Authors

This project brings together a collection of creative research based on original multispecies ethnography. It is the result of our collaborative initiative towards artistic forms of methodology, which, over the course of the past two years, has developed through the creation of a network and two conferences. This open access publication is situated in the interstices of Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods to show how their creative combination can offer fruitful pathways for the social sciences, humanities and arts-based research beyond-the-human. We deliberately opt for ‘artful’ rather than ‘arts-based methods’ or ‘artistic methods’, as we want to engage the double entendre of the word, signaling artistic, skillful and at the same time innovative practices that can be, but are not necessarily, aimed at being Art in their own right (Petitt and Servais, 2024). As Andersen et al. (2023) have noted, the forces of a globalised world implicate the very conditions of doing fieldwork; such surging and unpredictable conditions ask for new kinds of reflexivity and storytelling. We suggest that artful methods can be a valuable and even vital approach for allowing multiple more-than-human actors into our multispecies storying, both in our praxis and forms of representation (van Dooren et al., 2016).

A growing body of research and writing is emerging in the form of ethnography with a focus beyond the human. ‘Multispecies ethnography’ within anthropology is the engagement with human sociality in relation to an assemblage of other agentive beings, which may comprise humans, other animals, plants and microbes (see Ogden et al., 2013: 6). Since the mid-1980s, there has also been a long anthropological tradition of different narrative forms of creative writing and storytelling as a means of conveying ethnography (Clifford and Marcus, 1986). Since this period, there has also been an engagement beyond text-based analysis alone with a diversity of forms of creative output, recognised as visual anthropology and sensory ethnography (MacDougall, 1997; Stoller, 1997), or more recently multisensorial and multimodal forms of output. Arts-based methods and creative forms of research are, therefore, not new. Yet there is much to explore in the engagement between the two spheres, embracing more-than-human oriented research, or multispecies ethnography, in combination with multimodal forms of creative output, or artistic practice. Yet neither multispecies ethnography nor artistic methods has been confined to the discipline of anthropology alone. In the visual arts, for instance, there has been increasing engagement with the more-than-human and with multispecies studies-oriented research, or animal studies, as part of a broader embracing of the ‘animal turn’ across the humanities and the arts (see, for example, the artistic works of Olafur Eliasson and Cecilia Vasquez Yui; see Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015 on the ‘ethnographic turn’ in the arts).

In the interdisciplinary field of animal studies, the matter of cross-species communication is increasingly being explored by scholars who challenge the fundamental difference between humans and other animals. Researchers apply to human-animal communication the concepts and methods used in human psychology, sociology or anthropology to reveal interspecies forms of social interaction and cross-species engagement. In so doing, they open the scope of these methods, showing commonalities of communication in other beings, particularly mammals (examples may be found in Alger and Alger, 1999; Cornips and van Koppen, 2024; Greenebaum, 2010; Meijer, 2019; Mondada and Meguerditchian, 2022; Mondémé, 2022). Another approach is in the realm of animal behaviour, or ethology, engaged with how human beings can learn to be sensitive and respond to sensory cues, or different forms of body language (Brandt, 2004; Fijn, 2021; Fijn and Kavesh, 2023; Goode, 2007; Hartigan, 2021; Shapiro, 1990). Such approaches decentre the perspective from human language and a rationality-based cognitive approach toward communication to a more embodied, subtle and unspoken, or sensorial, one.

In this book, we expand the focus on multispecies relatedness beyond the animal by also considering trees, plants and perceived agentive beings, such as snow, or a river. We have brought multispecies ethnographic examples together which highlight how artistic methods can contribute to increase the researcher’s openness and empathy towards other species’ differences, through an attention to detail and deep forms of observation, such as a cow’s gaze, or a beetle’s movement, which may be an important aspect of non-verbal forms of interspecies communication.

Our collaborative approach within this volume is through an embodiment of a feminist-oriented, caring and creative way of conducting research. Observational methods and the ‘art of noticing’ (Tsing, 2010), alongside imaginative, yet grounded, artful methods can become integral components of multispecies ethnography, lending to a scholarship that relates to other ways of knowing and engaging with the world, which will hopefully progressively build on our collective interdisciplinary practices and ethics across the social sciences, humanities and the arts.

