(Lindsay Hamilton, Nik Taylor (Auth.) ) Ethnography (B-Ok - CC)

Power, Politi
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Ethnography after Humanism
Lindsay Hamilton • Nik Taylor
Ethnography after
Humanism
Power, Politics and Method in Multi-Species
Research
Lindsay Hamilton Nik Taylor
Keele Management School School of Social and Policy Studies
Keele University Flinders University of South Australia
Staffordshire, UK Adelaide, Australia
ISBN 978-1-137-53932-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53933-5 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933303
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Acknowledgements
Lindsay acknowledges the support and critical comments of Barry

Schofield, honorary research fellow at Keele University, as well as her
colleagues and students at Keele Management School who are a constant
source of wonderful ideas.
As always, Nik acknowledges the furry folk in her life. She currently
lives with Squirt, Loki and Bailey, who all offer their very own unique
form of support and encouragement. They are the reason she writes
about, and advocates for, other animals.
v
Contents
1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods 1
Part I Foundations 21
2 Why Ethnography? 23
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals 51
4 What Can Ethnography Be? 69
Part II Field-work 87
5 Visual Methods 89
6 Sensory Methods 111
7 Arts-Based Methods 131
vii
viii Contents
8 Hybrids of Method 153
9 People Writing for Animals 173
10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field? 193
Index 205
1
Introduction: An Ecology
of Ethnographic Methods
The idea for this book arose some years ago after we had completed our
first joint monograph together, Animals at Work (Hamilton & Taylor,
2013). In it, we presented a series of ethnographic vignettes of people
working with animals in some capacity or other, from those in car-
ing occupations, such as sanctuary volunteers, to those at the opposite
end of the spectrum working in abattoirs. We spent many hours, days
and, in fact, years interviewing people and observing places where ani-
mals and humans laboured together in some fashion. This took us to
some interesting and unusual settings: veterinary surgeries, animal shel-
ters, meatpacking plants and farms. We noticed that work with animals
took very different forms, from the close-up intimacy of the rescue shel-
ter to the distant, strictly zoned and highly mechanised factory floor of
the abattoir. While doing this fieldwork that interrogated meanings of
humanity and animality, we analysed modes of identity construction for
both human and animal groups, and assessed attitudes towards other spe-
cies. In doing so, we realised that this kind of ethnographic work nec-
essarily required us to acknowledge that we, as humans, were the ones
doing the research and the writing and that the animals, while present
© The Author(s) 2017 1

L. Hamilton, N. Taylor, Ethnography after Humanism,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_1
2 Ethnography after Humanism
in our day-to-day activities as ethnographers, were often absent from our

final—written—books and articles.
Ultimately, for us, this begged the obvious question, where are the ani-
mals themselves in this research? As we began to think about this together,
and developed our thinking on methods in other projects, we became
convinced that the reality is that the animals themselves tend to be
written out of the story by humans, particularly if one uses traditional,
human-centred methods to try and understand human–animal relations.
We found this problematic on many levels. So problematic, in fact, that
we decided to think it through in our next book, the results of which you
are currently reading.
Species Difference as a “Research Problem”

Ethnographers have a tendency to consider what other species mean to
humans rather than considering or seeking to understand how humans
and animals co-constitute the world. The human point of view is privi-
leged, which means we see other animals as adjuncts to us and our
lives instead of either living symbiotically with us or as having lives
in their own right. Indeed, many would argue that research into such
co-constituted worlds is outside the scope of the qualitative family of
methods usually characteristic of ethnography and that we should,
therefore, resist the temptation to speculate over that which we have no
way of learning.
It is true that animal lives are dominated by a range of distinctive con-
cerns, which are generally assumed to be existential rather than reflective.
Animals also behave in ways that are sometimes counter-intuitive to us,
concealing, at least to human eyes, that which we—as humans—are often
able to partially or wholly reveal to each other (and to certain animals
such as companion species) through a range of verbal and behavioural
cues. This is tricky to incorporate in our research projects and methods
because animals cannot participate through traditional methods. They do
not speak or write, at least not in ways we can easily decode and interpret,
meaning they cannot be interviewed, join focus groups or fill in question-
naires and surveys.
1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods
3
It is understandable, then, that most social science focuses on the

human world, while other disciplines such as ethology and veterinary
science, for example, excavate the meanings of animal behaviours dif-
ferently. Although it is worth noting that even here, in purportedly
animal-focused disciplines, animal subjectivity is often marginal or absent
altogether. Working below the surface of this act of partitioning is a pow-
erful focus on “the human”; a dominant and hegemonic belief that ani-
mals do not have selves or identities and, by extension, that they do not
matter or at least do not matter as much as humans. This has rendered
them all but invisible particularly to the social sciences. And this ensures
nonhuman animals are left firmly at the margins of qualitative research
practices, which at best reduces their status to objects or at worst ignores
them completely within a silent but salient hierarchy. In choosing not to
consider this problem, ethnographers inevitably become complicit in this
silencing process. The process of people writing (ethnography’s etymologi-
cal root) is humanistic by its very nature. In fact, like subjectivity and
identity, concepts of people and personhood are intrinsically linked to
the idea of the social and are, thus, taken to refer to humans rather than
animals.
Even among researchers who do acknowledge the presence of other
animals, and purport to study them in the burgeoning field of human–
animal studies, most do not interrogate what it means that it is us who
are watching them and that it is us who assert the power to speak for them.
This is unpalatable to us for several reasons which we explore through-
out the course of this book. Suffice to say here that the main reasons are
linked to the problematic of power which is a central interest to us both
and relevant to persistent patterns of thought which continue to domi-
nate the social sciences. The idea that social means human and that the
social sciences means the study of humans excludes animals from the idea
of communities and, therefore, from social science. This problem sits at
the heart of this book.
We engage with a serious research question leading from this acknowl-
edgement: Why is it that many researchers dismiss the presence of other
species at their fieldsites with a footnote or a throwaway comment (if
acknowledged at all), rendering them invisible or ignored? And is there
anything we can do, methodologically speaking, to better include animals
in our ethnographic endeavours? To be clear, we are not dismissive of

ethnography as a method. In fact, we find it a vital tool in the discovery
of new ideas and knowledges about human–animal relationships. But
at the present time, it does not offer an easy way to include animals.
It does not do what human–animal scholars need it to do. We want to
expand the field of what (and who) is researchable and design or adapt
ethnographies that question the primacy of the human in social spaces
and our research of those spaces. This, for us, means a greater acknowl-
edgement of the workings of power within ethnographic knowledge and
meaning-making.
Including Animals in Our Research

We have approached our separate social science research agendas differ-
ently to date. One of us (LH) is a scholar of organisations. Motivated by
a desire to understand how individuals interact with animals in organ-
isational settings, her research has focused upon the utility of qualitative,
and particularly ethnographic, techniques for understanding multi-
species cultures. She believes that analysing most forms of organisation in
terms of our relationship with the nonhuman world opens up opportuni-
ties to address important questions of accountability, ideology and ethics
and is what lies behind many contemporary discourses such as “corporate
social responsibility”, sustainability and environmental stewardship. The
second author (NT) is an advocate for animal liberation and her activist-
scholarship plays an important part in her professional life. Motivating
her research is the desire to understand the continuing uses and abuses of
animals in contemporary society with a view to being able to challenge,
resist and change them. Given that, statistically at least, most animals live
out their lives in some form of institutionalised manner (e.g. intensive
farms, zoos and animal shelters), this has taken her to the study of organ-
isations and workplaces as well. This, then, is where our work overlaps: in
the study of human–animal interaction in institutions and organisations.
While we have not always agreed on the interpretations of our field
data, particularly with regard to farming and slaughtering animals, what
perplexed and challenged us equally at the time of putting our first book
5
together (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013) was the almost complete lack of
methods tailored to understanding human–animal interactions and
relations. Our use of ethnography accomplished a detailed portrait of
the entanglements of human and animal lives in the places we studied
them, but we felt a persistent niggle that despite our shared emancipa-
tory agenda, we were privileging the perspective of the human workers in
these organisations and were far less able to speculate about alternative,
animal subjectivities that co-existed in them. In doing our fieldwork, we
openly encouraged humans to tell us what they thought or suspected
about other beings and their perspectives; we asked for opinions and
ideas about the animals they worked with and we took their responses
seriously as internally logical and rational beliefs. We were not, however,
equipped to find a more direct route to be able to listen for and to the
voices of animals (so to speak). They remained largely silent, and there-
fore absent, throughout our tales from the field.
Robinson (2011, p. 6) argues that we humans are entangled by vari-
ous identities, and representing these within the research endeavour is
“confusing, amazing, and sometimes downright messy”. In short, our
characters and identities—be they human or otherwise—compose what
Eduardo Kohn (2007, p. 4) calls an ecology of selves in social life, an
ecology formed organically, naturalistically and independently by living
beings existing and working together, interacting and conversing. And it
is this confusing, amazing and messy ecology of selves which we are seek-
ing, as ethnographers, to account for in some way. It is not dissimilar to
the “anthropology of life” that Kohn has advocated as necessary (2007,
p. 6) to demonstrate that humans are only one part of a larger intercon-
nected web of agencies and that “all-too-human worlds” exist “within a
larger series of processes and relationships that exceed the human”. It is
a form of social life which is inadequately mapped, frequently misun-
derstood or just ignored. The question we have both deliberated over for
some years now is how we can begin to document this—to develop meth-
ods that allow us to see and understand the beyond-the-human world.
Ethnographic work is evolving towards a variety of different special-
isms, for sure, but are we ever really going to be able to tell a mixed spe-
cies story well enough, especially using a method predicated on writing
by and for humans? Our frustrations with the limits of existing fieldwork
have been echoed by other scholars recently and a new buzzword, that of
multi-species ethnography has emerged. But what is multi-species ethnog-
raphy if, indeed, it is a method at all? Where has this development come
from? And what are its possibilities and limitations? These are the second-
ary set of questions that this book addresses. Our hope is that in writing
it, we will help to support and legitimise the rigorous endeavours of the
many hundreds of ethnographers who are now seeking to take a closer
look at human–animal relationships. It is worth noting, however, that we
have serious concerns with narrow labels like “multi-species ethnogra-
phy” and are reluctant to badge ourselves as multi-species ethnographers.
Given our concern about narrow labels as constraints, we use more
generic terms “multi-species methods”, “human–animal ethnography” or
“posthuman methods” consciously and interchangeably throughout the
book. When we do refer to multi-species ethnography, we do so to signal
narrow conceptions as used by those undertaking the work themselves.
Furthermore, while we call on a number of theoretical and philosophical
concepts, for reasons of coherence, we locate our own enquiry within
the field of human–animal studies, an area of study which—over the
last decade or so—has coalesced into a more recognisable field, variously
termed anthrozoology, human–animal studies, animal studies or criti-
cal animal studies. Like any academic field, it is not without its internal
cleavages or disputes, but it is a cohesive enough group to be considered
a field (which we choose to refer to generically as human–animal studies
throughout).
Our terminology reflects a practical choice on our behalf as we do
not wish to catalogue the differences of a field to those who have little
interest in internal politics, nor do we wish to have to write out the
different names every time we make mention of the field. The divi-
sions, which are often heartfelt and entirely real, can be difficult to
identify and are always contested so we could not pinpoint them to
everyone’s approval even if we decided to try (readers interested in
the emergence of the field and its differences are referred to Taylor &
Twine, 2014). Where we believe they matter most, we mention them
in the text. What unites this disciplinarily and ideologically disparate
field, however, is an interest in human relations with other animals,
which may include individual relations between different species or
7
may focus upon societal and cultural relations with, and attitudes
towards, animals.
It is important to acknowledge, then, that all the terms used in the
field, including our own choice of human–animal studies here, are prob-
lematic. In large part, this is because they reinstate the binary of human
vs animal that our scholarship in this area is trying to problematise. They
are also problematic because they assume animal as a generic category,
one which includes a vast array of different beings whose (often glori-
ous) differences should not be overwritten by simply labelling them ani-
mal. By extension, “animal” then comes to stand for “not human”, which
underlines that our terminology can shore up our pretensions to human
superiority. This, too, is problematic.
Our reservations about labelling human–animal research as multi-
species ethnography (even though it is an emergent paradigm) are that
it may become yet another novel way to understand the human, and
so, perhaps, inadvertently, reinscribe the very human–animal binaries
it purports to deconstruct. For example, Kirksey, Hannah, Lotterman,
and Moore (2016), in an attempt to “render visible the ongoing violence
taking place in laboratories behind closed doors”, subjected Loretta, an
African clawed frog, to an “outmoded pregnancy test” (p. 37). According
to the authors of the paper written about this public experiment, they
started “from a position of non-innocence, confronting the routine vio-
lence of experimental practices face-to-face with a captive frog” to con-
sider “how humans have become dependent on complex entanglements
with animals, ecosystems and emergent biotechnologies” (p. 38). While
the apparently unethical nature of this project is given a token mention,
much more is made of how it enabled those conducting it to blur “the
boundaries between performance art, science, and ethnography” (p. 37).
This is a clear example of how narrowly conceived multi-species ethnog-
raphies can fall into the trap of prioritising human knowledge over the
material and lived realities of what we feel amounted to animal abuse
with limited interest or application to questions beyond the extremely
narrow agenda of this particular project. As Dinker and Pedersen (2016)
note, it is worrying that we can “gloss over asymmetric human–animal
power relations” in pursuit of new methods, methods that may even con-
stitute “new euphemistic instantiations of human narcissism and desire
for knowledge and meaning-making, rather than formations of genuinely

ethical relations” (p. 417).
In contrast, we are interested in the varied and creative—but gentle
and respectful—methodological possibilities open to us once we ques-
tion human superiority and anthropocentrism in our research endeav-
ours. Hence, this book is about how we can push existing ethnographic
methods forward to include other beings, genuinely and with a view to
acknowledging and reducing power asymmetries between us and them.
This is an ethical, philosophical and practical undertaking. We do not
claim to present a straightforward “how to do multi-species research”
here, because we do not yet think this is available, if it ever will be. In
fact, we do not think a one-size-fits-all “how to” model is desirable and
we have no wish to limit the manifold possibilities that are currently open
by defining an ideal type of research model. Our main aim is to trouble
easy claims of human superiority through our methods.
hallenging Human Superiority in Research

C
Design and Approach
Removing assumptions of human superiority from our work is no easy
task for us as authors. It requires us to un-learn much that we take for
granted and to ask questions that often seem ludicrous to others (how do
we include a dog’s perspective when thinking about appropriate housing
for animal and human victims of domestic violence? How do we consider
what wild kangaroos might “think” about our colonising of their space?
How might we understand the resistance offered by certain cetaceans to
our idealised images of them? Can we characterise the actions of farmed
animals leaping from slaughterhouse trucks as resistance and a dash for
freedom?). Such questions do not fall within the usual terrain of ethnog-
raphers. Key to our, and others’, endeavours in this area is the freedom to
experiment—with ways of thinking, knowing and representing. And this
is why we do not offer here, nor think it appropriate to work towards, a
narrow definition of multi-species ethnography. Instead, we conceive of
our method simply as ethnography done differently and we weave together
a philosophical discussion with practical suggestions. The results might
9
frustrate those who want a straightforward answer to the question: How

do I do multi-species/posthuman research? We firmly believe, however, that
if you want these kinds of straightforward answers, then fieldwork that
tries to cross species boundaries and explore the mess and the grey areas
of interspecies social life is not for you.
Thinking about species boundaries is challenging. It is extremely dif-
ficult to avoid falling back into established tropes—ways of knowing,
writing, re-presenting—and we do not claim we have managed that
throughout this book. We have, however, asked questions with a view
to opening up a discussion regarding why we might want to do a form
of posthuman research that focuses on multi-species relations, and con-
sidered what it might look like. Numerous mainstream textbooks exist
to give researchers precise guidelines on a range of skills pertaining to
the research process, and this book does not aim to replicate that well-
trodden territory. However, we can say that planning a research project of
any nature demands an array of sophisticated techniques and competen-
cies, some of which take the researcher well outside their comfort zone
and often into the theories and literatures of other disciplines. This is
especially the case when considering multi-species relations.
Important literatures are to be found in diverse areas such as anthro-
pology and ethnography, philosophy, sociology, geography, science
studies and veterinary medicine. Navigating and making sense of such
diversity adds extra complexity to posthuman research into multi-species
relations, for it demands close attention be paid to the power involved:
the power of authors, whatever their training, to make claims and to cre-
ate worlds for, and about, their research participants (at least on paper).
We aim to provide the reader with a selection of tools to navigate this
political terrain philosophically and pragmatically and in so doing hope
that we bring new perspectives to bear on existing research of mixed spe-
cies settings: an area where there are currently very few methods books
(see Birke & Hockenhull, 2012, for a rare exception).
While we tackle the study of multi-species worlds in a broadly qualita-
tive fashion, we focus mainly (but not exclusively) on ethnography and
its potential future as a more inclusive approach. This is because, with
its ability to pay close attention to the symbolic forms, practices, objects
and discourses of everyday life, it is a technique that creates a multi-
dimensional picture of interactions in their subtle, nuanced and often

contradictory cultural context. It does this by encouraging the researcher
to engage physically, discursively and emotionally with those under inves-
tigation. In other words, it moves us from seeing research “objects” to see-
ing—and often working alongside—research “subjects”, and places these
roles as complementary rather than separate or oppositional. This lends
itself to regarding humans and other animals in relations and entangle-
ments not as so very different that they cannot be researched together.
New developments in ethnography have explored the co-production
of research across disciplinary borderlines and between scholars and
practitioners. This too strengthens ethnography’s position as a subtle
and nuanced means of accessing complex worlds of meaning. At the
same time, technologies such as social networking and electronic sur-
vey methods have opened up a range of novel possibilities for generat-
ing access, improving communications and triangulating (testing out)
data gathered in more traditional, manual ways. Yet there is still a need
to be inside a community of practice—there, in situ, hanging around,
watching, laughing and joining in to present and witness the daily, ad
hoc impulses and practices of meaning-making in a fresh light. And to
that end, there have been yet further advances in method: some eth-
nographers turning to the principles of arts, drama and community
engagement work to devise ways to break down divisions between aca-
demics and practitioners and consider knowledge as something which
is produced democratically and in collaboration. This changing research
environment, and in some quarters at least, the deconstruction of the
subject–object–researcher divisions through participant observation,
better respects and allows for the autonomous and self-propelling aspects
of cultural production.
It is important, however, to mention the role of theory at this point. It
is only through the subsequent application of theory that cultural experi-
ences and first-hand ethnographic observations become more obviously
located in relation to broader social forces, trends and patterns. Theory
is, after all, how we make sense of our data. And we may take a range of
theoretical perspectives: feminism, American pragmatism, Marxism and
so on to generate a better understanding of a particular milieu. Each pro-
vides a means to anchor subjective observation to more objective philo-
11
sophical supports. Our own theoretical standpoint is a heterodox blend

of posthumanism (the notion of humanity and animality on a contin-
uum, in our reading of it); actor network theory (the idea that humans,
animals and material objects come together in processes and sometimes
“stick together” meaningfully as networks); postcolonialism and eco-
feminism (the concept that we should challenge the unequal power that
often operates along race, gender and species borderlines). We are also
influenced by aspects of a range of other weighty ideas, including demo-
cratic and experiential learning upheld by American pragmatist think-
ing (Kelemen & Rumens, 2013) and critical human geography (Ingold,
2012a, 2012b). Bringing these diverse perspectives (loosely) together
under the banner of human–animal studies, we write this book with a
particular emphasis upon the heterodoxy of theory as lenses that can be
switched to view particular problems.
We are aware, however, that theoretical lenses are the intellectual “tun-
nel” that sometimes prevent us from seeing things differently, particularly
from the perspective of other disciplines with their own distinctive para-
digms, epistemologies and data sets. Theory has the capacity to illuminate
but also to conceal at the same time. This can be a particular challenge
in studies of interspecies relations that aim to make use of multi-species
ethnography, where the expertise of animal specialists is likely to be an
ingredient in the planning or execution of a project. In some regards, a
degree of heterodoxy helps manage this tunnel vision, but as we shall
explain, it is often difficult to blend different perspectives and paradigms
in practical research.
Doing Ethnography Differently

