We have a really exciting group of international and local scholars looking at the construction of boundaries and interfaces between human and non-human 'knowers'; creative co-production of place with non-humans; issues to do with communication and representation; embodied entanglements between human and non-human and challenging the positionality of the one who 'knows'.

Come along on Wednesday. We'll be in Electrical Engineering Building, Room 403a, Sessions 1 through 4.

You can find out more about each session below:

Session One: More-than-Human Bodily Entanglements: Boundaries, Interfaces, Knowers with presentations from @eva_faerycake, Gregory Hollin, Anna Krzywoszynska, Sophie Lewis, @SandySom

Session Two: (Not) Seeing, Hearing, Showing Non-Humans with presentations from @DrJennyA, @ProfLesleyHead, Michael Gallagher, Erin Despard, Timothy Hodgetts, @routesandroots,

Session Three: Co-producing place with non-humans with presentations from @ecoartnotes, @FelicityPicken, Antony Lyons, Jon Pigott, Jacob Shell

Session Four: Who Knows?: relocating participatory knowledges across human/non-human divides with presentations by @mhbastian, Skye Naslund, Felice Wyndham, @ollyzanetti

Hope to meet some of you there! If not, I'm sure there'll be some live tweeting going on.

Michelle Bastian

Members of the MPR project are contributing to convening sessions at next year's Royal Geographical Society conference in London 26-29 August on the topic of more-than-human participatory research. Details of how to submit a proposal can be found at the bottom of this post.

Co-production of knowledge with non-humans:  plants, animals,  materialities - spaces and places
Convenors: Michelle Bastian (Edinburgh), Michael Buser (UWE), Owain Jones (Gloucester), Emma Roe (Southampton) 

Sponsored by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group and the Participatory Geographies Research Group

Session abstract
This session will explore how the co-production of knowledge within (and between) communities is being expanded beyond narrowly human  notions of community to take into account the ‘voices’, needs and agencies of non-humans. We seek to explore how co-production has been done (historical examples), is being done, and can be done (imagined futures), with panoplies of non-humans which range through animals, plants, technologies and materials within space-time in both topological and topographical formations.  We feel that expanding the processes of knowledge creation through co-production is a necessary step in efforts to address the toxic nature/culture divide and in developing materialist techno-ecologicalisation of politics and ethics (Haraway, Latour, Bennett, Barad etc.). We need deeper engagements with the ecological (taken in its broadest sense), materialised processes which conjure communities into being, sustain them,  set them together, apart, in conflict, and bring them down; and in how they might be reformed into more just configurations.  We seek contributions which: report upon work that has sought to co-produce knowledge with non-humans;  speculate (plan) conceptually and methodologically on  how co-productions with non-humans of differing stripe might be done; stage dialogues between specialists in co-production and those specialising in the more-than-human (broadly conceived).

The co-production of research with(in) communities is a welcome effort to democratize, de-centre and reenergize knowledge production (Durose et al).  Inspired by a variety of feminist epistemologies, as well as emancipatory movements from South America and Africa (e.g. Freire), the central components of the co-production agenda have been the desire to support the inclusion of marginalised voices in the research process, to make research accountable to those it affects, and, in the process, to transform the practices of research and knowledge production. However co-production often remains in the human/social realm consisting of partnerships, collaborations, conflict management, development plans, etc. between individual and collective social agencies. We are concerned that co-produced research which stays within the (narrowly prescribed) social (human) realm becomes ‘part of the problem’ rather than ‘part of the solution’ in terms of  long term flourishing of diverse life.

One of the foremost proponents of participatory research - Peter Reason – has argued that the ethical and political imperatives implicit within the co-production paradigm need to be extended to non-humans. Claiming that we need to re-conceive ourselves as embedded within biotic systems, Reason characterises the notion of the more-than-human as an emergent edge within participatory research. Durose et al have also drawn attention to how long-standing epistemological debates about the nature of knowledge and expertise lie at the heart of debate about the impact of co-producing research.

Engagement with a whole range of work that identifies human exceptionalism as a fundamental impediment to knowledge, has been recognized as key to effectively addressing socio-ecological challenges. The (neglected)  interdependencies between the social and the ecological are writ large in the current era of ‘ecocide’, and realigning them from toxic to therapeutic forms is essential. However, transformative dialogues between co-production practitioners and those working on the more-than-human, which promise so much for both approaches, have yet to take place.