INTRODUCTION

The interlinkages between anthropology and art that this volume presents draw on a tradition of arts-based methods (Culhane and Elliot, 2017; Leavy, 2020). Words such as creative, artistic or arts-based methods denote a range of research practices. Research participants may be asked to engage with, for example, photography, filmmaking or drawing (MacDougall, 2022: 181–88), while perhaps the researcher draws, paints, dances, or collaborates with artists as a form of enquiry, analysis or communicative output. The entanglements of academia and art in different kinds of collaborations and interdisciplinary endeavours are expanding through observational films or ethnographic research being exhibited in art gallery or museum contexts (Grimshaw and Ravetz, 2015). Anthropologist Steven Feld (2024) speaks of intermediality as a way of performing with different media through composition, describing the complexities of his multimedia research as a ‘verbo-voco-grapho-sono-visual’ form of installation. Here, the intention is to highlight that there are ample opportunities for crosspollination between multispecies ethnography and the use of creative methods to further cross-cultural and inter-species perspectives.

Multispecies ethnographers from different disciplines and continents engage in creative data collection, analysis and dissemination in various and divergent ways. Some put creative and artistic practices to use in primarily one phase of their research, while others let the creativity infuse the whole academic process. In our editorial team, as well as amongst the other contributors of this volume, we have varying degrees of expertise and experience with art as a practice. What we do share is the experience of engaging in creative and artistic forms as a valuable research methodology. In order to include the array of methods – ranging from fine art in its own right, through to artistic practices and approaches within other forms of research, to creative techniques other than mainstream academic methods – we use artful methods as a collective term (see also Petitt and Servais, 2024). Artful methods offer a means to move beyond human exceptionalism to disrupt common subject-researcher relations, allowing for non-human creativity and agency to be incorporated into our research. The different possibilities of art-inspired methods within multispecies ethnography are being explored as a way of being more sensitive and receptive to more than humans (Hamilton and Taylor, 2017). Moreover, artful research methods have feminist, decolonial, anarchist and otherwise subversive potential (Ohito and Nyache, 2019; Petitt, 2023), taking othered forms of knowledge seriously, while troubling mainstream and normative academic practices.

In this volume, we explore Multispecies Ethnography and Artful Methods by gathering together ethnographic insights co-created with our human and non-human interlocutors, the researchers’ own creativity, and scholarly forms of analysis and output beyond academia (within a scientific framework – see Fernández-Giménez, 2015). This publication experiments with troubling the frontier of publishing expressions of more-than-human academic research by highlighting how the artful practices themselves can be the very core of data collection, analysis and dissemination of research results. As such, the creative pieces are not ‘just’ illustrations of textual representations but part of the iterative analytical process. Indeed, some of the artful contributions were not originally created with academic or artistic dissemination in mind.

In this publication, we bring together original research from both young scholars of multispecies ethnography who have found their way into artful research methods, and more experienced practitioners drawing on a long tradition in their field. Contributions by well-established scholars alongside early-career researchers, as well as emerging student researchers exploring new modes of research, offer a diverse collection of analytical, methodological and empiric orientations, while conversing at the intersection of multispecies ethnography and artful methods. Ranging from ethnographic poetry and other forms of creative writing; the artistic practices of drawing, painting and printmaking; through to the more familiar forms of visual anthropology, such as photography, filmmaking and sound, this publication showcases the value of different forms of creativity through the use of artful methods, while highlighting some of the critical challenges and questions that arise and that need to be considered carefully as this emerging field expands. Creativity, sometimes referred to as innovative practices, is often called for across both the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities, to allow for the capacity to think differently, in theoretical, conceptual and methodological contexts. Such explorations can lead to new perspectives and fruitful ways to understanding the world around us and our place within it.

Artful research practices gain ground and steadily make their way from the realm of exceptions, through the territory of marginality and towards the sea of scholarly acceptance. Our intention is therefore to support and showcase emerging multispecies ethnographers who use artful research methods, by creating and holding a nurturing space to explore and invent. As such, emphasis within the contributions has been to show how a particular artful method has been useful to each contributor when working with multispecies ethnography. While contributors have been free to choose their own format for each piece, we have asked everyone to write a short text outlining how they use artful methods and why it is crucial for their practices as multispecies ethnographers.