We see ethnography as an excellent vehicle for embracing the spirit of post-
humanist thought; or specifically, the branch of posthumanist thought
that looks for hybrids (Haraway, 1991), entanglements and boundaries
that are helpfully blurred through method. For us, this project is under-
pinned by the notion that social lives necessarily include other species;
holding the position that social lives are, in fact, constituted by various
interspecies interactions that may or may not include humans. Where,
for example, would vets be without animal patients? Or shepherds with-

out sheep? Aiming to move away from anthropocentric conceptions of
human–animal relations (that infer the necessity of humans to the dyad),
multi-species scholars should make it clear that society is not the same
as humanity and that methods should adapt to this broader definition of
the social, that a degree of “evolution” is desirable (Hamilton & Taylor,
2012) to not only include nonhumans conceptually but also to do so
methodologically as well.
While nonhumans are rarely, if ever, open to the sorts of ethnographic
work that may be possible in many settings, the argument of the posthu-
man ethnographer is that an inability to speak human language and to
live within human behavioural norms should not be a basis for exclusion
from social scientific research. The fact that animals live and are inter-
actively entangled with humans is enough of a reason to justify their
inclusion in some form of ethnographic work. Some see this as their
moral obligation to “Others” (Robinson, 2011), some see it as an original
and creative endeavour (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) and others see it as
analytically and politically intriguing and thus worthwhile (Law & Mol,
2008). We see it as all these as well as entirely logical.
If social life includes various actors, many of whom are not human,
with different capacities and forms of agency, then our methods should
be agile enough to study them. Of course, this idea is not without its
tensions. Many of those practising and advocating for multi-species eth-
nography point out that it can and should be used to study interactions
between humans and all other-than-human entities which includes,
for example, insects and bacteria. In some respects, this takes it beyond
the remit of human–animal studies, as is the point, but also means parts
of the emerging multi-species ethnography canon can be difficult to rec-
oncile for some of us who choose to study human relations with other
animals from a social science perspective. The niche nature of some
multi-species ethnographic studies lend themselves to criticisms of fetish-
ism or “theory for theory’s sake” (Best, Nocella, Kahn, Gigliotti, & Kahn,
2007) and appear to do little to contribute to understanding (and pos-
sibly improving) the material lives of humans and/or animals. Indeed, as
we have already pointed out, at worst this may be a smokescreen label
that hides yet further trouble.
13
This is somewhat ironic given the stress on materiality that multi-

species ethnography places (Smart, 2014). However, it is our position
that because ethnography (or multi-species ethnography if we prefer) has
the potential to acknowledge other-than-human life and to advocate for
its inclusion in social science studies it is a powerful tool that challenges
anthropocentric legacies and legitimates the study of human–animal rela-
tions. This is crucially important when we consider the social realm to
comprise multiple, interlocking and potentially researchable agencies and
relations: from the affective bonds between domestic animals and their
“owners” to the rational economics of the farmer–vet–animal relation-
ship on the farmyard. How we then decide to proceed with those studies
becomes a matter of individual and research group choices: some will
choose to use it simply to further knowledge (a legitimate end in itself )
and others will choose to use it more politically, as a partner in their advo-
cacy for other animals (something we take up in more detail in Chap.
9). We suggest, therefore, that there is a suite of approaches which can
be regarded as falling broadly under the posthuman research umbrella,
which may or may not also be considered multi-species ethnography.
Our approach involves creative adaptation of existing approaches for the
demands of the multi-species setting and is something we have called an
ecology of methods; qualitative approaches that are attuned to the interac-
tions that social actors (both human and nonhuman) have with each
other, other organisms, and with their environment and are themselves
capable of adaptation to suit that environment.
Contents of the Book
In this book, we consider how ethnography could utilise different forms
of data gathering and interpretation and propose new possibilities for
designing research which draws on a blend of literatures, theories and
techniques to offer a pragmatic step forward in methodology; a way of
studying social spaces without the unwitting suppression of species that are
other-than-human. To make this ambitious project more reader-friendly,
we have divided the book into two parts: Foundations and Fieldwork.
“Foundations” considers the philosophy of research approach and design,
making the case for the adaptation of ethnography for social actors of all
species. The Fieldwork part then takes these philosophical arguments and
places them into practical context by speculating on a number of tools,
methods and techniques that multi-species researchers might find help-
ful or inspiring. Each part can be taken alone or read in the context of
the whole book just as each chapter can be read alone or in the context
of others.
In the first part of the book, we are concerned with the context of
research methodology and begin by considering ethnography’s intellec-
tual heritage and approach. We think about how and why this makes it a
suitable vehicle for a multi-species agenda. And while we think ethnogra-
phy itself might be a useful method to study human–animal relations, we
broaden this by arguing that some of its foundational principles might
be adapted to include different methods in order to bring other animals
into our research. We then draw on this contextual analysis to call for
a change in the way that ethnography is conceived—not as a purely
anthropocentric suite of methods for researching human life-worlds but
as an approach which could and should move towards a more compre-
hensive and inclusive view of social relations. We go on to consider the
contemporary research environment and investigate how changes in the
types and locations of methods give rise to challenge and possibility in
equal measure. We do this to set the scene for later sections on the prac-
ticalities of research and to get the reader thinking about some of the
basic—but difficult to resolve—problems when planning a multi-species
research project.
Chapter 2 opens up the approach of ethnography and considers how
this method has changed over time. In charting some of the key moments
or “turns” in its history, we highlight two of its key strengths: its critical
and emancipatory agenda on the one hand, and the literary potential for
documenting nuanced social scenarios on the other. These two strengths
lay the foundations for a multi-species ethnographic approach to research
design for understanding social interactions across the species borderline.
We follow this in Chap. 3 by asking why and how we might want to lis-
ten for the voices of animals, by building the case for change. We discuss
the political and philosophical difficulties of taking a posthuman view
in conducting our research and outline the interconnected (or we could
15
say ecological) nature of knowledge, representational power and field

methods. In taking this approach, our aim is to scrutinise the idea that
researchers are embroiled in knowledge-making which (wittingly or not)
tethers it to humanist agendas. The argument here is that such processes
have the potential to ignore and erase animals and that methods are inex-
tricably linked to this potential for exclusion. Countering this, we claim
the importance of ethnography for attending to the richness of everyday
lives with other creatures and for asking the right questions, in other
words, those which highlight rather than suppress alternative voices.
In Chap. 4, we push this debate further still by posing the ques-
tion: What can ethnography become if it is to engage effectively with the
multi-species world? We also ponder how it can draw strength from the
theoretical framework of posthumanism and other critical perspectives.
Drawing on these issues, we chart a number of contemporary develop-
ments in ethnographic approaches and speculate about their value. Our
focus then switches from theory to practice in the next part of the book,
“Fieldwork”. In this part, readers are encouraged to take a step towards
designing and, in fact, re-designing research that will help them under-
stand human and animal lives better. Some of the methods we high-
light are new and have yet to be applied extensively (or indeed at all)
by ethnographers or human–animal scholars; others have value which is
open to significantly more debate than has been possible in the scholarly
literature to date. Some may be seen as running contra to ethnography’s
traditional roots in participant observation and writing and readers may
question whether indeed they ought to be considered at all within the
general family of ethnographic techniques so different are they from the
historic bases of the method.
In considering these charges, we respond by restating explicitly that we
are not seeking to write a multi-species manifesto that sets the limits of
what a new form of ethnography is, but rather we are putting together
a compilation of ideas that openly and self-critically reflect on human-
ist traditions within ethnography, with the aim of considering variations
that help us include animals in our research—to speculate about practi-
cal methods that take us beyond humanism and its tendency to render
animals a part of the background. Whether we term this posthuman eth-
nography, multi-species ethnography (or just ethnography), the aim of
our Fieldwork part is to look at examples from classic and contemporary

methods and to consider their validity against our important emancipa-
tory goals.
With these goals in mind, Chap. 5 outlines and discusses the exciting
and relatively new field of visual methods by examining how examples
of these techniques encourage better access to human and animal expe-
riences or beastly places. By charting a number of examples including
video, head-mounted camera, art and photography, we seek to highlight
how visual techniques (while not without faults) are increasingly help-
ful for providing the grounds for detailed social observation of every-
day experience as well as academic reflection. We consider the use of
visuals as “door openers” that can act as a starting point for debate
and participation. Chapter 6 expands on this with a discussion of sen-
sory methods to include other species in our research in immediate and
thought-provoking ways; something that words—no matter how poetic
or evocative—can struggle to achieve. Using examples from contem-
porary research and the arts, we argue that sensory techniques such as
soundwalks provide a helpful (and aesthetic) companion for troubling
nature–culture dichotomies because they do not dismiss the symbolic
and physical significance of other-than-human life in the way that tra-
ditional humanist approaches to method have so often done. While
we note the limitations and contradictions inherent in such creative
approaches, as well as exploring some highly unusual modes of par-
ticipant observation with animals, we speculate on how ethnographers
could experiment for themselves in the sensory field.
In Chap. 7, we turn to arts-based techniques and think about them as
modes of wonder; that is as fresh and exciting new ways to think about how
we learn about and from the world around us. We consider ethnodrama/
ethnotheatre and cultural animation which are hands-on arts-based par-
ticipatory methods at the cutting edge of creative research. In highlight-
ing some recent cases of these techniques in use, we extend our argument
that these innovations may offer something entirely new to ethnographers
keen to involve other species. Importantly, we also discuss the potential
of these methods for building bridges between human social actors and
as a means for decolonising research as an elitist academic venture, done
by and for researchers; in short, we showcase these methods as a vehicle
17
for public engagement and for opening out the world of research to a
greater audience. Chapter 8 sets out with a different aim: to investigate
the potential of blending different disciplinary knowledges and modes of
working in mixed methods or through interdisciplinary research designs.
In considering the potential of differently skilled researchers working in
teams, providing new research questions and lenses with which to view
findings, we note the problems of bringing together different research
paradigms and different ideas about what constitutes knowledge (and the
representation of that knowledge). We speculate about the term “hybrid-
ity” as a metaphor of interdisciplinary work, suggestive of the transgres-
sion of usual disciplinary boundaries and divisions. While offering no
clear solutions to the difficult problems that can result from hybrids of
research, we suggest there are grounds for hope.
Chapter 9 turns to one of ethnography’s most important processes—
writing. We consider its literary nature as a means of telling stories but
also consider the inadequacies of writing and how emancipatory theory
such as posthumanism and feminism can inform a different type of
writing process. We consider the role of advocacy in our writing about
social settings by discussing the idea that speaking for animals may pres-
ent a partial way forward in ensuring their interests are accounted for
in some way. While under no illusions that advocacy is an explicit act
of humans speaking on behalf of another agent or actor, our argument
in this chapter is that this presents one (of very few) options open to us
when seeking to bring animals into our writing; arguably ethnography’s
most important tool of dissemination. Acknowledging the embodied and
inescapable reality of being human and communicating in human ways,
we nonetheless seek to reflect on it critically, openly and with a view to
provoking further thoughts on how writing can be done differently.
To conclude, we are aware that animals communicate in ways that are
often beyond human comprehension, engage in behaviours alien to our
own and exist in their own unique life-worlds, and that it is provocative
to ask whether, by seeking to take special note of their agencies in social
science research, this book is looking for answers to puzzles that we have
no way of solving. However, even if this is the case, simply omitting or
ignoring the presence of other animals in our social lives and thus in our
research is not the solution, no matter how discomforting it might be to
try and include them. Instead, we suggest embracing this discomfort as a

way of thinking through the problems, a way of being forced to ask dif-
ficult and often interesting questions. It is, after all, a persistent theme of
discomfort that has informed our own research into methodology. We
want the experience of reading this book to involve an appreciation that
methods are far more than a “one-way street” that take the researcher
from unfamiliarity to certain knowledge. Methods, as we shall see, con-
stitute a way of deriving a best guess at the truth, and this is decided upon
via a range of political processes about who and what to include, exclude,
edit and represent.
By the end of the book, we hope that the reader will have a more com-
plex understanding of the messiness of social science investigations into
multi-species relationships in institutions and organisations. We hope
that the reader will also comprehend our sense of discomfort, humility
and inadequacy with the current status quo. Above all, however, in devel-
oping a curiosity for the ways in which methods could work differently,
we want readers to take with them an appreciation of the philosophical
and epistemological debates that reinforce their choices about how to
conceive of and manage research on multi-species issues. In this aim,
we hope to impart a sense of hopefulness: that we now have legitimate
spaces to think through how to be more mindful of our lives with other
beings, and how to include them in our research—and advocacy—agen-
das. Above all, we hope that the reader will ultimately share our own
curiosity about, and delight in, some of these theoretical, practical and
representational difficulties. While we would never claim that our own
investigations have been easy, we would always argue they have been
interesting and fulfilling. This book invites others to embark on their
own journey into the multi-species world and to discover, for themselves,
ways of making methods that confront, resist and maybe even go beyond
the constraints, tethers and traditions of humanism.
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Part I
Foundations
2
Why Ethnography?
This chapter asks: Why is ethnography the right approach for studies of the
interactions and relations between humans and other animals? Our focus is
on ethnography (rather than other qualitative approaches) for two rea-
sons. The first is because it has been infused by a strong liberal and eman-
cipatory agenda which lends itself to critical, boundary-pushing and
inclusive research. This makes a good starting point for considerations of
multi-species settings that, by their very nature, push taken-for-granted
(academic and epistemological) boundaries. The second is that we think
ethnography—with its emphasis upon thick description and nuanced,
poetic writing—holds much promise for the documentation of human–
animal interactions and relationships. As we shall show in the following
chapters, ethnographic work has proven analytical strength in unravelling
the contradictory, paradoxical aspects of human practice and the subtle
workings of power. We argue this ethic could be extended fruitfully in a
number of creative directions to enhance understanding of human–ani-
mal contexts and, in doing so, take research beyond the narrow confines
of traditional and hegemonic humanism. In what follows we begin to
explore this argument by considering the case for posthuman ethnography

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_2
by outlining its history as an approach; a necessary retrospective that pro-

vides the basis for our later chapters and their philosophical and practical
arguments.
Can We Go beyond Humanism?

For those who want to break free of humanist conventions, we argue that
it is acceptable—even desirable—to ask questions that may not be imme-
diately answerable. It is also acceptable to be perplexed and humbled
by this task. This discomfort helps us to reveal and to reflect upon the
politics of knowledge and the limitations of existing method. It is how
we reveal the faults and weaknesses of our normative research processes,
knowledges and means of learning. Helpfully, posthumanist theory has
challenged received wisdom regarding our implicit status as (human)
thinkers and writers and points out different ways of seeing the world.
In our reading of this (somewhat overwhelming) theoretical field, the
key argument is that humans are not discrete from the rest of nature and
that we exist in complex relations with a whole host of different agen-
cies which could include technologies like robots and smartphones, trees,
insects and, indeed, all manner of life-forms (Ferrando, 2012). There is
also space for the imaginary, the gothic and the monstrous in some forms
of posthumanism (Braidotti, 1997) although this lies outside our imme-
diate field of interest.
We support a relational view of the social in our reading of posthu-
manism, particularly as it relates to methods. This comes from our shared
enthusiasm for actor network theory as a mode of understanding the
connective and organisational processes that hold together (or repel) dif-
ferent agencies. Our focus is predominantly upon the animals—and their
agency—that humans consciously and socially come into contact with,
as pets or livestock, for example, because it is the social, organisational
and cultural world that is our shared interest and the domain of ethno-
graphic enquiry. Helpfully, many strands of anthropological and ethno-
graphic methods have traditionally encouraged input from participants
regarding their own meaning-making and the way they navigate their
own lives. We think this could be extended towards a broader concept
2 Why Ethnography?
25
of agency; a horizontal rather than a vertical one, which is inclusive of

different species (with different capacities for thought and action), par-
ticularly when grounded by a form of posthuman philosophy that aims
to decentre humanity as all-important. Although classical anthropologies
and ethnographies have often documented the role of animals in relation
to humans, we feel that a posthuman and emancipatory style of research
could better inform their inclusion as social actors in networks.
Yet, with few exceptions, the inroads being made into multi-species
research remain theoretical and abstract. Although ethnographic field-
work is well placed to pick its way through the messy terrain that post-
humanist analyses signpost us towards, we are in the midst of a process of
change that rests heavily upon the back of a relatively recent acknowledg-
ment that social life is always in process rather than a static, knowable
whole. Studying these dynamic processes, these becomings, enables us
to envisage the social as an emergent phenomenon and encourages the
expansion of ethnography’s potential into new areas of study as Skeggs
(1999) points out:
The strength of ethnography is the concern with process.… It enables us to

question taken-for-granted categories. It shows, for instance, that gender
(or insert any other categorical positioning) is always a process of becoming
rather than a state of being. (p. 42)
The appeal of this to those of us who study human entanglements with

other animals is multi-faceted. At a practical level, ethnographic field-
work encourages us to witness the multiple, messy processes that con-
stitute culture and identity while also giving epistemic permission to
study the various artefacts, materials and objects that play a role in their
creation. By definition, this opens up our investigations to the presence
of other animals. It rightly enables us to think about different forms of
identity and agency as they come together in social groupings.
It does so problematically, however, by potentially rendering them
as artefacts or objects, and therefore static and measurable materials in
a human story. Resisting this needs to be a key aspect of multi-species
methods but it does not mean we need to abandon traditional ethno-
graphic approaches like interview and observation altogether. If the aim
is to establish insights into human cultures and meanings (and we accept

