In her text “Domesticating practices: The case of Arabian babblers”, Vincianne Despret  describes the different research practices of two biologists whose scientific controversies involved different methods and theories. These divergent descriptions and approaches gave her the sense that, despite studying the same "object", the two scientists "were not dealing with the same birds.”

These issues matter in contemporary literature on the role of animals in shaping human environments and infrastructures (waste, water, housing, transport, disease ecologies, conservation devices, sensing technologies), where collaboration across behavioural sciences, biology/ecology, anthropology/sociology, arts-based research, and urban studies is often encouraged, but rarely discussed at the level of everyday practice and disciplinary friction.

What changes when animals are experienced or experimented upon? Do we do research on or with animals? What kind of observations count as good data in different disciplinary frameworks? And  how can these frameworks influence each others? Building on Despret's insight, this workshop asks how different methodological approaches “produce” different animals, and how interdisciplinary encounters can help us shape new  questions and perspectives when studying more-than-humans (their behaviour, agency,  significance) in social worlds.

Format

Instead of a full presentation, participants are encouraged to prepare a 5–10-minute pitch (with a few slides) to describe their own research topic, focusing especially on describing their own research practices and methods (what they do, what counts as a result for them, what is contested in their field, what were their methodological choices and why, etc.)

Programme