In the last decades, scholars from different backgrounds have engaged with ethnography as. a method to study biosocial worlds. While this approach offers great flexibility and openness, multispecies ethnography also entails the challenge of describing more-than-human agency beyond human discourses. What can animals, viruses, plants, but also spirits and objects, tell us about the human societies? And how to access their point of view through their material entanglement with human worlds and infrastructures?

In this lecture, Giovanna Capponi will analyse different case studies - from sacrificial chickens to wild boars in conservation areas and feral cats in urban environments - to highlight the challenges of multispecies ethnography as the privileged method of anthropological enquiry. Moreover, she will show the clashes and dialogues between ethnography and other methodological approaches from the natural sciences, geography, or the arts. Indeed, studying more-than-human meshes configures a crucial opportunity to cross epistemological and methodological boundaries. Can social sciences help formulate new questions for natural sciences? Which methodological tools can be employed to answer them? Drawing on these insights, she argues that the epistemological contamination prompted by multispecies ethnography is fundamental to rethinking how we pursue interdisciplinary research.