the anthropocentric nature of this idea as problematic and discuss it in
our Conclusion), after all, then it is arguable that these techniques are
unsurpassed as a subtle and nuanced form of enquiry. But these tradi-
tional methods currently present us with a limited way of witnessing how
nonhuman animals impact upon, enter into or resist human communi-
ties of practice, and for the most part, ethnographies tend not to include
other species in their accounts at all. Nonetheless, we feel that new and
innovative approaches can help advance the emancipatory, liberal ethic
of ethnographic work towards this important goal: important because
human lives are (whether we are aware of it or not) inextricably bound
up with and enmeshed by other forms of life. And, importantly, most
animal lives are inextricably bound up with human lives, whether this be
domesticated animals who live with us or in institutions of our devising,
or wild animals whose habitat is being threatened and changed by human
activity.
We accept that our aim of developing multi-species inclusive methods
can be accused of being anthropocentrically motivated, that is, to under-
stand the roles animals play in human cultures. However, our motivation
is a political as well as methodological one: to make other species more
visible in research to better understand the impacts we have upon them.
They may be invisible, ignored or contained but they are both effected
and produce effects, and their agencies help co-create meaning in net-
works. One has only to visit a farm, a veterinary surgery, a zoo or a shelter
to see this operating at first hand. Hence, we think it is vital to not only
write them into ethnography but also to do so sensitively and with an
open mind as to the rights and wrongs of our treatment of them.
In order to lay the foundations for development of this, our central
argument, we now consider what the term ‘ethnography’ actually means.
A degree of flexibility in this is useful. It enables us to resist narrow labels
and means we are less likely to fall for the (occasionally empty) rhetoric
of innovation. As Hammersley helpfully points out, there is a persistent
degree of uncertainty over ethnography’s definition for ‘like many other
methodological terms used by social scientists, ethnography does not
form part of a clear and systematic taxonomy’ (Hammersley, 2006, p. 3).
We regard ethnography simply as a way of describing social life-worlds
2 Why Ethnography?
27
‘from the inside out’ (Burford, 2015). As Hammersley (2006) states: ‘The
task [of ethnographers] is to document the culture, the perspectives and
practices, of the people in these settings. The aim is to get inside the way
each group of people sees the world’ (p. 4) and we would add to this: sees
and experiences a world shared with other species.
As to how this ‘getting inside’ works practically, it is helpful to refer
to the etymology: ethno relates to the human while -graphy relates to
the written representation of those humans. Thus, ethnography requires
that the researcher is physically and mentally ‘present’ in the field and
can then write about the speech, behaviour, routines and patterns and—
more challengingly—the sensory atmosphere of that particular place.
Traditional ethnography has made use of various techniques such as
work-shadowing, interviews, focus groups, and content analysis. Yanow
and Schwartz-Shea (2015) helpfully summarise ethnographic work as
a trio of observation, interaction and text analysis which can be inter-
changeable. Hence, ethnographers may carry a voice recorder, notepad
and pen or tablet for keeping track of what has happened and what has
been said and done. The fieldnotes taken in situ form a cornerstone of
the method, a way for researchers to detect recurrent themes, ideas and
issues. Because of the need for immersion, ethnographers tend to inves-
tigate a small number of cases, perhaps even one, and unlike quantitative
researchers they do not depend upon statistical significance to produce
worthwhile findings. Indeed, the fieldnotes become their data and it is
their analysis that provides the commentary and theorisation of the site.
What is apparent to many ethnographers, however, is that in order to
do justice to this process, one has to truly understand a field, an area’s
social capital and culture, its community and values, its objects and mate-
rials and the ways that these are enrolled in various routines and practices.
This ‘getting inside’ can be described as carving out a niche for participa-
tion and it is important for the deployment of the specific tools of the
trade—work-shadowing, note-taking, interviewing and so on—to take
place naturalistically. Simply turning up with a notepad does not provide
the quasi-insider status that is so often required to get access to the most
interesting data. By virtue of the subjective nature of this embodied and
literary approach, good ethnography often rests upon being in the field for
a long period of time and on the development of careful observations from
descriptive longitudinal analysis. Differentiating this modus operandi

from newspaper reporting (Schofield, 2014), fieldworkers often look
for general and, if possible, generalisable patterns in their collected data.
These patterns, or themes, arise from unstructured data, that is, data that
have not been coded at the point of collection as a closed set of analytical
categories. The aim is for the researcher to build up a gradual understand-
ing of their chosen setting in an organic, naturally emerging way.
Those who advocate ethnography as a method, a technique of writ-
ing and a form of praxis, argue that it gives us a particular strategy for
getting closer to pressing social issues: it involves getting to know par-
ticipants and appreciating the micro-fine layers of meaning-making that
they engage in, their internally logical reasons for saying and doing the
things that they do. Importantly, then, ethnographic writing needs to
pay close attention to the experiences of those within that setting; the
‘inside’ social world: What are the lived experiences of those under scrutiny?
How do things look from their perspective? In analysing these questions,
the ethnographer must also question the myriad structuring forces which
impact upon local settings (what we might term the ‘outer’ social world).
How, in other words, does the world ‘out there’ affect those in particular
settings? What social values and norms play a part in their lived experi-
ences? How are big issues (such as Britain’s decision to leave the European
Union [EU], the election of Donald Trump as president of the USA or
the Syrian refugee crisis) played out in micro-settings?
The ability to present daily experiences and conversations with affec-
tive and evocative resonance, and to relate them to broad social phenom-
ena like these is a central ethnographic skill. Hence, ethnographic work
depends upon a literary and poetic sensitivity to everyday life. Just as
in fiction writing, the skilled ethnographer weaves together background
detail with specific events, speeches and conversations to raise the read-
er’s awareness of key analytic points often drawn from sudden flashes of
inspiration or so-called ‘lightbulb’ moments. These lightbulb moments
are the instances when the social milieu crystallises as a noteworthy event
or comment. They often feel important before the researcher can think
rationally about why they are important. It may be that the ethnographer
is sensing the invisible but palpable quality of the air, a smell, a moment
of silence, the shifting moods and emotions that circulate between people
2 Why Ethnography?
29
in currents, a particular joke, saying or object in use. With a sudden

flash of insight, their discovery leads on to a more complex theorisa-
tion of the site and a better grip-hold on what is really going on there. So
ethnographic researchers also require the ability to consider seemingly
mundane details analytically, and make what is usual, commonplace and
familiar appear to be novel and intriguing through their writing. Many
ethnographers regard this as rather more than a descriptive endeavour.
Ethnography in Context
In this section, we turn to the historical context of this approach by
examining the work of some of the earliest ethnographers. Rather than
acting as a historical footnote, we think this is an important analytic step
in reconfiguring the methodological co-ordinates of contemporary eth-
nography towards the study of mixed species settings. Ethnography (as it
currently stands) is attuned to and informed by a number of theoretical
approaches that put inclusivity at its heart; not just posthumanism but
postcolonialism, feminism, queer and ecocritical theory (to name just a
few). These resources support and anchor forays into the extant human/
animal borderlands by creating a liberal and emancipatory empathy for
‘the other’. They also centralise and problematise the workings of power
which are crucial to our understandings of (how we treat) those ‘others’.
But they do not arise from nowhere and can be tracked to a series of
‘turns’ and trends that have prioritised different ideas through time.
Ethnographic research—as a broad set of techniques along the lines
hitherto described—has ancient and venerable roots. In fact, as early as
the third century B.C., Herodotus travelled around ancient Greece and
the Middle East to document the political and social forms he discovered.
He published these accounts in a vast, nine-volume manuscript entitled,
History (which, in Greek, can be translated as Enquiry). More modern
forms of ethnographic writing, however, are exemplified by the anthropo-
logical studies of small, rural and often remote societies that were under-
taken by researchers such as Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) and Alfred
Radcliffe-Brown (1922) who participated in tribal communities over
long periods to document their social arrangements, traditions, myths
and belief systems. These early ethnographers tended to reside in the field
for a year or more, aiming to live in remote and ‘primitive’ settlements by
learning the local language or dialect and, to the greatest extent possible,
by participating in everyday life. They collected objects, drew maps and
diagrams, collated data such as genealogical information and interviewed
local people. This method was called participant observation.
Malinowski spent a number of years in the Trobriand Islands of
Melanesia, publishing his findings in the now classic monograph Argonauts
of the Western Pacific (1922). One of his main interests was in the mate-
rial objects that the tribespeople used and exchanged. In tracking the gift
exchange of artefacts, for example, he argued that even in remote and
‘primitive’ or so-called ‘native’ cultures, there was evidence of rational deci-
sion making, gift economies, cultural symbolism and politics. Malinowski
carefully traced the network of exchanges of valuable jewellery such as
bracelets and necklaces across the Trobriand Islands, and established that
they were emblems enrolled in a system of exchange (something he termed
‘the Kula ring’), and that this system was linked to political power and
social hierarchy. Such interpretations set an authoritative tone for a wealth
of successive anthropological scholarship that was attuned to humans and
the objects which meaningfully furnished their life-worlds.
What connected the work of the earlier modern anthropologists was
that they shared an enthusiasm for the meaning of the social processes
they observed; the linkages between objects, people, systems and organ-
isational structures. Those engaged in traditional fieldwork with ‘native
cultures’, for example, looked at themes such as family and ancestral kin-
ship, marriage and child rearing and claimed that these structures, made
visible through everyday routines, objects and organising processes, were
where they could monitor the unfolding of systems of meaning-making
and the diffuse ways in which these were cultivated and contested (Garsten
& Nyqvist, 2013). Most were eager to understand and document the
contours of such relations as they pertained to a whole host of rituals,
exchanges and resources. Margaret Mead (1949 [2001]) puts it thus:
An anthropologist’s materials of study are the behaviours of living peoples

living together in ways that they have learned from their forebears, who
shared common patterns of behaviour. The anthropologist’s laboratories
2 Why Ethnography?
31
are primarily primitive societies, small isolated groups of people who

because of their geographical or historical isolation have remained outside
the main stream of history, and preserved special practices of their own that
contrast vividly with behaviour in large societies. (p. 43)
One of the core aspects of the approach outlined by Malinowski,

Radcliffe-Brown, Mead and others was to ask questions of human nature;
to ask how people functioned together in societies, how they educated
and socialised their young, how they treated their fellow human beings;
to take note of and to analyse the rituals and routines that were impor-
tant or symbolically significant in some way as well as acknowledging the
artefacts and objects that provided the physical symbols of these nuanced
worlds. Some chose to see this endeavour as an explicitly scientific one
(e.g. Malinowski), while others drew on a more literary sensibility (e.g.
see Frazer’s, The Golden Bough [1987]). But many saw this endeavour as a
vital means to safeguard and preserve knowledge of endangered cultural
practices; myths, wisdom, rituals that were likely to die out (Clifford
& Marcus, 1986). This concept of ‘salvaging’ was linked to the much
broader project of understanding humanity itself. As Ruth Benedict
writes (1934) in her account of the Zuni people:
It is obvious that the sum of all the individuals in Zuni make up a culture
beyond and above what those individuals have willed and created. The group
is fed by tradition; it is ‘time binding’. It is quite justifiable to call it an organic
whole. It is a necessary consequence of the animism embedded in our lan-
guage that we speak of such a group as choosing its ends and having specific
purposes; it should not be held against the student as an evidence of a mystic
philosophy. These group phenomena must be studied if we are to understand
the history of human behaviour, and the individual psychology cannot of
itself account for the facts with which we are confronted. (pp. 231–232)
Towards a Sociology of the Everyday

Later generations of anthropologists began to reappraise not only the
tendency to study tribal cultures as ‘exotic oddities’ but also the authorial
hierarchy that seemed to be present in much extant anthropological writ-
ing. They questioned whether documenting and analysing tribal cultures

had the power to ‘save’ indigenous people or whether this cloaked what
was really a colonialist endeavour that positioned the anthropologist as
world-maker rather than as an unbiased scribe. Hortense Powdermaker,
for example, began her career as a student of Malinowski and conducted
fieldwork among the Lesu tribe of New Ireland in present-day Papua New
Guinea. Like several of her contemporaries, however, she became increas-
ingly concerned about anthropology’s traditional claims to expertise
within a scientific paradigm (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) as well as its pro-
pensity for the exotic as its empirical mainstay (Herzfeld, 1993). Hence,
her later (1966) book Stranger and Friend: The Way of the Anthropologist
helpfully points to the politics of the anthropological encounter and asks:
What did the indigenous folk think about the research process, what were
their feelings about the ‘outsider’ who was seeking to integrate in their
group? How did they feel about being exposed to different narratives,
objects (such as cigarettes and cameras) and ideas from the West? Could
they give any degree of informed consent to be represented? Did they
have the ability to challenge those who made judgements about them and
their social milieu? Powdermaker’s discomfort led her to study aspects of
her own indigenous experience in the USA. The everyday life, with which
she was already well acquainted, became her new field.
Hence, rather than killing off anthropological participant observation
entirely, reflexive critique helpfully opened the way for a flourishing of
different approaches. Barth’s (1966) research into the formation of social
groupings, for example, argued for the importance of exchange rituals in
the development of interactive social processes and was strongly influenced
by Malinowski’s observations despite being written some four decades
later. The principles of anthropology also made the transition to other
disciplines, notably into organisation studies. For example, Malinowski’s
contemporary, the psychologist, sociologist and organisational scholar
Elton Mayo played a central role in applying the principles of anthro-
pology to an industrial context. His now famous Hawthorn Studies at
the Western Electric Hawthorn Plant during the 1920s and early 1930s
discovered an informal workers’ ‘social system’ and, in collaborating with
William Lloyd Warner (one of Radcliffe-Brown’s students) and others,
Mayo helped to establish the entirely new and path-breaking discipline of
2 Why Ethnography?
33
organisational anthropology (in Baba, 2006, p. 87; Garsten & Nvquist,

2013). Other scholars, like Powdermaker, began to apply the principles
of fieldwork to their own, everyday Western cultures; their hierarchies,
organisations and cultural codes of conduct.
In short, the techniques of anthropology had, by the 1930s and 1940s,
found useful application outside the tribal context. In the interwar years,
for example, many more ethnographic scholars turned their attention to
the state of the increasing urban poor. Groups of like-minded scholars
clustered in major urban centres such as Chicago and London. Members
of the Chicago School of Sociology (e.g. Everett Hughes, Robert Park,
Louis Wirth) applied anthropological techniques to a variety of urban set-
tings in their studies of social life. They looked specifically at interaction,
participation and membership in urban lives, documenting subcultures
and their practices of meaning-making. Of particular interest were those
described as ‘deviants’ and ‘delinquents’, gangs and groups running coun-
ter to dominant normative cultures. Ethnographers showed increased
enthusiasm for diversity in accounting for people often overlooked or dis-
advantaged by social life; so-called ‘dirty workers’ such as those engaged
in stigmatised occupations like street cleaning and butchery. A variegated
literature began to emerge and flourish including accounts of disaffected
youth living in ‘inner city’ slums and on street corners (Cashmore, 1984),
cocktail waitresses and their clients (Spradley & Mann, 1975), ‘deviant’
schoolboys (Willis, 1979), doctors and nurses (Wicks, 1998), chefs and
waiters (Fine, 1996) and countless others.
Such studies took their starting points from houses, schools, streets
and buildings; the built environment and its actors to ‘develop transla-
tion and mediation tools for helping make visible the differences of inter-
ests, access, power, needs, desire, and philosophical perspective’ (Fischer,
2003, p. 3). Moving firmly beyond exotic colonial encounters (Adas,
1992) between researcher and ‘tribal subject’, this distinctive p articipant
observation work formed the basis for contemporary ethnography. There
were a number of distinctions between this approach and the earlier
anthropological accounts. For example, where traditional anthropologists
had tended to live within their fieldsites for prolonged periods of time,
new approaches did not always require this. Part of the reason for this was
that unlike tribal cultures, industrialised, Westernised people tended to
live and work in discrete places, to have memberships to a variety of other

communities and to enjoy a greater degree of mobility. Their workplaces
were usually disaggregated from their domestic lives; their patterns of
leisure and consumption also separate.
This fostered a different style of participant observation, one which
focused on fragmented lives with multiple memberships. But it is a mis-
take to make too much of the novelty of new work in urban settings.
Indeed, as early as the Victorian period, there were several accounts that
would have passed muster as a form of early urban ethnography. Dickens’s
Sketches by Boz (1995), for example, provided realist literary vignettes of
life in the capital during this period. Likewise, Mayhew’s work of urban
sociology (1851/2008), catalogued the metropolitan underclasses by
travelling through various communities and surveying a number of occu-
pations within them. These formative works, and others like them, paved
the way for a veritable renaissance of ethnographic methods a century
later (see Kuklick, 1991, for a good historical account).
We are not suggesting that modern-day ethnography, with its fascina-
tion for making the quotidian strange, superseded the forms of anthro-
pology conducted by Malinowksi, Mead and others, or that it presents a
superior approach to social analysis than anthropology. Nor are we sug-
gesting that contemporary ethnography emerged distinctly in a neat linear
timeline with a consistent direction of travel. But we are suggesting that
for those interested by the possibilities of participant observation, the mid-
twentieth century—a period wracked by the upheaval of world wars and
the social dislocation of their aftermath—was a time when the sociological
analysis of the everyday gathered significant momentum. It drew strength
from existing catalogues of literary realism, travel and life writing as well
as the established methods of anthropology (seeking artefacts, interview-
ing, documenting information and historical accounts) but it also drew on
a greater degree of reflexivity that questioned and helped to disassemble
some of the extant distinctions between the ethnographer as researcher
writer and the social actors under scrutiny. The postwar scene, character-
ised by a wave of independence movements and anti-colonialist uprisings,
would foster further and intriguing offshoots of participant observation.
From the 1960s, postcolonial debates began to present serious chal-
lenges to ‘traditional’ forms of anthropology (e.g. Said, 1978, 1993) and
2 Why Ethnography?
35
there was renewed passion for democratising the fieldwork process; or

at least seeking to allow those being surveyed to speak for themselves.
Coupled with the emerging language of reflexivity during the postwar
decades, the principles laid out by Malinowski (1922) and others, of a
scientific anthropology given form and leadership by the fieldworker-
theorist (rather than the amateur literary traveller), came under increas-
ingly unfriendly fire. In fact, this period was regarded by some as a veritable
‘crisis’ for anthropology. Not only had the war and its aftermath ‘shat-
tered its empirical base’ but it also posed ‘serious intellectual and politi-
cal challenges to many of its fundamental assumptions’ (Grimshaw &
Hart, 1996, p. 6). For many, the issue boiled down to a simple question,
namely, could anthropology continue to call itself a science? As Clifford
Geertz asked: What sort of scientists are they whose main technique is
sociability and whose main instrument is themselves? (1989, p. 94).
One of the most vocal critics of formal ‘scientific’ anthropology was
the Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said. In a series of six
radio broadcasts (the 1993 BBC Reith Lectures entitled ‘Representations
of the Intellectual’) Said raised many questions about the contemporary
relevance of the anthropological approach, particularly enquiring about
academic claims to elite knowledge about social groups. Following this,
many other writers began to flex their emancipatory muscles, figuratively
speaking, and to write about anthropology and ‘the savage Other’, and
‘the primitive Other’, and just ‘the Other’ (Lewis, 2007, p. 774). As
Herbert Lewis states:
Soon it became fashionable to conflate or confuse anthropologists with

