Multi-species methods and methodologies

Guest editor: Ann-Sofie Lönngren, full professor in literature, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden

In Primate visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1989), Donna Haraway identified the narratives and metaphors that direct studies in primatology. Ever since, questions of methods and methodologies have been of high relevance in the interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies. As many scholars who are active in this area discover with time, the methods commonly used in our disciplines do not allow us to include non-human animals in our knowledge production. We need to go beyond the boundaries of our disciplines, meet and collaborate with each other. The high degree of innovation and experimentation that is often required when studying nonhuman animals also motivates challenges of the divide between science and art and calls for encounters and inspirations between these fields. In December 2024, the Multi-Species Methods conference was organized at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. Artists and researchers in the humanities and social sciences came from Sweden, Finland, Belgium and Poland to spend two days exploring the question of multi-species methodologies and the potential of intersecting artistic and scientific perspectives. The question addressed was as simple to phrase as it is difficult to answer: How can we create ethical knowledge about other species, about relations between species, and together with other species?

This issue of Zoophilologica is a way to continue that discussion in written form. Articles are welcome that engage with questions regarding methods and methodologies in relation to for example:

• sensory ethnographies, ”sensoriography”
• multispecies narration
• more-than-human history writing
• imagination and telepathy
• more-than-human action research
• interspecies dancing
• becomings
• assamblages and collectives
• sculptures
• followings
• painting and poetry
• knitting and weaving
• photography and film
• colonization-decolonization
• multispecies homes
• breeding and reproduction
• voicing and listening
• queer and ecological practices
• asymmetric power relations
• affinities, attachments and affections
• love, care and responsibility
• pets and pests
• to eat and be eaten
• ethics, vulnerability and mortality
• extermination and invasion
• violence and suffering
• hunting and killing

Deadline for submitting articles to this English-only special issue of Zoophilologica is 30.05.2025.