Thus we are specifically interested to explore how co-produced research can be inclusive of a wider set of actors than just the human. And in how to meet the challenges and opportunities offered by exploring methods and philosophies of co-production and how it might be transformed by the recognition of experiences, desires and knowledges of more-than-human agencies. And, in turn, how more-than-human approaches might learn from the attentiveness to community, voice, participation and methodology which have been developed within the field of co-production.  The session draws inspiration from a variety of recent projects and writings which have sought to bring non-humans of one kind or another (plants, animals, technologies, and wider materialised processes) into knowledge co-production. These have variously engaged with ideas of empathy, agency, witnessing, experimental partnering, data sonification, narrative theory, conversation and voice to explore possibilities of co-working with non-humans.

Contributions (using tradition or non-tradition formats) might:

• report upon work that has sought to co-produce knowledge with non-humans.

• speculate (plan) conceptually and methodologically on how co-productions with non-humans of differing stripe might be done.
• stage dialogues between specialists in co-production and those specialising in the more-than-human (broadly conceived).
• explore methods for more-than-human participatory research.
• explore what areas like animal-geographies could learn from participatory geographies
• outline the possibilities of working with non-humans as agents, including the place of scientific, craft and art expertise, learning from ethology and from those who work with and know particular non-humans.
• propose ways of de-centring the human, moving from Cartesian knowing self to a more ecological form of self as collective/network.
• shed light on the interplay between theriomorphism and anthropomorphism and explore the interface between becoming-human and becoming-animal.
  

We hope to run 2 sessions of 4 or 5 papers (or equivalent effort)

Please send questions and email proposals (title, 200 word abstract) by the 31st of January 2014 to one or more of:

• Michelle Bastian
  

• Michael Buser
  
• Owain Jones
  

This project takes place in a context of mass species extinction, extensive habit loss, climate change, and resource depletion. At its heart is the conviction that, while dominant research paradigms have undoubtedly given rise to  improvements in a range of areas, they have nonetheless failed to address how our changing societies might remain within sustainable limits. One concrete example of the effects of failing to consider more-than-human communities within research is the drastic decline of vultures in East Asia, where over 99% of the population have died from acute reactions to diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug given to cattle. Over and above the consequences for the vultures themselves, the increasing amounts of carrion available, (which was previously eaten by the vultures), has led to an exploding feral dog population, which in turn has led to tens of thousands of rabies cases in humans, as well as increases in other diseases. There have also been cultural losses for Zoroastrian communities who have had to find alternative funeral methods. This cascade of effects, which has very real consequences for humans, is partly due to inadequate research methods around drug testing that do not take broader contexts into account (van Dooren, 2010).

What this suggests is that the impacts of transforming research practices so that they operate within a paradigm of more-than- human communities are potentially immense. However, shifting conventional research paradigms, many of which remain embedded within Enlightenment philosophies of self-aware humans in a machine-like world, is not a task to be taken at all lightly. Thus while we would like to situate our project within this broader context, we have more modest hopes for our work.

Traditionally, concepts of community have been tightly bound to ideals of shared communication. The vision of the localised, face-to-face community and the emphasis on the need for shared languages and cultures, as well as the exercise of public reason (e.g. Habermas), remains influential even as it has been widely challenged. In this context, the move towards the co-production and co-design of research (e.g. Ostrom, 1996) is particularly interesting, since even while much of this research is aimed at strengthening local communities, at its heart is an account of knowledge as partial and situated (Haraway 1988). That is, rather than taking a universalist approach to knowledge, and knowledge generation, it is explicit about the difficulties of communication and the incompleteness of any knowledge system. As a result, the co-production agenda raises a range of fundamental philosophical questions about what it means to generate knowledge, even while it insists on the need to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders in the interest of stronger and more ethical research processes.

