework: Multispecies scholars are calling for learning modes of attentiveness in doing multispecies research. Present in multispecies ethnography is intimately coming to know animals in a fully embodied relational way (Ellis, 2021) that cultivates the engagement in which humans and non-humans are transformed in their becoming (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink, 2010). Multispecies ethnography disrupts the triadic model of research – knowledge, a knower, and things (for example, see Barad 2007) – that claims that that there is a universal truth to be discovered or that an objective can be known or specified in advance (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016). The researcher becomes as much a part of the frame of the research itself through the practices of doing the research.

Tsing (2015, p. 17) calls the “arts of noticing,” observing the making of lifeways when living and non-living entities come together. But as van Dooren (2014, p. 14) has pointed out, it is not enough just to notice, “the specificity and proximity of [these] connections matter.” Learning the practice of immersive ways of paying attention to particularities can allow one to learn how to craft deliberative responses in shared worlds (van Dooren, Kirsey, & Munster, 2016, p. 1).

Methods/Data: Daily practices of birdwatching can provide a starting point for researchers to ‘get into the weeds’ of learning how to be affected in doing multispecies research. Bell (1997) suggests that the immersion in natural history provides enriching experiences that cultivates an embodied interdependence with nature. Influenced by Jamie Lorimer’s (2015, p. 51) concept of affect – extending beyond habituated bodily encounters to include the “feelings, moods, emotions” in experiencing these moments of situated embodied encounters, I use personal anecdotes of learning with, about, and from birds to explore just what it means to coinhabit the lifeworlds of birds.

Results/Significance: Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor and Blaise (2016, p. 152, p. 149) develop a series of creative “experimental shifts” in their attempts to “bridge the theory/practice divide” in decentring the human in doing multispecies ethnography. These include the transition from: ‘tracing the individual child to tracing the relations, representing animals as objects to engaging with animals as active research subjects, the focus on meaning-making and instead learning to be affected by the world, innocent to awkward encounters of mixed affect, exceptional human thinking to risk the endeavor of thinking collectively with other species’ (p. 153-162). These suggestions serve as a starting point for researchers to learn the practice of doing multispecies ethnography. I take up this question of learning to be affected even further by looking at those that are already participating in relational practices with nonhuman others (for example, see Roelvink, 2000).

Central to having a body means to articulate and to become sensitized in “learning to be affected” by a world with its many differences (Latour, 2004, p. 205). Latour describes the process of training a body to become sensitized as an entangled physiological and social process. But how do we register and become sensitized in our multispecies research worlds?

Author

• Joanna Chin, York University