Inspired by the ethnographic statements that commonly accompany ethnographic poems, outlining the kind of ethnography a poem is based on, we call our accompanying texts ‘artnographic statements’. They are intended to guide the reader, viewer or listener behind-the-scenes of the scholarly context of each creative contribution. These statements are thus a place for each contributor to engage conceptually and methodologically with reflections around the background to their contribution. Importantly, the word ‘artnographic’ signals the entanglement of the ethnographic and the artful and how creative elements have been integral to insights within research. This is our way of playing creatively, launching artful ethnography into the conceptual domain as a particular way of doing ethnography, in conjunction with a particular way to create art and artful practices. Approaching ethnography in an artful way is more than ‘just’ making a drawing, a poem or a film as part of one’s research. It is about engaging with an artful attention and openness regarding how one approaches ethnography, an openness to taking notice of the details and taking new kinds of experiences seriously through a playful engagement with interlocuters who may also happen to be different species. In this way, an artful approach can permeate ethnography as much as the ethnography can permeate artful practice.

Artful methods

Contributions to this volume

While diverse in their artful expressions, the contributions to this volume are all based on multispecies or more-than-human ethnography. Multispecies ethnography can be communicated beyond ‘ordinary’ academic text to explore other multimodal forms of output that allow for an engagement with the senses in various forms, such as photography, film or as a part of an art exhibition (Fijn and Kavesh, 2020, 13). Possibly the most prominent recent engagement with the more-than-human in the use of video and sound has been by the Director of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, Lucien Castaing-Taylor. Documentaries such as Sweetgrass and Leviathan are excellent examples of a sensory, experimental approach to filmmaking with a focus beyond the human. Hermione Spriggs’ film contribution to this publication project is in keeping with this sensorial style of filmmaking, where the viewer enters into the world of the mole, evoking the darkness and density of the dirt that the mole has to push through underground.

David MacDougall (1997) has written about what he calls an ‘embodied cinema’, where video and audio within observational films can function as a window beyond vision and sound to encompass a broader awareness of the sensorial surroundings within a film, evoking aspects such as the touch of the texture of clothing, or the smell of smoke. In her contribution, Nanna Sandager Kisby experiments sensorially with sound recordings and still images to better understand the meanings of how humans and snow as an agentive being meet in Ilulissat, Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Combined with a range of Nanna’s subjective images – from wide-shots situating the viewer in the landscape, to images paying close attention to the texture of snow – are the different sounds embedded within this unique landscape, which could be viewed as harsh and inhospitable but, through a depth of knowledge about place, can open up the senses to a different kind of engagement with a snowy, Arctic landscape.

Natasha Fijn used a combination of natural history with observational film techniques to convey cross-species and cross-cultural observations in the field in her book Living with Herds (Fijn, 2011) – what she has referred to as an etho-ethnographic approach to multispecies filmmaking (Fijn, 2012). Like ethnographic, or observational filmmaking, the photo essay has been used extensively as a tool of communication in the context of visual anthropology. In this volume, Natasha Fijn’s contribution is not in her usual embodied filmmaking style that she has integrated with written multispecies ethnography. Instead, she has focused on individual eucalyptus trees as agentive beings, using still photographs to form a photo essay: a series of images capturing moments in time, placed in context with one another to form a more-than-human narrative with accompanying written captions.

The contribution by Angela Bartram and Lee Deigaard taps into the formation of images together as a photographic narrative, while discussing their multispecies collaboration in artistic research within their accompanying text. Through a series of images, Charlotte Dorn makes observations regarding her artistic process, where she begins outdoors, observing through drawing, exploring her connection with beetles, then goes into the studio to work on them through printmaking. The photographic images and accompanying text are an explanatory tool for the artistic practice of observing closely to create printed pieces, but can also be thought of as integral to a particular multispecies ethnographic process. As Fijn and Kavesh have foregrounded: ‘Bridging ethological and ethnographic techniques together, or benefiting from the entanglements of natural history and observational filmmaking, such innovative approaches are promising for embarking upon novel enquiries in the perceptions of more-than-human sensory worlds’ (2023: 245).

Drawing has been part of taking ethnographic field notes and illustrating accounts from the outset of the discipline of anthropology, more recently receiving attention across the humanities and social sciences for its analytic usefulness and importance as a means of data collection to accompany fieldnotes, or as a form of remembering an event that has occurred (see Causey, 2017; Taussig, 2011). Simone de Boer and Hanna Charlotta Wernersson draw on various forms of ethnographic drawing, whilst integrating video excerpts and still images and accompanying insights through words. As such, in their contribution they explore the lives of cattle in Sweden and compost worms in Kyrgyzstan through a multi-layered, multimodal form of research.