Inspired by a variety of feminist epistemologies, as well as emancipatory movements from South America and Africa (e.g. Freire 1970 [PDF]), the central components of the co-production agenda have been the desire to support the inclusion of marginalised voices in the research process, to make research accountable to those it affects, and, in the process, to transform the practice of research and knowledge production. To date, discussions of co-production have taken place in a range of areas including public service provision (Verschuere, 2012), health services (Gillard, 2010), management and organisational research (Antonacopoulou, 2010; Orr, 2009), as well as broader debates about science, policy and the public realm (Nowotny, 2001). However, in our current context, where the failure of the enlightenment project to produce knowledges that support sustainable ways of life has become clearly apparent, there are strong incentives to extend this agenda by thinking through what, and who, research might still need to take into account.

Intriguingly, one of the foremost current proponents of participatory research - Peter Reason – has explicitly argued that the ethical and political imperatives implicit within the co-production paradigm need to be extended to non-humans (Reason, 2005). Claiming that we need to re-conceive ourselves as embedded within biotic systems, Reason characterises the notion of the more-than-human as an emergent edge within participatory research. Like other writers on co-production within sustainability research (Maclean, 2009; Pohl, et.al. 2010), he notes that non-humans are both marginalised from, and affected by, research processes. The need to more explicitly engage with the problem of how to place non-humans at the heart of the research process has also been noted by feminist biologist Lynda Birke in relation to Human-Animal Studies (Birke, 2012, 152). Even so, the work of exploring how co-production might be redesigned to take non-human participants into account is still to be undertaken.

Despite this, there is much work to suggest that taking the more-than-human into account can produce broader understandings of both ‘community’ and ‘research’ that are better able to account for the changing nature of communities in our current context.  Bruno Latour’s notion of a Parliament of Things (Latour, 1993), and Donna Haraway’s account of companion species (Haraway, 2008) already provide important pathways into thinking through these issues. More recently, Nigel Clark’s account (2010) of the role of dynamic geological processes in social life provides an example of how to extend the more-than-human community beyond animate life.  Work utilising methods such as multi-species ethnography has further shown the importance of attending to the perspectives of non-humans in understanding technology design (Mancini, 2012), tourist communities (Fuentes, 2010), indigenous activism (de la Cadena, 2010) and field research (Candea, 2010). Connecting research on co-production and ‘the more than human’ thus has the potential to extent both literatures while also contributing to more nuanced understandings of ethics, power and voice in the research process.

Michelle Bastian

References
Antonacopoulou, E. P. (2010). "Beyond co-production: practice-relevant scholarship as a foundation for delivering impact through powerful ideas." Public Money & Management 30(4): 219-226.
Birke, L. (2012). "Unnamed Others: How Can Thinking about "Animals" Matter to Feminist Theorizing?" NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 20(2): 148-157.
de la Cadena, M. (2010). "Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond “Politics”." Cultural Anthropology 25(2): 334-370.
Candea, M. (2010). ""I fell in love with Carlos the Meerkat": engagement and detachment in human-animal relations." American Ethnologist 37(2): 241-258.
Clark, N. (2010). Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet London, Sage.
van Dooren, T. (2010). "Pain of Extinction: The Death of a Vulture." Cultural Studies Review 16(2): 271-289.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, Continuum.
Fuentes, A. (2010). "Naturalcultural encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology." Cultural Anthropology 25(4): 600-624
Gillard, S., K. Turner, et al. (2010). "“Staying native”: coproduction in mental health services research." International Journal of Public Sector Management 23(6): 567 - 577
Haraway, D. (1988). "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective."  Feminist Studies 14(3): 575-599.
Haraway, D. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
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Mancini, C., J. v. d. Linden, et al. (2012). Exploring Interspecies Sensemaking: Dog Tracking Semiotics and Multispecies Ethnography. Ubicomp, Pittsburgh, USA.
Nowotny, H., P. Scott, et al. (2001). Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, Polity Press.
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Ostrom, E. (1996). "Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy, and development." World Development 24(6): 1073-1087.
Pohl, C., S. Rist, et al. (2010). "Researchers' roles in knowledge co-production: experience from sustainability research in Kenya, Switzerland, Bolivia and Nepal." Science and Public Policy 37(4): 267-281.
Reason, P. (2005). "Living as Part of the Whole: The Implications of Participation." Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 2(2): 35-41.
Verschuere, B., T. Brandsen, et al. (2012). "Co-production: The State of the Art in Research and the Future Agenda." Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 23(4): 1083-1101.