missionaries, soldiers, colonial policemen and tax collectors, ivory traders,
and Paul Gauguin. Even earlier, a number of anthropologists had begun to
turn the big guns of ‘critique’ on themselves—or at least on their anthro-
pological ‘Others’—both past and present. Anthropological writings, too,
became packed with ingenious claims of the evils of anthropology, and, as
a result, the field has been painfully wounded—from without and within.
(p. 774)
Lewis is critical of Said and his followers in relation to the way that the
broad field of anthropology appeared to have been ‘lumped together’ as
if all approaches were the same. This, Lewis argues, wounded the disci-
pline. This was a problem for those intrigued by ‘exotic’ fieldsites but has
also created new forms of anthropological engagement and—during the
postwar period—gave momentum to a more emancipatory approach, a
style of work that has tended to be grouped together under the umbrella
term of critical ethnography.
Critical Ethnography
Moving distinctly out of the field of early scientific anthropology through
studies such as those pioneered by the Chicago School, critical eth-
nography took colonised, deprived and marginalised groups of people
as its mainstay. Critical ethnography was influenced by heavyweight
theories of social economics (such as Marxism) as well as concepts of
cultural power and domination (such as those posited by Gramsci in
1971). Themes such as alienation, identification and cultural symbolisa-
tion began to shape the critical ethnographic approach. An inextricable
ethos of this form of work was, thus, liberal and emancipatory in nature.
Betty Friedan (1963), for example, had interviewed and observed middle
and upper middle class women to make critical claims about the forces
of patriarchy that impacted upon their wellbeing. Meanwhile, Gloria
Steinem (1963/1995) played the part of a ‘bunny’ to write her feminist
ethnography of the Playboy Club.
Paul Willis’s (1979) book, Learning to Labour, typified the ‘new’, that
is, distinctively critical ethnographic approach. It was strongly attuned to
economics, social forces and culture. In his book, Willis documents the
lives of a group of school boys (‘the lads’) and discusses their transition
from the education system to work. His central analytic point is that for
such children, there was a marked lack of engagement and ambition.
The lads could not foresee a future that was different from the one they
expected to have as an operative on a factory floor or as an apprentice and
so saw their lack of engagement as ritualistic rebellion. Willis’s ethnogra-
phy presented the symbolic structure of working-class culture as a lived
form, alive and functioning in the schoolyard and on the street corner.
For Willis, adopting a Marxist grounding to his ethnographic fieldwork,
2 Why Ethnography?
37
the working-class culture he was able to observe worked against and

within a variety of powerful social structures. Presented through this lens,
we see a group that appeared to be fatally limited by their self-defeating
lack of ambition or, as Höpfl, Hamilton, and Brannan (2016) have put
it, their ‘limited time horizons’. Willis documented their words, behav-
iours, jokes as well as noting their possessions and consumption habits to
show how the lads were forged by oppositional culture. Throughout their
everyday lives, they seemed tethered to the routines of mundane work by
the disciplining powers of capital and state, global economics, urbanisa-
tion, industrialisation (and ultimately by the aftermath of its decline).
Opposition to the school is principally manifested in the struggle to win

symbolic and physical space from the institution and its rules and to defeat
its main perceived purpose: To make you ‘work’. Both the winning and the
prize—a form of self-direction—profoundly develop informal cultural
meanings and practices. (Willis, 1979, p. 26)
The power of Learning to Labour arguably lies in its ability to capture

and evoke a vernacular life-world such that the reader feels an intimate
link with the main ‘characters’ (Joey, Fuzz, Spanksy, Bill, Eddie, Will,
Fred and Spike). But there is more to it than a literary ambition to evoke
their world. Indeed, critical ethnographic accounts like Willis’s often
approached a problem or field with expectations of testing out or fortify-
ing theory. Theory was the anchoring point for empirical fieldwork and
was attractive to pursuing the inclusion agenda as it could be keyed to
structural economic factors. For Willis, the story of the lads and their
particular cultural world was part of a much bigger story of serious prob-
lems of social justice, aspiration, mobility and voice. His Marxist r eading
gains traction through the description of commonplace sites like the
schoolyard and the classroom, and by presenting these as cultural cru-
cibles for the creation of self-propelling cultural forms, generating but
also generated by fundamental inequalities and structural disadvantages
of capital and class. In this reading, the lads are—depressingly—caught
and determined by the much larger processes of social reproduction that
supply labour power in the traditional capitalist mode. For Willis, the
question is not whether such a process is going on at all, but rather how
it impinges upon speech, behaviour, humour and action at the local level;
how ‘macro determinants’ (p. 171) need to pass through the cultural
prism to be reproduced and refracted as new variants.
The descriptive and realist nature of ethnographic writing like this
and its ability to evoke and contextualise lived reality—and not least to
prompt a degree of empathy with those experiencing that lived reality—
is just one reason why the critical ethnographic method has become pop-
ular since the 1960s and 1970s. Using stories, characters and discourse
in naturalistic prose is helpful to get a grip on big questions, especially
when one considers the complexity of everyday social life and its interac-
tions, politics and negotiations. But although it is an over-simplification
to claim that there are neat phases in the development of ethnographic
methods, it is perhaps fair to say that many contemporary ethnographers,
while influenced by the critical project, have made a conscious turn away
from anchoring their accounts in totalising social theory popularised by
writers such as Willis. Instead, many have placed a stronger emphasis
upon forms of language itself, rather than regarding language as a local-
ised cultural form both standing for and reproducing powerful social
forces. This has been termed a linguistic turn.
The Linguistic Turn to Interpretation

The linguistic turn refers to understanding and reflecting upon the power
of ethnographic language to create as well as to describe social worlds.
The distinctive ‘turn’ to language was informed by critical ethnographies
and their emancipatory and liberal agendas and particularly by their
enthusiasm for postcolonial, feminist and critical theory. Emerging in
the latter 1970s, notably in the work of anthropologist Clifford Geertz,
ethnographers began to stress the significance of their writing in new
ways. Geertz looked at text and speech as cultural symbols in their own
right and sought to express his fieldwork discoveries through a style that
he called ‘thick description’ (1973); meaning evocative and powerful
writing. By reflecting upon the power of his writing as a world-making
medium, he helped forge a different style of interpretive research. John
Van Maanen (1988) describes interpretive ethnography as that which
2 Why Ethnography?
39
represents the ‘social reality of others through the analysis of one’s own
experience in the world of these others’ (p. ix)—a reflective and embod-
ied approach that traces the implicit meaning rather than monitoring the
explicit frequency of words and phrases within the fieldsite, looking out
for the political charge of language in use; its oppressive or emancipatory
potential, both on the part of the research participant and the author
(Burawoy, 1991).
According to Van Maanen (1988, p. 7), various styles of writing pro-
duce different effects upon the reader. A realist account, for example,
can be described as ‘direct, matter-of-fact’ and as ‘a portrait of a studied
culture, unclouded by much concern for how the fieldworker produced
such a portrait’. The work is concerned with description of the fieldsite
and is not especially reflective. A confessional account is, by contrast,
significantly more reflective and ‘auto-ethnographic’ than the realist eth-
nography. The focus is ‘far more on the fieldworker than on the culture
studied’ (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 7) and there is a high degree of disclo-
sure of the methods in use, the experiences of the fieldworker and some
honesty about the effects they may have had in the field. An impression-
ist ethnography, by contrast, is highly reflexive, ‘personalised’ and often
artfully fragmented into ‘fleeting moments of fieldwork cast in dramatic
form’ (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 7). Borrowing from creative writing, the
impressionist tale borrows elements of both realist and confessional styles
and is often poetic and literary in nature.
In his analysis, all these genres of ethnography (and several others not
mentioned here) encompass a narrative, story-like approach to social
analysis that, most importantly, work with a layer of separation from
the lived cultural world in question. Characteristic of the perspective
that proliferated during the linguistic turn, Van Maanen emphasises that
‘there is no direct correspondence between the world as experienced and
the world as conveyed in a text, any more than there is a direct cor-
respondence between the observer and the observed’ (1988, p. 8). For
Van Maanen, ‘language (and text) provide the symbolic representations
required for both the construction and communication of conceptions
of reality and thus make the notions of thought and culture inseparable’
(1995, p. 141). The artefactual nature of language as a core of the ethnog-
rapher’s art is about paying attention to and theorising the words spoken
in particular contexts, but also writing up a meaningful theory of what

those words might mean, symbolise or stand for when formed in social
interaction. With a focus on linguistic interpretation, language is a cipher
and a medium for carrying reality.
For some, the interpretive stance did not go far enough in uncover-
ing the politics of ethnographic endeavour. During the 1980s, those
branding themselves postmodern ethnographers highlighted localised,
emergent and mobile factors rather than the tethering anchors that had
informed earlier critical accounts of cultural development. Cultures
could be free-roaming, diffused and unconnected. They also sought a
more radical treatment of language, one which took the linguistic turn
to another level. They claimed that discourses, texts and interactions were
culture rather than the means to understand or decode culture in its pro-
ductive and representational capacities. As James Clifford (1986) puts it,
If ‘culture’ is not an object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of

symbols and meanings that can be definitively interpreted. Culture is con-
tested, temporal and emergent. Representation—and explanation—both
by insiders and outsiders—is implicated in this emergence. (p. 19)
Those working within postmodern templates discount the possibil-

ity of producing ‘the truth’ of a social setting and instead focus on the
interactions and relations that emerge in social life. They frequently use
experimental forms of writing to encourage the data to ‘speak for itself ’
and some postmodern ethnographers have tried to adopt multi-vocal
accounts that rest on the co-production of narratives.
Such approaches tally with an appreciation of the relational nature
of social life, identity politics and multi-culturalism. Hence, postmod-
ern approaches draw strength from postcolonial debates about the way
researchers can account for the multi-vocal messiness of the social world
without assuming the power-laden role of the scribe amongst the tribe
(Marcus & Fischer, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988). For some critics, however,
a postmodern tale makes for a suspicious reading experience; without the
anchoring basis of social theory, for example, are we simply left with sto-
rytelling or poetry? When the text is the culture, can we ever generalise
or form ideas that can be extrapolated and applied elsewhere? Such ques-
2 Why Ethnography?
41
tions continue to infuse methodological debates in ethnography but one

tranche of experimental literature tackled this head-on.
The Turn to Enactment

Refusing to be mired by the breathless circularity of philosophical hand-
wringing over ‘truth’ and authorial power, a number of ethnographers
during the 1990s began to take a much more pragmatic line. Much of this
work centred on the analysis of objects and people together and became
known as Sociology of Technology and Science (STS). STS ethnogra-
phers, influenced by postmodernism as well as earlier critical scholarship,
focused on the politics of language and objects by seeking to demonstrate
how a range of social phenomena were done or enacted in practical terms.
They explored the ways in which humans could interact with and shape
multiple objects (or the same objects multiplied)—including texts—
through a range of various practices. Following path-breaking work by
Bruno Latour, John Law, Michel Callon and others, the movement was
away from the philosophical question of whether representations of real-
ity could be said to be true or accurate towards a pragmatic concern for
the ways in which social realities were enacted, understood and made real
to those involved. Much STS work supported the framework of actor net-
work theory; the concept that people, texts and objects are all ‘enrolled’
in working together to accomplish a variety of social processes. In many
ways this had been foreshadowed by early anthropology with its attention
to both the material and symbolic aspects of social worlds.
A good example of an enactment approach is to be found in In Mol’s
(2003) hospital ethnography in which a close-up account of the leg dis-
ease atherosclerosis is presented. Mol demonstrates through painstaking
ethnographic and interview detail the nature of the disease as it is relation-
ally produced, experienced and practically enacted from a variety of per-
spectives in the hospital and beyond. In its consciousness-raising efforts,
the account is critical and politically sensitive but without recourse to an
overarching explanatory model for theorising the treatment and experi-
ence of this disease, Mol seeks to listen to patients and health care special-
ists as though they are themselves ethnographers; ‘not an ethnographer of
feelings, meanings, or perspectives’ but as ‘someone who tells how living

with an impaired body is done in practice’ (p. 15). She goes on to explain
this focus upon the doings of social life:
The stories people tell do not just present grids of meaning. They also con-
vey a lot about legs, shopping trolleys, or staircases. What people say in an
interview doesn’t only reveal their perspective, but also tells about events
they have lived through. (p. 15)
Her text focuses on minute and seemingly inconsequential details through

numerous perspectival lenses. She tracks the movement of legs as they
walk, ride bikes, climb stairs and so on. Doing this presents us with a lay-
ered format of analysis; one in which we are encouraged to pay attention
to the micro-details of bodies and materials to see where they might lead.
Interestingly, this is echoed in the physical layout of the written account
with a main section of prose and a text box running below, both providing
different and parallel perspectives at the same time—just as the experience
of disease can be accomplished with and through various viewpoints.
Drawing on postpositivist trends in epistemology (that knowledge is
uncertain and facts can be contested), these accounts share an enthusiasm
for ‘mundane artefacts’ (Latour, 1993) in social science studies. Latour
and Woolgar (1978/1986), for example, show us how scientific texts get
produced in the laboratory by documenting the micro-social impulses,
engagements, movements and materials that enable particular forms of
knowledge to be ‘sanctified’ and made ‘true’. They account for the mani-
fold processes, interactions, errors and objects that work together, in rela-
tion, to create scientific work and its productions. At no point in such
accounts are we instructed in the proof of a theoretical argument beyond
a basic analysis that all social life is relational, messy and irreducible to
simple fact, however high-brow or scientific it may purport to be.
The Turn to Posthumanism

More recently, some ethnographers (primarily from anthropology and
sociology but also from other disciplines) have become interested in
posthumanism. Posthumanism, as we highlighted briefly at the outset,
2 Why Ethnography?
43
is a cross-disciplinary theoretical orientation that brings together many

of the strands woven by STS, actor network theory and postpositivism
more generally. It is deliberately reflexive, attendant to language, critical
of grand narrative approaches to theory and seeks to decentre the human
from social research, analysis and theory. It is a broad orientation used by
those who study, for example, artificial intelligence, parasites, microbes,
bacteria, nonhuman animals, diseases and so on. While posthumanism
builds on earlier traditions it differs in that it expressly includes other-
than-humans (although not always nonhuman animals). Smart (2011,
2014) argues that by doing so, posthumanism offers a way to correct a
phase of ‘hyper-humanism’ (2014, p. 4) that has pervaded ethnography,
even following postmodernism with its radical efforts to consider mobili-
ties, fragmentations and complexities in social life. It offers a chance to
take the best attributes of realist and classical anthropology and ethnog-
raphy (assertive, evocative account writing) and rescue them from post-
modern sensibilities where ‘Nature, production and material culture were
sidelined from the analysis’ (2011, p. 322) in order to privilege the world
of mankind.
Although posthumanism remains a largely theoretical and philo-
sophical endeavour, many scholars who work within its paradigms are
becoming interested in methods to realise its goals empirically. While
few ethnographers are trained in the veterinary or animal behaviour sci-
ences, for example, some are now seeking to include animals as social
actors and are seeking to try their hand at multi-species ethnographies
(e.g. Dashper, 2016). Such accounts problematise the centrality of the
human in the research process and implicitly, and sometimes explicitly,
force us to rethink the imbalance of power endemic to human–animal
relations in the twenty-first century. This phase of our historical journey
is the one we currently find ourselves within. But it is incomplete and
in process and, as we consider it, needs refinement and further thought
about the philosophy and practice of our methods.
Whether one draws on a literary or scientific style in ethnographic
writing, regards oneself as critical, postcritical, postmodern, interpretive
or whether one is heavily influenced by later turns to enactment, STS and
posthumanism there are some key principles common to all ethnographic
work: features which have prevailed since the earliest days of fieldwork.
This broad family of techniques, at its heart, emphasises a need to listen

to and appreciate the views of people in situ; their understandings of the
world. It is research that emphasises the importance of studying, at first
hand, what ordinary people like cocktail waitresses, chefs, schoolboys and
doctors do and say in specific settings (Hammersley, 2006). The way that
this can be analysed and theorised has been shaped by a wealth of litera-
ture—postcolonialism, critical theory, cultural studies, feminism, STS,
posthumanism and indeed many other intellectual movements over the
course of history. What endures, in spite of the variety of theoretical or
methodological approaches and the intellectual fashions that come and
go, is that ethnographers seek understanding of the perspectives, activi-
ties and actions of other people, and that this is likely to be different
from, perhaps even in conflict with, how these people themselves see the
world that they inhabit.
This degree of analytical perspective differentiates ethnography from
straightforward reporting but, as we have explored, also demands of us
a high degree of self-scrutiny. Following the important work of scholars
like Geertz, Powdermaker, Willis, Mol and Latour, it is relatively com-
monplace nowadays to accept that we can never be truly certain about
the views of others, about their subjective experiences, desires and needs.
Seeing the world ‘from the inside out’ is a key defining feature of eth-
nographic work that we asserted at the outset, but as ethnographers we
oscillate uncertainly between the inside and the outside. Critical eth-
nography provides one means to live with this uncertainty, interpre-
tive work another, postmodern and STS ethnography presents another
approach still. As to how we can proceed to consider such difficult ques-
tions beyond the limits of humanism—arguably the most momentous
and immovable of the intellectual anchoring points—we have perhaps
the biggest challenge yet. We have to consider our own status not only
as researchers, world-makers, text-creators and so on but also as members
of a researching species. In their unique pursuits of very specific types of
knowledge, animals search within and think about the world rather dif-
ferently than we humans.
The human self as an instrument of knowing remains a key tenet in
fieldwork. Ethnography calls for the immersion and use of the researcher’s
body as an experiential tool which remains central whatever theoretical
2 Why Ethnography?
45
support chosen and anchored to. In pragmatic terms, this means we can only
ever rely on our own human skills; the writing and painstaking analysis of
fieldnotes, listening, participation and observation. In this sense, ethnog-
raphy is a deeply human method and we, as ethnographers, dwell within
human bodies and use human skills to make sense of the world. At a basic
level, we must acknowledge this as a fact and get on as best we can. We
believe, however, that a reflective openness about the politics and poetics
of ethnographic writing—as well as adopting a degree of methodological
flexibility about what ethnography actually is or can be—opens the door
to, and legitimates the study of, human entanglements with other species.
This makes space to adapt this method to different, animalistic, forms of
agency. In our opinion, we can steer this human method towards the quest
of posthuman knowledge, making it appropriate for considering human–
animal relations differently. In this, we have been heavily influenced by the
turn to enactment which we argue lends itself readily to multi-species and
posthuman forms of ethnographic research. Such work lays clear emphasis
upon the ‘doings’ of social life, and hence encourages (or perhaps requires)
us to consider the role(s) of nonhumans in various settings. For Mol, for
example, ‘doings’ might revolve around motorbikes, staircases or shopping
trolleys; it is through and with such objects that the experience of social
lives become multi-layered and it is by following these things that ethnog-
raphers learn most about their chosen field. Attending to action enables us
to contemplate how we (as human actors) move through space and create
ripples of action and interaction. It also prepares us to think about how
Others, be they objects (like shopping trolleys) or animals, have the power
to impact upon us, to move us and to make us feel.
Importantly, then, such an approach also opens the way to closer
observation of nonhuman animals although we accept that at one level this
perhaps infers that animals fall into the category of things. But despite
that possible pitfall, the turn to enactment takes us further into negotiat-
ing the tricky questions of authorial power that have been raised through-
out ethnography’s history but have yet to be resolved in posthumanist
philosophy. For, if we can draw upon the everyday actions and objects
of a fieldsite to show how knowledge is created, this opens the way for a
fuller appreciation of the power relations that infuse certain perspectives
(usually human) and disempower others (usually animals).
In these regards, the turn to enactment and the theoretical framework

of actor network theory, which infuses it, is of clear benefit to those
interested in posthuman and multi-species work because it helps us see
meshworks of relations: interminglings and hybrids of objects–people–
animals–materials, and directs our attention towards the lived effects
of these couplings. In the following chapters, we consider the political,
philosophical and methodological ramifications of this view on ethno-
graphic practice and seek to expand on our proposition that the eman-
cipatory and the literary traditions of ethnography, in particular, and its
historic commitments to reflexivity, the ‘salvaging’ of cultural worlds and
an attention to people, objects and others in symbolic and lived networks
are what lends this broad suite of approaches the potential for richer
documentation of human–animal lives.
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3
Listening for the Voices of Animals
The previous chapter presented an historical overview of ethnography in

order to contextualise our argument that it offers a set of ideas, principles
and practical approaches to the study of social life that we think make
an ideal starting point for developing new posthuman or multi-species
methods. In this chapter, we continue building our argument that such
methods are needed by considering why we should listen to—and for—
the voices of other animals in our research. With the metaphor of voice
in mind, we introduce some of the political and philosophical difficulties
of posthuman research by outlining the interconnected nature of episte-
mology, power and method and shed light on a number of complexities
that emerge when one scrutinises humanist claims to knowledge about
animals.
Implicated in this political process of knowledge-making, ethnogra-
phers should seek out new and more emancipatory approaches to the
study of social life, a life that includes rather than erases nonhuman
actors and does not seek to make imperialist claims about who or what
such Others really are. Animals may be brought to life or silenced by
the inscription methods that we humans use in our research; they may
be anthropomorphised, given symbolic meaning, objectified, rendered