The contribution by Merlijn Huntjens, Nina Willems and Leonie Cornips, as well as that by Catrien Notermans and Anke Tonnaer, together with Marcel van Brakel, speak to the call for storytelling in the field of multispecies ethnography as a dynamic art of storying the world (van Dooren, 2014: 10), which has emerged over the past decade. A movement towards forms of (speculative) fiction comes forth from the need to challenge our anthropocentric and logocentric focus of knowing the world (Gatt and Lembo, 2022). Notermans, Tonnaer and van Brakel combine visual elements with creative writing as they develop a song lyric in order to tell a speculative research story of possible more-than-human worlds. The series of linked images is derived from explorations with the formation of drawings by an agentive more-than-human being with artificial intelligence (AI).

Creative writing may better capture alternative ontologies and epistemologies that acknowledge the more-than-human and the richness of the social relations that are maintained across species. Huntjens, Willems and Cornips combine photos, creative writing and poetry as they guide the reader to tune into intimate bovine subjectivities, including the agency of one non-binary cow in particular, on a small-scale farm in the Netherlands. Lisa Jean Moore engages text with a segment of video footage to tell a multispecies ethnographic story, where she explores the social, biological, sensorial and nurturing entanglements of her relationship with transgenic goats.

Ethnographic poetry has been an established field-based practice for over a decade (Maynard and Cahnmann-Taylor, 2010) and has furthered ways to capture affect and wordless interactions in the field (Zani, 2019), as well as being an innovative tool for the analysis of multispecies ethnography (Petitt, 2018, 2023; forthcoming), including interview material (Fernándes-Giménez, 2015; Fernándes-Giménez, Jennings and Wilmer, 2019). Poetry as feminist method has underscored the subversive power of the format, taking seriously knowledge traditions other than mainstream academia that stems from white, patriarchal and colonial practices (see, for example, Ohito and Nyachae, 2019). The ethnographic poetry contribution by Andrea Petitt is situated within poetic forms of ethnographic practice, while developing her own take through the use of rhyming analysis. By drawing on horseback ethnography and a combination of a poetic, ethnographic portrayal with analysis, Andrea explores how power relations between humans, horses and cattle take sensory shapes on a working cattle ranch in Colorado.

We note and appreciate that there is a wide scope in these collected contributions, both in theoretical and ethnographic articulation. Some pieces are by more experienced scholars who know how to reach beyond their particular ethnographic and interspecies worlds to help others imagine an epistemic expansiveness in inquiry and reporting. Other contributions are by researchers whose conceptual framework may be close to the specific case at hand, or whose ethnographic research is more clearly delineated, producing work that tells a focused story. We have welcomed a diversity in academic backgrounds, intentionally bringing together experienced and upcoming scholars who are original in their combination of multispecies ethnography and artful methods. Drawing on this diversity, we sought innovative ways of publishing their work that captures this combination of different spheres but conveys new methodologies collectively.

Indeed, the contributions to this volume are not just conveying research through a single medium, in an academic style of written ethnography, but are using different modalities to convey their multispecies storying. Several use multiple forms, including drawing with still images, or with moving images and sound, and accompanying text, sometimes creative and poetic, which builds up a layered, sensory mode of communication, more akin to artistic practice. Together, this collection of contributions offers a behind-the-scenes view of how multispecies ethnographers can engage artful methods in their own particular ways and this publication aims to showcase by original examples, pushing the frontier of creative forms of dissemination in academia.

Creating this volume

As editors, the journey of this publication started in 2022 when we crossed paths in serendipitous ways and discovered a shared passion for both multispecies ethnography and artistic practices. Two of the editors of this volume, Andrea Petitt and Véronique Servais, found each other through their shared practice of multispecies ethnography and proceeded to organise the possibility to working alongside each other, and eventually together (see Petitt and Servais, 2024). Simultaneously, Andrea had reached out to Anke Tonnaer and Catrien Notermans to discuss overlapping interests in gender and multispecies ethnography, and talks about coming together for an event simmered. It turned out that all four were interested in artistic forms of expression as research method and, in May 2022, we organised an online workshop with the theme of Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods (MEAM). The focus of the workshop was on how artistic – or artful – methods lend themselves in particular ways of conveying multispecies ethnography and the specific possibilities and challenges that multispecies questions offer. Natasha Fijn, with whom Andrea was in conversation regarding joint interests in horseback herding practices, participated in the workshop and subsequently came on board to join our editorial team with her expertise in the combination of multispecies, visual and sensory ethnography.

