Methods of Engagement: Feminist Approaches to Collaborations in Studying Beyond the Human

Abstract

This panel session features multispecies research that engages relational webs of knowledge making and troubles the divides between researcher and researched at multiple scales. Authors on this panel take varying approaches to collaborative work with life scientists, community members, and more-than-human worlds--jumping spiders, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and other plants. These research projects aim to critically examine the power relations that shape, and are in turn shaped by, knowledge making practices about the “natural world”; crucially, however, they do so in explicit engagement with a multitude of knowledge makers, across disciplines, species-lines, and spheres of “expertise”. As feminist, queer, and Indigenous scholars of science and technology studies insist, we aim to find new ways to work with a multitude of beings that participate in constructing worlds and knowledges, and examine consequences of uneven relations and power laden struggles over meanings and categorizations. How can research practice decenter historically contingent definitions of what it means to be human, and human categorizations of other-than-humans, in ways that allow for new forms of knowledge to emerge? What insights can be cultivated by attending to lives and knowledges beyond the human? How does power come into play in these research encounters? How do these questions draw from and come to bear on political struggles and regenerative movements?

Discussant

• Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UW Seattle

Individual Presentations

• (Re)Generative Equivocations in the Creation of a "Medicinal Forest Garden" - Laura L Dev, University of California Berkeley

• Unthinkable Plant Science: Troubling Cognitive Commons with Dr. Gagliano - Kristi Onzik, UC Davis Anthropology

• Toward a Praxis of Queer Biology: Feminist Ethnography in the Fields of Animal Mating Science - Ashton Wesner, UC Berkeley

• Making Value and Making Money with Amateur Applied Mycology - Joanna Steinhardt

Session Organizers

• Ashton Wesner, UC Berkeley

• Laura L Dev, University of California Berkeley