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_3
monstrous, or simply ignored. We have an ethical as well as an intel-

lectual duty to confront that reality-making process and, if possible, to
conduct forms of ethnographic work that help explore the richness of
human–animal interaction rather than reducing it to simplistic terms.
This is important because, whether wittingly or not, the existing meth-
ods we use draw upon, reinforce and sustain a humanist legacy by cen-
tralising the use of human language in data collection and dissemination.
Traditional ethnographic methods have prioritised interview, conversa-
tion and discourse analysis, which is entirely understandable in a prag-
matic sense, for they are sophisticated means of understanding human
concerns. For those of us interested in advancing a posthumanist perspec-
tive, however, such a reliance on text and language is problematic, for
animals do not speak or write. Indeed, as Law (2004, p. 33) puts it, the
routinisation of research is a powerful means by which difficult epistemo-
logical questions remain unasked. In other words, it is easy to take meth-
ods for granted, to persist with traditional human-centred techniques of
doing ethnographic fieldwork, even when the project is ostensibly about
animals.
Posthumanism and postmodernism, however, are providing strong
theoretical grounds to challenge our everyday assumptions about the
operation of language and about the existence of a static and knowable
external reality. These frameworks support closer investigation into the
myriad ways in which methodological assumptions are used in the service
of power/knowledge, for example, though the creation of “pure” catego-
ries such as human and animal, which are, in turn, linked to hierarchical
forms of knowing that posit one side (human) as superior to the other
(animal). The theoretical freedom of posthumanism, in particular, has
articulated a clear message for those conducting research: that ethnogra-
phers need new forms of thinking about Others. Cary Wolfe states:
We must take yet another step, another post, and realize that the nature of
thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist … when we talk about
posthumanism we are not just talking about a thematic of the decentring of
the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological
coordinates…we are also talking about how thinking confronts that the-
matic, what thought has to become to face those thematic. (2010, p. xvi)
3 Listening for the Voices of Animals
53
Just as Wolfe calls for the nature of thought itself to be scrutinised to

reveal and challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions, Anderson (2017)
reminds us that our human “tool-kit”—that is, the very language that we
use, the methods we use to conduct and transcribe research—leaves us
relegated “within the bounds of humanist discourse”, thereby underpin-
ning the humanism that posthumanists like Wolfe seek to trouble. Thus,
we have to challenge the status of the human as a thinking and research-
ing animal if we are to move beyond the humanist paradigms that have
dominated social science to date.
Finding methods that align with posthumanist attempts to include
other species in our worldviews, our research projects and our research
outputs, in more sophisticated and empathetic ways, is of paramount
importance lest the foundational disjunction between our theoretical
aims and our practical methods render our ideas moot. And there are no
clear solutions here, not least because the power-laden inscription devices
that we use to communicate with each other about animals are them-
selves tethered to the very experience and embodiment of being human.
The words that you are reading now have been typed, formatted and
exchanged by humans and machines and that is after they have been cre-
ated within a particular paradigm or ideological position. Perhaps there
is no escape from this epistemological circularity but there are, at least,
a number of thinkers now addressing these profound questions and lin-
guistic complications (e.g. Haraway, 2003; Law, 2004) along with a few
of us extending these issues into the practical realm of methodology. The
question is this: Should we aim to listen to/for the voices of animals in social
research? And, if so, how?
owards Ethnography for Human–Animal

T
Relations
As we explained at length in the previous chapter, the technique of par-
ticipant observation which supports ethnographic work means that the
researcher gets physically involved with whatever participants are doing to
consider new insights into their discourses, behaviours and use of mate-
rials. A different set of ethnographic challenges are presented, however,
when we try to incorporate animals because the actors in the field are not
all “like us” and do not share our language or cultural norms. An exam-
ple may help illustrate why this matters in practical terms. Consider the
world of police dogs and their handlers (Sanders, 2006; Sang & Knight,
2015). While dogs are key to law enforcement and can thus be seen as
central in the work process, they cannot easily be regarded as research
respondents or co-workers if we choose to focus on this particular milieu.
It would be, in many ways, far simpler to write an account of police dog
handlers and simply omit the dogs. Police dogs do not talk or write about
what is going on in their lives. It is questionable whether they wittingly
contribute to the experience of crime-fighting even when they have a
particular job to do (although, for a notable exception, see Bradshaw,
2011). This adds an extra layer of complication for researchers interested
in studying multi-species settings; not least, letting their voices be heard;
or perhaps put more modestly, trying to listen out for their voices.
Importantly, from our perspective, however, ignoring police dogs
because they are not amenable to our methods is unsatisfactory if the
aim is to produce multi-species or posthuman research. If that is our aim,
we should avoid thinking that the importance of these dogs lies purely
in their relationships to us and focus all our energies on what the human
part of the dyad thinks/feels about the other. Just because we believe we
cannot understand their minds should not necessarily be considered a
barrier to including them in our ethnographic research. So what are we
to do? One way forward may be to consider the interplay between dog
and handler as part of a larger network of relations that co-produce and
enact the process of crime prevention and control. We need not understand
the inner workings of the “wild minds” (Laurier, Maze, & Lundin, 2006)
of police dogs in order to comprehend their roles as actors in this net-
work, or indeed the world more generally. We can, following a number
of scholars intrigued by meshworks of materials and actors (e.g. Mol,
2003), track the movements of bodies and things, trace the contours of
this micro-social setting by attending to the actions and interactions that
produce important effects.
It is a starting point of our thinking, then, that we need to ensure
that animals are included in the first place with close attention to their
55
embodied as well as symbolic acting power in social settings. As Laurier

et al. (2006) argue:
We are suggesting that “animal minds are wild minds, shaped by a history
of environmental pressures” (Hauser, 2001, p. xvi), that these minds will
not be found by looking “inside their heads” but instead by studying
animals’ practical skills in the “wildness” of wherever it is that they
inhabit. To read Hauser (2001) somewhat against his own intentions, we
would extend the “wild world” to include human culture in its rich
heterogeneity. (p. 4)
While we may take issue with the reductive and binaristic implication that
animals represent wildness, particularly when considering them “work-
ers” as in the case of the police, we need to acknowledge that changing
attitudes and behaviour towards them rests upon challenging their object
status, something we cannot do if we relegate them to the sidelines of
inquiry. This is a dilemma for posthumanism. But it is not a new prob-
lem. Indeed, it would be a mistake to assume that animals have never
mattered to ethnographers and that they have always been deleted from
classical accounts. Ethnography has long been attuned to animals, or at
least the presence and significance of animals within human experiences
and cultures (Smart, 2014). Classical ethnography has presented animals
in accounts of sacrifice, hunting and companionship, albeit as a means of
shedding light on human cultures.
A good example of this is Clifford Geertz’s (1973) case study of the
Balinese cockfight in which cockerels stand for masculinity and the fight
ritual enables men to test their strength and virility by proxy:
As much of America surfaces in a ball park, on a golf links, at a race track,

or around a poker table, much of Bali surfaces in a cock ring. For it is only
apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men. To anyone who
has been in Bali any length of time, the deep psychological identification of
Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable. The double entendre here is
deliberate. It works in exactly the same way in Balinese as it does in English,
even to producing the same tired jokes, strained puns, and uninventive
obscenities. Bateson and Mead have even suggested that, in line with the
Balinese conception of the body as a set of separately animated parts, cocks

are viewed as detachable, self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a
life of their own. And while I do not have the kind of unconscious material
either to confirm or disconfirm this intriguing notion, the fact that they are
masculine symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the
Balinese about as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill. (p. 245)
Here, the cockerel becomes a symbolic marker of Balinese culture. No

longer simply birds, they become “masculine symbols par excellence”
(Geertz, 1973, p. 245). And this is not an isolated case. There are count-
less examples of animals as totems or food, or as playing a part in ritual
processes such as fertility and marriage ceremonies, religion, magic and
celebration. Ruth Benedict (1934) writes about the Indian tribal culture
of the Northwest Coast of America and the manner in which people
impersonated bears in ritual performance:
The Bears were dressed for their great ceremonies completely in black bear-
skins, and even on lesser occasions they wore upon their arms the skins of
the bear’s forelegs with all the claws displayed. The Bears danced around
the fire, clawing the earth and imitating the motions of angry bears, while
the people sang the song of a Bear dancer. (p. 176)
One might imagine that nonhumans are in some way complicit with
their own utility in such imperialist accounts. What they reveal, however,
is that anthropology has largely been a project of us watching them, us
consuming them, us using them to do our cultural work, our analysing
them in terms of their importance to us and to our meaning-making
processes. Animals have mattered in anthropological accounts but mainly
because they are symbolically and physically important to humans.
Even where animals are central to performance of a specific ritual
(e.g. the cockfight), concepts of animals and humans in relation rarely
form the outright focus of participant observation. The participation is
with humans but the observation tends to be of animals. In fact, it is
fair to say that animal perspectives and their distinctive “voices” have
not been considered widely or heeded by fieldworkers. Rather, animals
have appeared as furnishings, props and materials, the unwitting bearers
of cultural meaning that complement the human world. Animals have
57
been present, then, but perhaps not in the way that those interested in
the close workings of human–animal interactions would choose. In her
account of the Bear dancers, for instance, Benedict presents very little, if
anything, of the bear that once was, just as she neglects the practicalities
of the meetings between the species not least in acquiring the valuable
artefacts of claws and fur in the first place. Animals often seem to be a
part of the anthropologist’s implicit “materials of study” (Mead, 1949,
p. 43 [2001]), the furnishings of the symbolic culture in question; as
objects not subjects.
When we talk about listening for the voice of the animal, then, what
we are actually suggesting is not that ethnographers should literally try
to hear and translate animal utterances in some way but that we try to
include them (and include them more equably): that is, challenge the
unequal relationship between human researcher and animal subject that
denies their agency, that assumes their lack of voice, their import only as a
marked and imprinted subject of human meaning-making. Throughout
history, ethnographers have been implicated by the ethics of “voice”,
the inherent power that is carried by those who speak on behalf of and
for Others. Posthumanist and postmodernist theory adds a radical new
dimension to this challenge because, for us and a growing number of
multi-species researchers, those Others are animals and their relations to
us are slippery, undulating and sinuous (O’Doherty, 2016). Their voices
are not easily heard let alone understood.
A Return to Questions of Power

This central problem does not necessarily require us to add more animals
into existing modes of research, to begin peppering our ethnographic
accounts with more species in arbitrary fashion. Rather, it demands a
philosophical commitment: that we recognise and reflect upon the social
power of being human at a fundamental and challenging level within the
ethnographic process. This is important as negotiation of power often
mediates human–animal relations in our chosen field sites just as it infuses
the writing that emerges from those sites. Unfortunately, power itself is
invisible although ethnographers can look for its effects in the subtle (and
not so subtle) ways that people speak and behave. This was Paul Willis’s
explicit aim in Learning to Labour (1979), in which the minutiae of day-
to-day school life highlighted the ways that working-class kids were sub-
tly groomed for working-class occupations. If we look for the effects of
power in human/animal context, we see that animals may be “good to
eat” but not “worthy of love”, while at other times, they are “cute”, “help-
less”, “tame”, or “wild”, reflecting broader social norms about certain spe-
cies as edible/inedible/lovable/dirty and indeed any number of adjectives.
Posthuman or multi-species researchers need to pay attention to cul-
tural rules like these to theorise how power plays out in mundane inter-
action at the local level. Doing so offers vital clues about the ways in
which animals are made sense of in lived relations. This may involve, for
example, looking at the relationships between pets/companion animals
and their guardians/owners. Observing someone washing the fur of a
cat or dog, for example, ethnographers can perceive how the enactment
of the task, and the way such work is described, becomes useful in the
creation of an affective relationship (Taylor, 2010). Importantly, attend-
ing to such a mundane example such as this points to the means by
which, in broader society, cats and dogs are deemed “worthy” of human
love, and thus carry a certain amount of affective power in interaction
with a wider population. By contrast, consider abattoirs and farms, for
example, where distancing moves are often expressed (or performed) by
language and a host of practical acts such that cattle are numbered rather
than named individually. This boundary work is echoed and supported
by the macabre processes of the slaughterhouse where animals are neatly
renamed with efficient organisational language to obliterate their pres-
ence in any capacity other than as “products” to be “harvested” rather
than killed (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013). This detailed attention to the
moves (Latimer, 2004) enactments and routines of everyday life with
animals represents the next logical step in the critical turn if we are to
examine (and hold to account) the hegemonic social norms which pro-
liferate about animals and, further, to look for and expose the effects of
subjugation and disadvantage on those very animals.
While researchers might take pains to track the operation of power,
however, the point of view of the animal is not always amenable to quali-
tative enquiry. Their very different communication styles make it highly
59
problematic to treat them as cognisant, knowing agents. Excluding them

carries the potential to render them unimportant while seeking to present
their perspectives is shot through with indeterminacy and can sound a
little strange. In our work to date, we have attempted to consider the pos-
sible consequences of this dilemma and while neither of us claims to be an
animal expert, we have always been keen to allow the human participants
in our fieldwork to make claims to specialist behavioural and emotional
knowledge of animals. This is how we have attempted to illustrate the
lived contours of the bio-social relationship that exists between the spe-
cies. We have paid close attention to our respondents’ claims regarding
their unique understandings of individual animals; whether it was their
behaviour, their apparent “mindedness”, their “personalities” (or lack of
them), and all this has been a clear and consistent feature of any data we
have gathered. And yet, despite having carried out a number of in-depth
studies, and been active in encouraging people to empathise with ani-
mals, we have still been left with a general sense of discomfort regarding
the inclusion—the voice—of animals in our work. Indeed, we ourselves
are open to the criticism that animals as individual agents do not feature
in our work despite our focus being primarily human relations with, and
treatment of, other animals.
Despite real attempts to be open to the idea of animals acting in our
research sites, we constantly find ourselves frustrated that our only options
to include them are through allowing other humans to speak for them, or
allowing other human meaning-making processes vis-à-vis other animals
to be included in our work. Given our interest in other animals and their
relations with humans, and that we work from within paradigms that
(at least attempt to) eschew simplistic binary divisions such as human/
animal and social/natural, we believe it is important to include animals
in description, interaction and, if possible, dissemination. While in itself
this is fairly novel, the problem of human primacy and centrality remains
since it still us who represent them. How can we live with the power to
describe and make worlds for the nonhumans that we study? Is it possible
for practical research to be done if we decentre our own species as domi-
nant? Perhaps, acceptance of the values of posthumanism places us in an
impossible trap: a desire to decentre human authority at the same time as
(re)asserting humanity through account-writing of the world around us.
Maybe this is inevitable and unsolvable given that ethnographers see

the world through human eyes and we interpret it using human-centred
methods. But it is a mistake to be too disheartened by this. While we may
not have concrete answers for the methodological questions opened by
acknowledging the need to include other species in our research, we can
at least take heart in the fact that the emergence of postmodern, posthu-
man and multi-species forms of ethnography does herald a major break-
through in challenging the hegemonic view that animals have no intrinsic
importance in social science. It is from this starting point that interest-
ing discussions—on epistemology, methods, ethics—begin regarding the
implications of “humanimal” connections.
While not an advocate of this view, per se, the work of Michel Foucault
(1991) nonetheless provides a useful reference here. His intention was
not so much to catalogue and explain human nature, rather to point to
technologies (“discourses” included) by which dominant forms of that
nature could be exerted and expressed. He offers much to those interested
in the workings of power in a methodological as well as in a cultural and
social sense. For Foucault, performances, architectures, objects and pro-
cesses became vital to the analysis of the “how” of power rather than the
“what”. For example, within the prison or the church (or any number of
settings), he argued that “the pathological, the outcast, the abject and the
almost-human consistently feature as indicators of the limits of the nor-
matively human” (Graham, 2002, p. 13). Thus, for Foucault, discursive
regimes are the cornerstone of power, in that they provide the strength to
define which itself leads to inclusion or exclusion:
Truth is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the produc-

tion, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. It is
linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and
sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces, and which extend it. A
“regime” of truth. (1980, p. 133)
The creation of binary modes of knowing is an exercise in both definition

and power—in power/knowledge in Foucauldian terms—in the sense
that one side of the binary comes to be normative, thus excluding or
defining the other side as problematic/inferior. Drawing on Foucauldian
61
approaches to understand the workings of power/knowledge can be a