This volume sprouted forth from that first MEAM workshop, as we created the MEAM network. The following year we organised a hybrid MEAM conference in Liège, Belgium in July 2023. We asked workshop participants if they would like to engage in some form of experimental, creative publication together and received positive responses from participants. In collaborative dialogue, editors and contributors found formats suitable for an initial submission of different multimodal pieces. The approach was from the bottom-up: we first asked contributors what kind of piece they would like to contribute, and only then did we go ahead and structure some guidelines for publication possibilities.

As an editorial team, we have worked together for roughly two years and have established a positive, playful and creative, yet not uncritical, work climate and editorial style that has organically transpired through feedback from contributors within the MEAM network. In the editorial team, which also comprises of the core of the MEAM team organising the network and conferences, we know how to feed off each others’ expertise and energy and how to step in and support each other professionally. We have chosen to edit this book together to materialise, solidify and showcase to others this truly collaborative and non-elitist format of working creatively together. While Andrea Petitt took on the leadership role of the overall process and thus stands as first editor of this publication, we have adopted a joint effort and all decisions have been canvassed together. It is the open way that we have come together in meetings, creating space for discussing diverging views, engaging in clear and timely communication so as to be able to honour deadlines; it is trusting one another with information of changing situations that affect our tasks and collaborations, while receiving support and flexibility from each other in return; it is taking each other seriously as individuals and as academics, respecting one another’s time; it is creating a collaborative culture where we can trust that we will leave each meeting feeling better than we did when we arrived; it is also trusting that we give each other critical feedback in a respectful way, on our work and ideas. In short, behind the scenes, it is a practice of feminist practicalities that goes beyond theory, method, analysis and dissemination. As we have stepped into unknown paths together, we have opened ourselves to creative ways of working collaboratively together.

The editorial collective of this publication is, therefore, not only a list of names, but in itself a contribution to MEAM methodology, as it is the materialisation of operational practices of feminist, decolonial and more-than-human research practices. Research practicalities, such as curating and editing together academic output, are often an invisible aspect of research, and academia more broadly, that is interlinked with, but distinct from, research method, theory and empirical focuses of study. By highlighting such research practicalities as an important aspect in their own right, we propose an attention toward how collaboration can work in academia, and hope to encourage others to think critically about their processes of academic practice. We see our way of working together as aligned with explorative, feminist, egalitarian, decolonial practices, that go beyond the theories we use, the methods we engage in, or the empirical focus at hand, and have been integral to this volume featuring multispecies ethnography and artful methods.

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Ethnography beyond language

The process of meaning-making in one’s field of study is not limited to analysis of verbal speech and subsequent written language. Sensory ethnography emphasises how the senses, such as sight, smell, taste and touch, can inform research (Howes, 2003; Howes and Classen, 2014; Pink, 2015; Stoller, 1989). The desire to expand ethnographic practice beyond language and a linguistic-oriented focus arose decades earlier, stemming from a critique of the limitations inherent in verbalised speech and the prioritisation of language as the central form of communicating (Feld, 2021; Ingold, 2000), which links with the realisation of the need for anthropological research in the field to be open and attentive to how the body engages with one’s surroundings, as a form of phenomenological enquiry (Jackson, 1989; Stoller, 1997). Rather than taking a single sensory modality through emphasising sight in the form of ‘visual anthropology’, we have the capacity to draw upon multisensorial forms of engagement, integrating our attention across different senses, beyond the visual to a more embodied form of ethnography (Fijn and Kavesh, 2023: 241; Notermans, 2018, 2019). In recent publications, sensory anthropology has been reviewed for its potentially significant role in conveying an anthropology beyond the human, to include other animate beings (Fijn and Kavesh, 2020; Hamilton and Taylor, 2017; Vannini, 2023; Petitt, forthcoming).