useful way forward in theorising how hegemonic species regimes are con-
structed and maintained. This applies to human self-identity at both an
individual and societal level, and, as we have noted, it is often achieved
at the expense of other species that are deemed inferior to humans. It is
the dynamic that also works between species of animal; for example, the
treatment of some creatures as pets, while others remain coded as vermin
or food. By extension, this helps to explain the relative acceptance of
the catalogue of daily/hourly abuses of millions of species by humans,
and it certainly offers a philosophical starting point for analysis of this
phenomenon.
STS approaches (for more contextual discussion about the develop-
ment of STS, see Chap. 2) have added much to deepen our conceptualisa-
tions of power and knowledge, particularly along human–object–animal
lines. For instance, Latour and Woolgar pointed out that what “really”
happened in the laboratory was written away in the production of texts
(Latour & Woolgar, 1986), that there was no such thing as clean, value-
free science. Law has also written extensively on the precise technologies
by which truths gain traction (2004) through bundles or—in his phras-
ing—assemblages which tie together “in here” knowledges with “out
there” scientific experiments and processes (2004, p. 42). We can apply
such a perspective to the critique of humanist research methods which
seemingly hold together through myriad interwoven norms, paradigms
and controls but which have humanist hegemony at their heart. As in the
Balinese cockfight, for example, animals are “lost” through the various
transcription devices that social scientists use to make sense of them.
Jane Goodall, in her lectures, often tells of how she was ridiculed by
journal editors and reviewers for her insistence that the chimpanzees she
lived with and wrote about had emotions, personalities and names. They
did not want to publish her work unless the animals in question were
referred to with numerical demarcations. Had she not fought this, then
perhaps her work would have lost some of its revolutionary potential.
Echoes of this can be seen in Wieder’s (1980) study of laboratory tech-
nicians and their interactions with the chimpanzees they cared for. His
study demonstrated how the empathic, ordinary, emotion-laden interac-
tions between human and chimp, which were dependent upon a mutual
sense of co-presence, were entirely written out of formal journal accounts

of the scientific work done in the lab. The result was that the animals were
completely absent in formal scientific accounts, despite those accounts
being impossible without the presence of the animals in the first place.
In Foucauldian terms, this makes sense as their invisibility is a working
of the human/animal binary that posits humans as more important, or
central, than animals.
Power, then, also emerges in the silences and voids created by a lack
of discourse. The suppression of animal agency by denying them voice
serves to allow humans to impose upon other creatures whatever image or
identity they deem appropriate. Thus, within much anthropocentric and
humanist writing, the animal simply becomes an abstract and textualised
nonperson that is available, mobile and passively awaiting inscription
and representation. The fact that animals are not “heard” within much
social science research is just as much an outcome of the operation of
discourse as the traditional idea that animals are inferior to humans. By
examining the ways in which animal and human identities are enacted,
made powerful, negotiated or repressed, we can reveal much about the
ways that categories of human/other-than-human might be applied,
contested, resisted, decided and made real by the process. The tricky part,
for those interested in new methodology, is ensuring that tackling this
does not simply devolve into studies of human conceptions of animals,
or of how “the human” is constructed at the expense of “the animal”
(see Tester, 1991). After all, simply using animals as tools to understand
human meaning-making is as much a legacy of logical-positivist under-
standings of the world as is the assumption of inferiority itself in the
first place. We are arguing here that the “pure” categories that segregate
animal from human (and segregate human from human) are about power
in the Foucauldian sense. The power lies in the discourse, the names and
the definitions. By denying animals a role in the discourse, their voices
disappear with it.
The difficulty is including them as actors, not as props or as objects as
may have been the case in the more traditional examples we have out-
lined. For us, human and animal agencies are mobile and co-dependent
in many ways and often human and animal experiences are related and
overlapping. Acknowledging this demands some difficult thinking about
63
who is included in our research and how. Or perhaps, more accurately,

about who is excluded and how. Isabelle Stengers (2005) explicitly links
the exclusion of those with less power from decision-making processes
with the discourses used to keep them disempowered. She argues that
decisions and legitimate reasons have to be made/constructed “in the
presence of those that may turn out to be the victims of their decision”
(pp. 996–997) and asks: “What would the researcher decide ‘on his/her
own’ if that ‘him/herself ’ were actively shed of the kinds of protection
current decisions seem to need?” (pp. 996–997).
Like Stengers, we think that decisions about who is included in the
research process should be determined with two things in mind; first that
the politics of inclusion/exclusion and species boundaries that sit behind
decisions to exclude other animals be made visible and second, that our
decisions, our human decisions, that both directly and indirectly affect
animals need to be carefully reconsidered in that light. If this sounds
suspiciously political, that is because it is. And it is here that we think
feminist philosophers of science and epistemology have much to offer
us as we attempt to think through these difficult issues (Stacey, 1988).
After all, the reasons that pushed feminist scholars into thinking about
new methods are similar to those driving our interest. Echoing feminism,
posthumanism points out how the validation of certain knowledge(s)
and the denigration of Others works in the service of power (to uphold
speciesism rather than uphold sexism, although the two are entwined).
And just as feminism acts as a corrective to this by grounding knowledge
in women’s everyday lives so can posthumanism act as a similar correc-
tive by attending to the details in the lives of other animals—those often
silenced through mainstream, normative research (Madden, 2014).
To conclude, by calling into question the immutability of boundaries
between humans, animals and other organisms and pointing out that we
need to include them—to listen for their voices—in research, we hope to
add something different to the extant debate on the politics of method.
In considering the methodological difficulty of including other-than-
human voices in our accounts, this chapter has argued that new posthu-
man or multi-species methods are needed. But what do they look like?
How can we make them practical? There are no clear answers in this
emergent field, not least because the theoretical field of posthumanism is
itself neither clear-cut nor discrete from other frameworks. A posthuman

or multi-species method, however, may be defined as one which, at the
very least, recognises the difficulty of enabling animals to collaborate in
the production of their own data.
Posthumanism invites us to reconsider the very idea of “human
nature”, along with a whole host of basic assumptions about personal
identity, social order and community, the grounds for “human exception-
alism” and the basis for the relationship between the worlds of thought
and action. These are difficult but essential philosophical problems for
those interested in going beyond humanism in research. The danger is
that grappling with the species politics of research, indeed of knowledge
itself, can be paralysing. How it is possible to do research in a way which
does not fall into the habit of privileging human interpretation, human
representation and human meaning-making over the potential alterna-
tives can be downright confusing. We are largely stuck within represen-
tational loops of humanism as a result of animals’ different capacities for
expression.
Open recognition and reflection upon these expression politics, the
politics of voice, language and interpretation, is one pragmatic route for-
ward. But finding ways to work this awareness into our practical field
methods and accounts can be extremely challenging. We need to work
with if not through the complications. Helpfully, a growing number of
scholars are taking up this challenge. Ethnographers interested by such
questions and puzzles primarily come from the social sciences, arts and
humanities but, increasingly, tendrils are beginning to reach out to (and
across) subdisciplines such as management and organisation studies,
which have seldom taken much of an interest in the world of the other-
than-human except in robotic and technological forms.
For example, while the “normal” diet of the business school remains
anthropocentric, and posthumanism is very much located on the periph-
ery, this is now being challenged quite rigorously among critical organ-
isational ethnographers (see, e.g. Labatut, Munro, & Desmond, 2016).
Those concerned with corporate social responsibility, farming and
food production, supply chain and quality management, for example,
have seen an emerging wealth of intriguing case studies in recent years.
The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) meat scandal of 1989,
65
foot-and-mouth in 2000 and the “horsemeat” scandal of 2013, for

instance, have raised significant interest in the relationship of humans to
other creatures, although much of this relates to issues of food security
and consumer trust rather than to the deeper philosophical questions
about the ethics of meat itself (see Taylor & McKenzie, 2016, for an
exception). Nonetheless, interest and cross-pollination between disci-
plines are growing.
Indeed, many veterinary science academics are becoming interested
in the possibilities afforded by social scientific approaches (and ethnog-
raphy, in particular) to research as they might be applied to a variety of
“real world” problems, such as welfare and disease among farmed ani-
mals. In turn, the relatively new field of human–animal studies itself is
reliant upon a vast body of contemporary and historical biological and
ethological work without which we would know little of the animals we
purport to study. That said, the age old natural–social science divide is
in evidence more often than not, although it is heartening to see natu-
ral scientists increasingly attending human–animal studies conferences
and human–animal studies scholars increasingly venturing into natural
science terrain. Overcoming this divide, which often revolves around
positivist versus anti-positivist paradigms and is evident in debates about
different methodological approaches, is, we think, an important key to
the future of ethnographic methods that take account of multi-species
settings. It is significant because it informs any attempts to make changes
to our societies to improve animal lives in practical terms.
Rather than keeping “different realities apart”, as Law (2004, p. 75)
puts it, we need to learn from other disciplines if we are to move for-
ward in a meaningful way (Madden, 2014). For this, we need to pay
close attention to the work going on outside ethnographic circles. We
discuss this and the specific philosophical, epistemological and intel-
lectual boundaries that make cross-pollination difficult in Chap. 8. It is
enough to state here that we feel that acknowledgement of the power-
laden nature of method and its reality-making potential demands a more
circumspect and “modest” approach (Law, 2004, p. 15) to truth claims.
This is why, when we consider how we might listen for the voices of other
animals, we lean towards ethnographic methods: quiet, slow, naturalis-
tic methods (Law, 2004) that aim for “partial connections” (Strathern,
2004) with other species (and with other subject disciplines and their
methods) rather than grand theories that make great claims about what
or who animals are, what they think and why they behave in certain
ways. Our next chapter outlines some ways in which we can transgress
these limitations, even if not always escaping the “traps” of humanism,
and so we ask, what can ethnography be?
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4
What Can Ethnography Be?
In the previous chapter, we argued that ethnography needs to evolve into

an approach that includes other species as significant social actors rather
than as objects or materials. We are particularly excited by the prospect
of ethnographies that account for the complexities of the relationships
between humans and other species, rather than play to the reductive tradi-
tional dichotomies that have partitioned animals from mainstream social
science. We have argued that such a form of posthuman ethnography is
necessary, desirable and possible. In this chapter, we push this argument
further by asking what ethnography can be, or become, to effectively
engage with the posthumanist project: that is, the notion that humans
can do more to recognise, include and reflect upon the voice (or apparent
silence) of other species in ethnographic research. This is an emancipa-
tory goal by which—through method—animals are foregrounded rather
than forgotten or taken for granted in the background of human lives.
Our enthusiasm for this posthuman ethnography comes at a time of
great change in ethnographic fieldwork and analysis methods, a time in
which many ethnographers are questioning the limits of the discipline
and considering a whole host of advances and innovations, not simply

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_4
those which relate to species. This has resulted in the emergence of mul-
tiple and niche specialisms with nuanced differences, making ethnogra-
phy more difficult to define/contain coherently. Despite the potential for
confusion, however, this is a positive shift for ethnographers, who now
have a range of techniques at their fingertips which offer different ways
to access and analyse fieldsites. This gives us, as multi-species researchers,
significant hope. This hope also stems from the intellectual interest in
developing new views of agency and new analyses and critiques of the
processes of Othering through cross-fertilisation between a range of (tra-
ditionally human-centred) subjects such as geography, organisation stud-
ies and sociology. The traditional dualisms of the social sciences—micro/
macro, global/local, structure/agent—are breaking down (O’Doherty,
2016). As a result, new ways of thinking about the kinds of knowledge
that social research can be expected to “produce” and new ideas about
what is “researchable” are making breakthroughs in method. This degree
of change makes the development of multi-species methods timely and
exciting.
In addressing the possibilities of some of these changes and tracing
their potential for applied research in multi-species settings, we also
remain attentive to the political and practical difficulties that can make
innovation problematic or hard to manage. In particular, we note the
complexities of academic institutions and the bureaucratic funding envi-
ronment which, at times, stifle innovation and militate against change.
Techniques That Cross Borderlines

Alongside the staple methods of participant observation, documentary
analysis and interview, today’s ethnographers are increasingly incorporat-
ing techniques that are entirely new or borrowed from other disciplines
(Sullivan, 2012). Some (such as Doloriert & Sambrook, 2012) are exper-
imenting with narrative methods such as autoethnography, for example,
a reflective technique in which the researcher systematically analyses his/
her own experience to draw conclusions about the broader context in
which they are situated. With features in common with literary writing,
autoethnography blurs the traditionally detached relationship between
4 What Can Ethnography Be?
71
the “scribe” and the “tribe” by writing reflectively and self-analytically

(Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Van Maanen, 1988). This effectively obliter-
ates any pretension to a scientific, distanced approach to fieldwork: a
sentiment that had been so important to many of those early pioneers of
ethnography (Malinowski, 1922).
Others are blurring and crossing boundaries by borrowing from other
subject areas. Using techniques of geography, for example, some ethnog-
raphers are experimenting with built-space data stories (Yanow, 2005),
walking and motion studies (Taylor, 2016) to write multi-dimensional
accounts of space and place (Low, 2017). Appropriating from media
and communication studies, for instance, has enabled ethnographers to
develop media analysis techniques (Parker, 2012), audio-visual studies and
aural narrative methods (Giraud, 2016). Meanwhile, methods common to
linguistics and psychology have helped develop and refine ethnographic
experimentation in conversation and discourse analysis, ethnomethodology,
hermeneutics (the close-reading and interpretation of texts), biographical
research and ethnopsychoanalysis (the combined use of psychological and
anthropological techniques for developing therapeutic interventions) (for
useful examples, see Dawson, 2014).
As we shall go on to explore in the second half of this book, we are also
seeing increased interest in public engagement scholarship that aims to
blur distinctions between academic researchers and “subjects”. Through
creative, arts-based approaches such as ethnodrama (Saldana, 2005) and
cultural animation (Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015), a wholly different
type of ethnography has emerged: one which utilises immersive, practi-
cal and participatory exercises to bring together researchers and commu-
nity members, those with different forms of expertise from the narrow
and theoretical forms of knowledge typically valorised by universities
(Roos & Victor, 1998; Wiles, Bengry-Howell, Crow, & Nind, 2013).
Experimenting with photographs, videos, drawing, scrapbooks and sculp-
tural models to generate and gather ethnographic data in different ways
and with participants from different walks of life shares the process of
knowledge production, decentring the academic as the “prime mover” in
the research and allowing differently skilled individuals to have their say.
In this regard, we are seeing applications of creative methods in a number
of disciplines, including health, sociology, geography and the arts.
Complementing these boundary-crossing and boundary-blurring

forms of ethnography, we are also witnessing the rise of new techno-
logical solutions for particular forms of research. For example, digital,
virtual and social networking technologies have become increasingly
popular and have, in turn, led to further specialisms and innovations.
The last 15 years or so has seen the rise of social network analysis, online
questionnaires, real-time research using digital devices and new visual
methods (Hand & Hillyard, 2014, also see Chap. 5), with some research-
ers now engaging in virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000) and netnography
(Wiles et al., 2013). Global Positioning System (GPS), smartphone and
“sat nav” technologies are being used to collect spatially referenced data
alongside qualitative materials (Taylor, 2016). Web-based communica-
tion is opening up social research methods to new audiences, and new
data infrastructures have paved the way for the analysis of big data sets,
including the use of genomic information (Hodgetts & Lorimer, 2015)
alongside the traditional, close-grained style of fieldwork.
A good example is provided by Horst and Miller (2006), who drew
upon digital media and technology (particularly the Internet) to cre-
ate space for relationships and interactions to occur between research-
ers and participants. The aim was to work collaboratively to co-produce
ethnographic fieldnotes by, for example, recording participants’ reactions
to interviews and other interactions, a meta-layer of data that comple-
mented the traditional handwritten individual fieldnotes. They then used
email and Skype to circulate and analyse the fieldnotes, interview tran-
scripts and reports. By doing this, they developed a technological media-
tion that rested upon and co-produced more than one perspective; that
of the lone ethnographer.
The increasing traffic between (and within) academic disciplines
through co-productive work of this sort is encouraging dialogue between
different groups at the borderlines of research. This has led some to sug-
gest that social research methods are now being democratised (Durose
& Richardson, 2015; Hand & Hillyard, 2014), and that expertise and
knowledge is itself undergoing a degree of transformation. Indeed, research
funding councils are increasingly aspiring to support the co-operation of
academics on key issues that cross-cut traditional divides between sci-
ence and social science as well between academics and practitioners. A
73
significant change in the contemporary research landscape, when com-

pared to earlier decades, is that such interdisciplinarity is increasingly
cherished and rewarded. Through financial incentives, this has increased
collaboration between those specialising in creative, digital, data-led and
virtual technologies and those more familiar with mainstream field-based
research (Kara, 2015).
Confusing Times?
The proliferation of interdisciplinarity and new research tools can be
quite overwhelming on one level; we cannot all afford the time or mate-
rial resources to undertake research with a technological component, for
example, nor do we necessarily have the skills to understand literatures
or techniques outside our own area of familiarity (for more discussion on
this, see Chap. 8). Yet, as we see it, the expansion of ethnography and the
blurring of its definitional characteristics provides a valuable opportunity
for the multi-species researcher. The amorphous state of methodology
and the eagerness, in some quarters at least, to experiment makes time
and space for the seeds of posthuman research to find fertile ground. This
is needed if we are to bring animals to the forefront of our research and
to be inquisitive about the social and cultural mechanisms by which they
are often relegated to the background: a posthuman sensitivity to “the
perspective of the subordinate group” in human networks and hierarchies
(Becker, 1967, p. 240).
When we take the side of the “underdog”, the person or groups that
are routinely ignored in research, for example, we offer an implicit chal-
lenge to the “hierarchy of credibility”, that is, the belief “that members
of the highest group have the right to define the way things really are”
(Becker, 1967, p. 241). Accepting normative positions vis-à-vis the pro-
duction of knowledge about human–animal networks means that we
miss a great deal of the complex fabric of everyday social interaction. In
other words, it leads to partial and some would say “shoddy” scholar-
ship in that half of what/who we claim to study in human–animal rela-
tionships is missing when we focus solely on human understandings.
As Wels (2015) argues:
Organisation ethnography chooses the side of the powerful, the winners,

the victors: they persistently choose the perspective of human animals
above that of the non-human animal. (p. 243)
Finding ways to incorporate animals in our research processes and outputs

is important and, from our perspective, essential if the ethic of inclusivity
is to be, even partially, realised. The new landscape of research methods
offers us grounds for hope for realising this inclusivity.
For example, Mancini, Van der Linden, Bryan, and Stuart (2012)
aimed to understand the social significance of technologically medi-
ated human–canine interactions. Using a series of interviews with
humans who regularly used tracking technologies with their dogs, the
research team wanted to investigate what the interactions between
humans, dogs and technology meant for both the humans and the
dogs. As they state:
In order to study technology-mediated human-animal interactions or to

develop user-centered technology for animals, we need to question what
these interactions and the technology that mediates them might mean for
animals as well as humans. Therefore, our research questions how tech-
nology might acquire and convey meaning for both; we question how
this meaning might be inferred by or communicated between the two,
and how it might inform the way in which the two adapt to each other
and coevolve; we also question how this co-constructive [italics in original]
meaning exchange could be accessed and understood by those research-
ing the interconnections between humans, animals and technology.
(2012, p. 143)
Their findings demonstrate that the use of technology—here, tracking

devices on dogs—can improve and strengthen multi-species relations.
They noted that human owners used the devices to improve the care they
offered their animals in practical ways—finding lost or injured animals
for instance. Beyond this, however, Mancini et al. argue that the power of
remote vision shifts the balance in the human–dog relationship. They state:
Unlike children, dogs cannot emancipate themselves from the status to

which they are relegated by a human society that struggles to recognize
75
and make room for their autonomy and self-ownership. While research
shows that tracking human family members often raises ethical con-
cerns, such as privacy issues and social tensions, these did not emerge
in our study. But could we construe the behavior of a dog who runs off
when the owner pops up from behind a tree as a desire for privacy,
which is violated by the tracking technology? Could we construe the
behavior of a dog who suddenly starts frequently checking on their
owner during walks as a sign of anxiety, which the technology has
shifted from the owner to the dog? If so, how could we articulate the
boundaries between protection and respect in our research on technol-
ogy-mediated human-animal interactions? Such research has the poten-
tial to redefine the way in which we understand our relationships with
other species and to contribute to the development of a more inclusive
society. (2012, p. 150)
Here, then, we see an example of how a nontraditional approach to

multi-species research might help reorient the ways we think about other
animals by forcing us to think about the world from their perspective.
While not quite allowing us to “hear” their voices, it certainly casts them
as central figures in research where they have previously been omitted
or sidelined. It also opens up the world to a different narrative—a way
of telling stories and making sense of our surroundings through, at least
partially, adopting the perspective of the Other.
If all this seems a far cry from the early days of the scribe among the
tribe, and the technological focus seems overwhelming, we can simplify
and reduce potential confusion by reminding ourselves of a basic prin-
ciple: the aim underlying all of these techniques is to develop empathy
for and understanding of others in social settings. However we come at
this problematic, and whatever our specialism, the ethnographer is look-
ing to provide a detailed, highly contextualised and locally specific “tale
from the field” (Van Maanen, 1988). In the case of the multi-species or
posthuman researcher, the ethnographer is looking to explore a world
constituted by humans and other animals in relation. Importantly, while
humans may be the ones to design and execute that research, they need
not be at the centre of the resulting account as Mancini et al. (2012)
helpfully demonstrate.
Do Research Bureaucracies Help or Hinder?

From a multi-species and posthuman perspective, such work has
much potential. And while the contemporary state of affairs lends
itself to its development, we must also sound a note of caution at
this point for much of the contemporary enthusiasm for interdisci-
plinarity and technological innovation rests upon the persuasive con-
cept of “research impact” (Briggle, Frodeman, & Holbrook, 2015;
Travers, 2009; Wiles et al., 2013). Embedded in current US, UK and
Australian government funding policy, for example, is strong empha-
sis placed upon the ways in which research-related skills might ben-
efit individuals, organisations and nations beyond the “ivory tower”
(Durose & Richardson, 2015). It is no longer sufficient for research-
ers to focus on activities and textual outputs that disseminate find-
ings—staging a conference or publishing a report, for instance. The
political agenda has now moved towards proving the importance of
ideas in “real world” scenarios; to demonstrate impact in terms of “an
effect/change/benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy
or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond aca-
demia” (REF Assessment Framework, 2011).
Thus, university faculty and research institutes often support the view
that it is no longer sufficient to find out, academics are now expected
to help improve the connections between research and everyday life;
between theory and common sense, in short, to make a social difference.
While this has encouraged a greater depth of sensibility to different ways
of working with people (and nonhuman others) in research, it has also
resulted in a number of practical and intellectual challenges. The cross-
over between academic ideas about creativity and the way these have been
applied has not been straightforward. There has been significant debate
about the definition of what makes a method new (Xenitidou & Gilbert,
2012), as well as the degree of trust we should place in novelty or innova-
tion (Wiles et al., 2013). Some scholars have been vocal about the poten-
tial for conflict between measures of “evidence”, academic integrity and
commerciality. There has been criticism of the ways in which discourses
surrounding public and organisational engagement with academic meth-
ods have tended to reinforce the traditional direction of travel: that is,
77
the export of knowledge from university faculty to the world “out there”,
the very terminology of “impact” reinforcing some of these concerns
(Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015).
We share some of these concerns because we are attuned to the politics
involved when human actors seek to represent the life-world of animal
actors in qualitative terms. We too are concerned about the quality and
integrity of new developments (e.g. see our earlier discussion of Kirksey
et al’s frog experiment) as well as the unreflective reliance upon buzz-
words and jargon such as multi-species ethnography. We are also concerned
that creativity is being misappropriated to serve narrow and uncritical
agendas, to make certain ideas or discourses more powerful while silenc-
ing others (Fraser & Taylor, 2016). We are also mindful that the very
structures that should support boundary-crossing innovation are them-
selves entangled by these politics. Universities are not immune from the
reaches of neoliberalism (Fraser & Taylor, 2016; Harvey, 2005).
In fact, some academic researchers describe their experiences as working
in the “academic sausage factory” (Smith, 2000) where they are expected
to embrace the language and logic of neoliberalism; that is, the values and
ideals of economic rationality. In practice, this means ethnographers are
often expected to generate research funding, “leverage” corporate invest-
ment and funding opportunities and constantly innovate new ways of
disseminating results to wider and wider audiences even if that neces-
sitates a removal, or at least playing down, of the critical orientations of
such. This clearly has detrimental possibilities for the academy broadly
but, arguably, is far more damaging to research done into marginalised
topics and/or utilising critical or (perceived) radical frameworks or meth-
ods. Research is also speeding up, and “slow scholarship”—the kind often
needed to do ethnography, and to develop new methods and ideas, as
well as to build relationships across disciplinary and academic–practi-
tioner boundaries—is becoming rare. Quite simply, it is a concern that
ethnographic research is increasingly tethered to the agendas and interests
of business and that academic freedom and independence to select field
sites of interest is being eroded. The ongoing commercialisation of uni-
versities, in effect, polices the acceptability of ideas and engenders a push,
in terms of knowledge production, towards the conservative middle.
This issue is particularly concerning for those working in unconven-

tional areas like posthumanism. Consider, for example, those wanting to
undertake work that problematises the uses of animals in society. Funding
sources for this kind of work are scant, the “outputs” are unlikely to be
palatable to university administrators who do not court controversy, and
opportunities for the forms of dissemination the neoliberal academy val-
ues will be few. The current university “ranking regime”, for instance
(Gonzalez & Nunez, 2014, p. 7), which propels researchers to publish
in narrow, disciplinary-specific “top tier” journals, ignores the cultural
or structural factors that inform what gets published and where. In turn,
this determines what—in terms of ideas, data, methods and theories—is
considered important. This demarcation of “good” knowledge and “bad”
knowledge damages work being done on the fringes of academic accept-
ability, of which (arguably) the study of human relations with other ani-
mals is an example. Because, in wider society, the tendency is for animals
to be deemed inferior to humans, there is a knock-on assumption that
understanding our relations with them is frivolous. This is reinforced by a
suspicion within the academy regarding work that is openly and unapol-
ogetically critical of the status quo. Given that most human–animal
studies researchers seek to highlight the ways animals are mistreated and
misused in modern society this default critical setting is one that rankles.
This discomfort often plays out in derisive terms (animals are not
“worth it”) which mirror social and cultural assumptions about the rela-
tional inferiority of animals vis-à-vis humans (Buller, 2014). And while
contending with such principles can often offer points of interference
and disruption for scholars in the area, these beliefs are backed insti-
tutionally. Forced to play by institutional rules if we want recognition,
promotion, and often the room to do research, human–animal studies
scholars can become caught. For example, successfully bidding for large,
government grants involves demonstrating a track record. Track record is
measured, at least in part, by publications in top tier journals. If these top
tier journals are closed to critical work reflecting on marginal issues, then
human–animal studies scholars find themselves in a bind. Moreover,
given the generally uncontested rhetoric put forth by the sector—that
universities are places where open, critical inquiry takes place—challeng-
ing such systems becomes fraught with difficulty. It may make sense to
79
publish in a lower or non-ranked journal, for instance, especially if the

goal is to reach audiences that are better placed to act on the (critical)
knowledge being produced but this effectively closes the door to grant
income and, by extension, to professional development. While we do
not suggest this is always true and acknowledge that there is room for
resistance—resistance that might, in fact, lead to other positives such as
collaboration with allies—we raise this here to point to the problems of
epistemological gatekeeping and how they might affect those in the field
of multi-species investigations.
Methods as Resistance: The Species Turn

Paradoxically, while we are critical of neoliberalisation within higher edu-
cation/research (see Fraser & Taylor, 2016) we also acknowledge that, in
certain places, this has supported the forms of innovation we outlined
at the outset. The new politics of the research funding environment, for
all its potential harms can support a creative, artistic and emancipatory
agenda by underlining the importance of community engagement, inter-
disciplinarity and innovation of methods. Perhaps, a more positive way
of seeing this is to view innovative methods as a form of resistance. This
resistance involves researchers staking claims about what matters episte-
mologically, ethically and methodologically and, in turn, helps under-
mine established assumptions about what is worthy of study. In the
process, it also opens up research to new areas, or legitimises the use of
nontraditional forms of data such as reflective writing about emotions or
senses, sounds or visual stimuli.
It is our contention, then, that despite institutional and/or ideological
and political constraints, ethnography holds much promise for investi-
gating multi-species settings. We believe that despite its humanistic ten-
dencies and inheritances, ethnography has a long and proud history of
encouraging democratic engagement between researcher and “subject”
located in studies of everyday social life. The growing momentum within
the social sciences to include other species in less explicitly humanist ways
extends the emancipatory, liberal agenda of ethnography’s critical and
postcolonial past as well as its more recent turns to interpretation and
enactment. We think this offers clear grounds for optimism and legiti-
mates the efforts of many scholars currently seeking to break through into
the study of humans and other creatures. Many posthumanists claim that
this can be viewed as part of a distinct epoch in history, the Anthropocene,
a time period in which human interconnectedness with the rest of the
natural world is increasingly accepted as a basis for reflection upon human
consumption, greed and responsibility (Nimmo, 2015).
Borrowing the terminology of Kirksey and Helmreich (2010), we sug-
gest that we can label the new enthusiasm for including animal Others
in ethnography a species turn. We need no longer consider animals the
“windows and mirrors” (Mullin, 1999, p. 201) into our own human
concerns and interests. Instead of being excluded or included symboli-
cally, the presence of animals can be seen as necessary, presenting the
researcher with messy “entanglements” (Haraway, 2008) and “engage-
ments” (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010) to make sense of and work with.
The species turn reflects posthumanism’s claim that humans and animals
inhabit the same social spaces with overlapping agencies and experiences,
which challenges extant sociological ways of seeing culture and specifi-
cally the “affected ignorance” towards animals (Haraway, 2003) that has
been traditional.
We support the notion that ethnography should partake in the turn to
species. Whether we subscribe to the view that this is part of a new age or
not, we think that we should now seek to explore the many and “varied
webs of interspecies dependence” (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010, p. 553)
that form rhizomes of social networks. These rhizomes and networks form
interspecies collectives (Haraway, 2008) that constitute the exciting new
spaces of research. Hence, there is no interest for us in comparing animals
with humans: our fascination lies in generating new understandings of
the contiguous nature of human–animal lives.
This fascination is shared by a growing number of multi-species
researchers. Indeed, we have already seen boundary-challenging work in
various mixed species settings such as laboratories (McAllister Groves,
1996; Philips, 1994), cat shelters (Alger & Alger, 2003), dog shelters
(Taylor, 2010), airports (O’Doherty, 2016) and in law enforcement
with K-9 police dog handlers (Sanders, 2006). There have been more
radical applications of this concept too, for example, in documenting
81
human–plant and human–microbe relations (Buller, 2014). Connecting

this emerging field is the desire to demonstrate empirically how animals,
insects and myriad other life forms come to be constituted in particular
ways in the modern social imaginary and to extend a degree of mean-
ingful presence to them in the ethnographic account (Rabinow, 2007).
What excites us about such work is that traditionally taken-for-granted
distinctions between human and animal life are increasingly questioned
and eroded.
A case in point is Taylor’s ethnographic work in animal shelters (2004,
2007, 2010). Based on both interviews and participant observation in
shelters where she also volunteered, her written findings demonstrate the
central roles animals played in giving meaning to dirty, difficult, under-
paid and emotionally fraught work. Similarly, she also demonstrates how
animals come to be constituted as “persons” or as “worthy pets-in-wait-
ing” as opposed to “unworthy” and unwanted strays. The ethnographic
approach facilitated an understanding of how work with/for animals
formed the identities of both the humans and animals involved in that
work.
Such studies, many of which do not claim to be multi-species ethnog-
raphies per se, show that ethnographic fieldwork already lends itself to
documenting the sometimes complex interactions between species par-
ticularly through its emphasis on sensory observation and experience, of
noting seemingly minute and inconsequential details to develop experi-
ence of the field. Nonetheless, in considering whether this growing body
of work constitutes or responds to a species turn, we must return to an
uncomfortable fact: that ethnography is—quite literally—people writ-
ing. Those critical of the idea of a species turn could feasibly argue that it
involves the observation of distinctively human traits while animals have
a subjective experience of living which is wholly and (we presume) almost
inconceivably different from ours: that we may never capture these life-
worlds no matter how much we may try.
While acknowledging that we remain, to an extent, trapped by our
own behavioural and epistemological traits, we can at least remain mind-
ful of the fact that knowledge creation is not neutral, nor objective, and
is always subject to ideological and political practices and processes. Any
and all attempts to “bring animals in”—no matter how innovative—
must eventually wrestle with this knowledge/power intersection. The

“subaltern” status of animals (Wels, 2015 using Spivak, 1988) means that
an already uneven playing field wherein other species are assumed to be
inferior offers another layer of potential oppression—that which occurs
through the silencing of those in less powerful positions.
In conclusion, we see the species turn as a form of resistance, part
of a much greater challenge to post-Enlightenment, rationalised logical-
positivism, the legacies of which have created the epistemological con-
structions that have, for many years, supported the marginalisation
and oppression of various Others (e.g. Adorno & Horkheimer, 1979;
Strathern, 2004). Those sympathetic to this case (and those terming
themselves posthumanist) have to take care to think closely about meth-
ods, be they ethnographic or otherwise, because methods are a funda-
mental vehicle by which knowledge is assembled and it is through the
“purification” of otherwise messy and competing categories that meth-
ods achieve their authority in making things known. Persisting with neat
and categorical separations between things, between nature and culture,
for instance, and between humans and animals (Kirksey & Helmreich,
2010; Latour, 2005), we inevitably perpetuate myths and inaccuracies
about the entangled realities of human–animal interactions (Haraway,
2003, 2008; Irvine, 2004; Wolfe, 2010). Resistance of these simple bina-
ries lies at the heart of posthumanism.
The contemporary developments within ethnography, the interest
in co-creative polyvocal research, the rise of creative and technological
methods are all laying tracks for us to follow. It has been our argument
that we must include animals as subjects, not objects, of research and
that adapted ethnographic methods are key to these attempts. We have
explained that this is not only desirable within a posthumanist framework
but also constitutes an act of rebellion that resists both hegemonic norms
about species that “matter” and about defending the right to create new
ideas no matter how institutions and funding bodies choose to differenti-
ate between “good” and “bad” forms of knowledge. Despite our concerns
with neoliberalism within the academy, we remain hopeful that ethnog-
raphy’s long history of liberal interest in and defence of the “underdog”,
its postcolonial and critical roots and ability to adapt to myriad new ways
of working, including technology, go a long way to extending posthu-
83
manism’s radical challenge. In the next part, “Fieldwork”, we move from

considering the political, philosophical and ideological difficulties—and
necessity—of including other animals in our work to thinking about the
practical ways we might achieve this. We consider visual, sensory, arts-
based methods, interdisciplinarity, mixed methods (or hybrids) before
turning to writing as a means of advocating for animals.
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Part II
Field-work
5
Visual Methods
In the first part of this book, we argued that marginalising nonhuman

animals in human–animal studies scholarship is problematic on several
fronts. Ignoring animals contributes to their oppression by presupposing
and shoring up the ideology of human centrality. Persisting with human-
ist agendas perpetuates the colonisation of knowledge production to the
detriment of rich and subtle multi-species accounts (Davis & Craven,
2011, p. 191). We need methods that bring animals in, methods that
include and involve them in ways that reveal their significance as social
actors both in relation to humans and in their own right. Yet this is no
simple undertaking, for methods are themselves subject to politics: the
site and subject of power relations. Those in control of the methodology
usually dominate the form of knowledge that is produced (e.g. see Latour
& Woolgar, 1986), the places where it is reported (e.g. see Fraser & Taylor,
2016), as well as the manner in which it is reported. We have so far drawn
on the history of ethnography and anthropology, and, to a lesser degree,
sociology, to advance a posthumanist philosophy of knowledge that takes
these points as central to any discussion about methods. This chapter
takes a more practical approach in considering how techniques of visual

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_5
research can complement ethnographic work by helping us to highlight

the intertwined relationships as well as the potential power imbalances
between humans and animals.
A turn to visual methods is, in many ways, a natural first step in our
emancipatory endeavour because since the earliest cave paintings, human
artists have focused upon images of animals in portrayals of war, hunt-
ing, celebration and important rites of passage. After all, “the image is
older than the written word” (Beuving & de Vries, 2015, p. 122). The
long history of art and other visual forms shows that relationships and
interactions between the species are central to human ideas of society and
indeed of humanity itself. As contemporary ethnographers, however, our
interest in the visual does not lie solely in historic meanings attributed
to animals. Instead, we argue that images and the production of visual
resources open up new areas for reflection and provide a critical basis for
discussing and representing human–animal relationships.
Visual Methods for Naturalistic Enquiry