This need for sensorial integrative approaches has become further warranted through the use of the term ‘multispecies ethnography’. Kirksey and Helmreich signaled problems with this as a form of representation: ‘How can or should or do anthropologists speak with and for nonhuman others?’ (2010: 554). They discuss several examples to show how art forms ‘have proved good to think with about “living with” in a multispecies world’ (ibid.: 556). From the outset of the post-humanist turn towards an ‘anthropology beyond humanity’ (Ingold, 2013), arts-based methodologies have been explored to address this problem of voice. Over the course of the past ten years or so, developing research styles such as the ‘arts of noticing’ (Tsing, 2010), ‘critical description’ (Tsing, 2014), ‘arts of attentiveness’ (van Dooren et al., 2016), and ‘slowing down’ (Stoller, 2023) have been adopted as ways of including the more-than-human world within a growing body of ethnographic research, yet leaving room for further exploration of both methods and forms of representation.

While ethology has traditionally studied animals as ‘natural’ beings and tried to resist anthropomorphism, some field ethologists (Lorenz, 2002 [1952]; Smuts, 2001; De Waal, 2008 among others) have recognised that the ability to read and understand animals’ behaviour is closely linked to a way of engaging sensorially with them and their surrounding environment. Lorenz, for example, was reputed for his ability to sketch an animal’s attitude and emotions in just a few pencil strokes, while Smuts explained how she learned from baboons through an embodied and intuitive form of knowledge of when and how to escape from a coming storm. The potential of engaging sensorially with animals is currently being rediscovered through the development of more interactive observational methods which acknowledge that proximity, mutual recognition, curiosity and emotional engagement are not necessarily bad for research (see for example Herzing et al., 2012). If the emerging field of etho-phenomenology considers animals as significant others with emotions, personalities and agency (Delfour and Chalmeau, 2023), we suggest that artful methods in science, such as animal behaviour, also have the potential to be explored further. Recently, an ‘Arts, Science and Environment’ programme (see Pénitot et al., 2021) explored whale behaviour and communication by playing music to them – and some whales answered. In their attempt to truly acknowledge what happened, Delfour and Chalmeau (2023) advocate a ‘poetic’ approach that goes beyond the mere description of the whale signal by acknowledging the mutual emotions of the whale and the researcher in their musical conversation. In such a poetic approach, the whale ‘purrs’ in response to the Gaelic song she is offered – a qualification forbidden by orthodox behavioural methods.

In the wake of posthumanism, the call for allowing multiple non-human as well as supernatural actors into ethnography (Fernando, 2022; Notermans and Tonnaer, 2024) comes from the recognition that an understanding of human nature is inherently an interspecies relationship (cf. Tsing, 2015) and a fundamental way of engaging with the world for many people across the world (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). A re-emerging problem of representation tallies with the realisation that living with other-than-human beings – animate, geomorphic or non-secular – is for many a daily aspect of communication, which benefits from artful means in order to arrive at cross-species understanding (see for example Chao, 2022; Govindrajan, 2018; Notermans, 2019, Fijn, 2019; Petitt, 2023; Petitt, forthcoming; Servais, 2024). Multispecies ethnography is an approach spurred on by the unprecedented disruption caused by this era of the Anthropocene (Bubandt, 2018), resulting in the need for creative ways to convey new understandings of ‘complex social relationships within ecological assemblages’ (Fijn and Kavesh, 2023: 238), an urgent need for the reappraisal of different onto-epistemological ways of being, and ultimately requiring an engagement with more-than-human sociality in the diverse means that our interlocutors do. Artful and creative methods allow us to make room for ambivalence, or ontological uncertainty (Graeber, 2015), avoiding the contemporary tendency to assign animals to symbolism or one stable category, such as prey, sacred being, pet, food or commodity.

Ethnographers may work with a particular species or a combination of species of animal, plant, fungi or elements viewed as agentive beings by other cultures, or moving forms such as water, earth or fire and the gods or spirits associated with them. These broad spectrums of agentive beings present diverse yet overlapping methodological challenges, such as how to understand different perspectives and how to take knowledge seriously from different kinds of bodies, wrapped up in power relations in intersectional ways. The opportunities and challenges of multispecies ethnography shape the research design not only in terms of data collection, but also in what analytical frameworks are operationalised throughout the research process, including how the processes of data analysis and dissemination emerge. It is no wonder, then, that multispecies ethnographers increasingly engage in creative and artful methods, such as different expressions of creative writing, poetry, photography and filmmaking, as well as drawing, painting and printmaking, to capture ways of relating beyond the human.