There is significant potential for images to support naturalistic, critical
and emancipatory modes of ethnographic research. Consider, for exam-
ple, Lewis Hine’s photographs of young children working as newspaper
vendors and coal miners, impactful work which contributed significantly
to anti-child labour legislation in the USA. This naturalistic approach is
also evident in the classic photoethnography, A Fortunate Man (Berger &
Mohr, 1967), an account of a country doctor as he conducts his rounds
in the Forest of Dean. Weaving candid black-and-white photographs
with text and speech evokes a degree of empathy with both doctor and
patient, the words and images working together to move and engage the
reader without a demanding theoretical theme. Indeed, so powerful was
the book that it is considered a masterpiece (Francis, 2015) and “still the
most important book about general practice ever written” (Feder, 2005,
p. 246) because of its ability to bring both the doctor and his patients to
life. As Feder (2005) points out, “You can hear the voices of the patients
through the text” (p. 246), and the still images are vital in this, for, as
Grady (2001) notes, “…thinking, writing and talking about, and with,
5 Visual Methods
91
images not only can make arguments more vivid, but also more lucid”
(p. 84).
It is from such a strong tradition that the last three decades have seen a
growing theoretical and ideological interest in visual information within
the humanities and social sciences more generally (e.g. Barthes, 1977;
Berger, 1972; Emmison & Smith, 2000; Sontag, 1977), and an upsurge
of interest in a wide variety of visual artefacts, including film (Duneier,
Brown, Carter, West, & Hopper, 2010; Hayward, 1993) and everyday
images such as advertising (Barthes, 1972; Eagleton, 2003; Williamson,
1978). A wealth of recent publications has emerged in ethnographic jour-
nals as well as through the institution of journals such as Visual Studies,
Visual Communication and Visual Methodologies. Visual research is also
becoming increasingly popular in history, geography (e.g. Rose, 2001)
and economics (Thrift, 2008; see also Journal of Cultural Economy). There
have been some particularly fine examples of photoethnography (where
narratives are interspersed with photographs taken in the field) in these
publications as well as some interesting critiques of visual data gathering
and presentation (e.g. Pauwels, 2010). Some have even heralded a shift
from the “linguistic turn” (Rorty, 1979) to the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell,
1994).
The reach and impact of visual research is assisted by the fact that
it encompasses many forms, including the analysis of pictures, graphs,
film, internet sources, artworks, sculpture and architecture and is flexible
enough to draw from pre-existing visual material and/or researcher- or
participant-generated visual data (Banks, 2001; Pink, 2003; Ruby, 2006;
Warren, 2005). Visual research draws upon a growing interest in picto-
rial cultures (Baudrillard, 1994; Debord, 1992) that permeate—or, as
some would put it, “saturate” (Gergen, 1991)—everyday life through
newspaper photographs, films, television, video, web pages and social
media spaces, and whose dissemination has become ever easier through
mechanical reproduction (Benjamin, 1999) and digital technology such
as smartphones. These technologies make image capture and film-making
an everyday possibility and, in a research context, support the naturalistic
approach that ethnographers favour. Naturalistic enquiry is important
if we are aiming to build nuanced accounts from organic, immersive
and participatory methods. It is also a mode of enquiry that lends itself
to capturing the subtle interactions that take place between the species.
From a posthumanist perspective, research that is not wholly reliant upon
the spoken or written word has added potential for revealing subtle inter-
actions which do not occur through language. This basic idea is simple,
although the methods that seek to embrace this ethos are perhaps less so.
Let us start, then, with some practicalities.
Visual Methods to See Animals

Those who work with visual methods usually make a distinction between
the a priori incorporation of the visual into research design and the use
of ad hoc images to support findings garnered from other methodologi-
cal approaches like interview. Thus, the term visual method is used “to
include ways of doing research that generate or employ visual material as
an integral part of the research process, whether as a form of data, a means
of generating further data, or a means of representing ‘results’” (Knowles
& Sweetman, 2004, p. 5). A useful initial example of images in the data
collection process is Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997). Participants are
given cameras and encouraged to take visual records of their daily lives
(e.g. Packard, 2008) or of specific events in their lives (e.g. Woodward,
2008). A variant on this is Native Image Making in which images (not
necessarily photographic) are produced by participants and form part of
the data. While in both cases, it is humans who control production of the
image, there is nonetheless some potential for revealing new insights into
human–animal interaction within such techniques if they set out with
the explicit aim of bringing animals in (or at the very least not editing
them out) of visual data. Participants could choose to take a camera on the
daily dog walk, on a horseback “hack”, feeding their chickens or indeed
any number of mundane experiences. The hope would be, from a multi-
species perspective, that through the mediation of the image we would
include the presence of animals in everyday routines and accounts of them.
Visual elicitation is a further way images such as photographs, draw-
ings or films can be used to generate inclusive field data. Visual elicitation
is often used within interviews as a stimulus for (human) discussion, a
way to spark the interest of the participant and to prompt them to speak
5 Visual Methods
93
more freely about what they are seeing, thinking and feeling. The objec-
tive is not so much to study the images as to think about the ways that
participants respond to them and attribute their own “social and personal
meanings and values” (Bignante, 2010, p. 1; Ruby, 2006). In photoelici-
tation interviewing, for example, the researcher starts from the premise
that the images, the meaning(s) that are attributed to them, the emo-
tions they stimulate and the information they draw out of the partici-
pant generate insights that do not necessarily or exclusively correspond to
those obtained in verbal inquiry alone (Bignante, 2010). Because images
have many potential meanings and are indeterminate and open to fluid
interpretation, they potentially reveal more about how participants shape
their ontologies, how they observe and experience their surroundings and
how their judgements are filtered through and by structuring forces like
organisations, social and cultural institutions (Banks, 2001).
While undeniably human-centric, visual elicitation carries valuable
potential for building a more nuanced understanding of human–ani-
mal relations. Participants could be asked to reflect on photographic
images of animals, for example, to stimulate discussion. An alterna-
tive approach would be to use art, for example, Piccinini’s (2004) fan-
tastical sculptures that were developed from silicon, fibreglass, textiles
and human hair to explicitly challenge audiences to consider species
divisions deeply and critically. And while we are aware that neither
photos nor artistic images provide a means to give animals their own
“voice” in the research process, they do at least enrich our human
methods of data collection (Pauwels, 2016, p. 95) by generating use-
ful starting points for discussion about animals. Such a process is par-
ticularly helpful if the topic of research is difficult to explain (e.g. the
emotive bond between horse and rider) or carries the potential to be
emotionally troubling in some way (e.g. exploring perspectives on fox
hunting or bullfighting). While researchers have to bear in mind the
ethical concern that images can be shocking, confronting and provoc-
ative and that care needs to be taken in selecting them, we feel visual
images can be useful as data or as prompts for discussions, particu-
larly with participants who are neither “experts” nor “scientists”, those
who speak other languages and/or have limited literacy skills. People
from a variety of backgrounds can happily and easily interpret visual
images, which perhaps make for a more inclusive approach than ver-
bal interview techniques alone.
In considering the inclusion of animals through visual methods, a
good example is highlighted by the work of the photoethnographer and
poet Harriet Fraser, who has produced extensive research on the culture
of upland hill farmers in the UK’s Lake District. Collecting visual rep-
resentations of animals and people has been vital in this endeavour. In
her project, Landkeepers, Fraser (2015) interviewed and photographed 30
farmers along with spokespeople from the National Trust (a heritage char-
ity), United Utilities (a water company), Natural England (a government
adviser) and the National Farmers’ Union. She observed and recorded
farmers’ stories about their lives with Herdwick and Swaledale sheep,
breeds that are native to the region and suited to the harsh demands of
the climate and terrain. Using traditional methods of participant obser-
vation, Fraser worked with farmers as they managed their animals, often
conducting quite demanding physical duties:
… Anthony shows me how to check that it’s done properly: I have to put
my hand right up and under the fleshy tail flap, into a world that’s warm,
moist and utterly foreign. Being a novice at this, I don’t put my hand up far
enough—Anthony does that bit for me—and then I fasten the end with as
tight a knot as I can manage. (http://www.landkeepers.co.uk)
These visceral experiences of animal care and management were cap-

tured in fieldnotes, interview transcription and startling black-and-white
photography. Fraser wrote several poems with elements from the tran-
scription. Importantly, the sheep were explicitly present and formed a
connecting link through the many conversations and experiences she had
in the field, on themes as wide-ranging as farming, food, biodiversity, car-
bon storage, water quality, leisure and trees. Her collection then formed
part of a travelling art exhibition in the Lake District and other cen-
tres, including the Royal Geographical Society in London. By displaying
the photographic images alongside powerful fragments of transcription
and poetry, the exhibition space became a forum for discussion between
original participants as well as invited stakeholders who were encouraged
to experience—to quite literally see for themselves—the overlapping
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c ultural world of Cumbrian farmers and their sheep. The exhibition was
complemented by a printed book and website which engaged thousands
more interested parties and generated relationships and networks long
after the exhibition had moved on. Fraser’s approach not only sought to
deconstruct apparent social divisions between farmers and “stock”, insid-
ers and outsiders, stakeholders and policymakers, but was also “respectful
of and resonant with the rich oral histories and cultural practices of indig-
enous communities” (Cunsolo Willox, Harper, & Edge, 2013, p. 129),
provoking a genuine dialogue and exchange about a life-world “marked
by uncertainty and the unknown” (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013, p. 7).
Reflecting on this, she writes:
Sometimes these are stories of joy and celebration, sometimes they shed
light on heritage. They may provoke further investigation or action, or
touch on issues of struggle or loss in a local-global system where everything
is connected, and balance can be elusive. (http://www.somewhere-nowhere.
com/)
A different but equally helpful example is the Loving Me, Loving You
project being run by Taylor and Fraser in South Australia. This project
is part exhibition, part research project, and aims to stimulate dialogue
and awareness about the links between domestic violence and animal
abuse, in particular, the need for animal-friendly housing in domestic
violence services so that women and children can keep their (often vul-
nerable) animals with them. It aims to demonstrate how the strong bonds
between women, children and their companion animals—who have
all experienced domestic abuse—can help with recovery from trauma.
Working with social care providers such as the Northern Domestic
Violence Service (South Australia), the counselling and support service,
Relationships Australia (South Australia) and community groups (such as
local photography clubs), the project asks women and children who have
experienced abuse to provide some form of art work that expresses their
relationship with their animal companion. These artworks are being col-
lated at the time of writing (Winter 2016) and will be exhibited in local
communities throughout 2017. They will also be used as focal points for
the interviews conducted with the women who produced them (children
will not be interviewed). Exhibits so far include photos, drawings, poems

and prose.
While it is too soon to talk about the results of this project (the exhibi-
tion will roll out early 2017 and the interviews are currently underway),
it is important to note that it was the idea of an exhibition of imagery
that captured the imagination of the various groups involved. Excitement
about being part of a gallery event has led to a fruitful working part-
nership that has brought together groups and individuals in novel ways.
The strong presence of the animals throughout the process has provoked
people’s interest and attention. From the perspective of the researcher,
it has also been interesting, worthwhile and fun to attend many of the
photo-days, and to meet the women, children and animals who have
been involved in the study. The animals have been central in breaking
down barriers between participants and researchers and providing the
grounds for a more naturalistic approach to research. Their presence has
encouraged genuine relationships to be forged between academics and
participants, one predicated on mutual admiration for these companion
animals rather than interviewer–participant dyads. Without the visual
focus on these animals, the researchers would not have been able to man-
age this so deftly, nor would they have been able to capitalise on the
ways in which animals bring people together as a mutual point of interest
despite diverse (and in this case, troubled) backgrounds.
Online exhibitions of images are useful for publicising “findings” and
open debates to wider audiences, including those who may not visit gal-
leries or exhibition spaces in their everyday lives. This is a method that
one of us has experimented with for that very purpose. From 2014 to
2016, Taylor’s What Is It About Animals? study aimed to facilitate the
inclusion of other animals in a piece of social research. Aware of, and
having designed and participated in, much research into human–animal
relations that seemed only to assess human attitudes towards, and con-
structions of, other animals the goal was to include the animals explic-
itly. To that end, the research team solicited photographs of companion
animals from the general public in order to shed light on the ways that
individuals experience the animals they consider important.
By encouraging participants to explain the meanings their animals
hold for them in an open-ended, relatively nonprescriptive way, the aim
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was to gain ethnographic insights into how such relationships might be

expressed. The solicited photography was then exhibited online along
with video entries from humans that explained or epitomised what ani-
mals meant for and to them. There was room for participants to write
something in this particular project but the platform leaned towards
displaying visual images as opposed to text. The online location of this
material meant that participants could add materials at times of day
that suited them (something which has been used beneficially by Misra
(2016) in her online photographic work with working mothers). The
project was deliberately nonprescriptive and left open to interpretation
regarding which species constituted companions along with the kinds of
emotions that could be expressed and how. The website is still live (at the
time of writing) and can be viewed at www.whatisitaboutanimals.com.
The resulting collection of words and images confirmed the utility of
visual methods to capture more dynamic aspects of human–animal rela-
tions. When used as data, the researchers found that images were both
objective and subjective in that they represented snapshots of reality but
still needed to be interpreted by viewers which added an extra layer of
data to the presentation.
This nontraditional method was purposely open-ended rather than
narrowly focused and deterministic which was a deliberately provocative
approach. The use of visual methods in this instance was experimental
and the results were mixed. One of the aims had been to promote better
inclusion of other animals in the visual material, and in this regard, there
was some success. Animals were most certainly present in the finished
exhibition because many people uploaded one or more pictures of their
animal with their names, brief biographies, very short statements about
their role in the family, sometimes only headings, and sometimes with no
accompanying words at all. Through these assembled images and words,
the animals became central to the study and a glance at the hundreds of
photographs usually shows them touching humans in some way. What,
for many, would be a difficult relationship to put into words is thus made
easier to interpret through images.
The explicit aim of bringing animals into a study of this sort is unusual,
even in human–animal studies. We do not often read stories about them
as participants and so they remain Othered by reductive labels; they are
“the family dog” or the “pet”. In this study, by contrast, animals were
visibly present; viewers could see who they were and could learn a little
about them as individuals in a research project. A further strength of the
project was that it was accessible to non-academics. Given the need for
“public sociology”, particularly for those of us who embrace scholar-
activism, this was important (see Chap. 9 for a more developed analysis).
As Packard (2008) notes: “The problem we also have as a discipline is that
the way we write about everyday life can seem absurdly inaccessible to the
very people who inhabit it. Rather, we need to find ways to write about
everyday life that are open, recognisable and legible to those who live it”
(p. 834). In its open-endedness and flexibility we feel this objective was
successfully met. The number of visitors to the project website (at time of
writing close to 20,000 individual visitors viewing the various pages close
to 200,000 times) suggests this was a highly accessible piece of public
sociology, made appealing through the power of visual resources. Despite
this, however, the images that were included in the project were those
that humans thought represented their animals best; images that were
deliberately chosen and possibly manipulated by humans. This returns us
to a humanist bind for while the deep feelings from the humans towards
these animals in particular were certainly evident in the pictures, the ani-
mals remained (to some degree) objects. Animal agency, personality, liv-
ing, fleshy and sensory being could not be included in the research other
than in a static way, mediated by beneficent human concerns. So what of
this absent agency? Can we ever bring that into our pictures?
Our answer is a modest one, for visual data does not necessarily cir-
cumvent human interpretation or bias—there are power imbalances
inherent to any form of representation (Packard, 2008) and in all the
examples we have so far presented, they are also open to criticism on that
basis. Photographs are interpreted by human researchers and deliberately
chosen by human participants because they express something specific.
Art forms, poems and sculptures are made about animals but by people.
These specific messages are refracted through a lens of humanist concerns
which inevitably render any resultant dataset partial. But the inclusion of
images does, at least, ensure that animals are not entirely invisible. Their
social status—as companions/friends/pets/livestock—can be captured
for a very brief moment as they stand, sit or walk with the humans with
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whom they share their space in relation. In snapshots, their agency as

social actors can be visibly acknowledged even if not fully explored or
represented through human technologies of depiction.
Advances in readily available technology, however, are helping us
overcome some of the limitations in including animals in our visually
oriented research. One of the benefits of visual method, as we see it, is
that it can make use of technology to record the shared experience of
horse-riding, dog training or any number of social interactions between
the species for, as Forsey (2010) argues: “It is curious that ethnographers
seem not to have reflected much on a gap between what we say we do
and our real life practice” (p. 558). Perhaps such gaps would be better
understood by drawing together interview and filmed data, as well as
providing fresh insights into the ways in which animals occupy, move
through and experience humanised spaces like houses, offices and parks.
Addressing this particular shortage of visual research, Lynda Birke (2014)
has attempted to develop an approach that aimed to understand how
humans work well with horses.
Birke used videos to film specific human–horse encounters. She then
treated the videos as substitutes for written interview transcripts and
analysed them both quantitatively and qualitatively. This approach
allowed her to utilise several different methods, mapped on to one
another, to try to understand and include the horses as participants.
She describes this as a form of multi-species visual ethnography as the
project was “open-ended and descriptive, rather than hypothesis-led”
and included multiple components, including “ethological observa-
tion of horse-plus-human, monitoring of physiological changes and
sociological approaches (interviews, fieldwork observations of horses
and people in stable yards)” (p. 82). While she was open about the
limitations and implicit asymmetry (e.g. the horses could not be asked
questions), Birke’s project demonstrates a compelling account of how
humans and horses “dance” so well together that they can be seen as
one. This interesting form of community is best captured, from Birke’s
perspective, through visual means.
The examples discussed above underline how visual methods can
reveal relations by producing research outputs that show rather than tell
us about the importance of animals. Ultimately though, visual methods,
for all their inclusive immediacy, are not immune from the charge of
humanist bias. While imagery and art opens new avenues of discussion,
then, it must be noted that simply (re)including the ocular senses in our
methods does not necessarily mean that we can and will include animals
in equal ways. Indeed, the privileging of the visual over the other senses
(particularly olfactory) may itself be seen as a form of species bias. We
must remain mindful that there is a risk of objectifying other creatures
through visual means as recent research in psychology has underlined by
measuring the effect of viewing of “cute” animal images on human stress
levels and mood (Nittono, Fukushima, Yano, & Moriya, 2012).
Despite the inevitably partial and fragmentary nature of visual
resources, we see significant potential for human–animal and posthuman
studies. The conscious viewing of carefully selected images of animals, be
they artistically stylised or more naturalistic and opportunistic, can pro-
voke a reaction in the onlooker that fuses rationality with emotionality.
When used to collect data, images or artistic representations of animals
can make the space for new forms of knowledge, discussion and under-
standing. Informed by emancipatory theories (such as feminism), for
example, visual resources can provide the basis for scholar-activist work
such as that carried out by Yvette Watt at the University of Tasmania,
who blends activism and art. Watt’s Animal Factories visual research proj-
ect highlighs the hidden institutional suffering of animals living in agri-
cultural settings. Similarly, Jo-Anne Macarthur’s We Animals project is
another useful example, a project in which she uses photographs to illus-
trate the lives of animals with humans in numerous areas such as those
reared to be food, those used in entertainment as well as those being
rescued from research environments to “retire” into sanctuaries.
Even if our aims are to advocate on behalf of other animals, however,
by taking photographs of them or using images of them to stimulate
debate, we run the risk that we are situating other species as objects in the
image, not necessarily as equal partners. Indeed, when we talk of visual
methods, we usually mean visual representation, with all that confers
about our abilities to present and re-present the world and others in it.
This may undermine the inclusive potential that we think visual methods
carry. We are reminded of this by Armstrong who opens his thoughtful
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essay The Gaze of Animals (in Taylor & Signal, 2009, pp. 176–199) by
describing his visit to a zoo and his encounter with a captive tiger:
I’m looking at the tiger, but she’s not looking at me. I’m in London’s
Regent’s Park Zoo, so of course there is heavy wire mesh between me and
the big cat. She’s surrounded by human visitors: The Sumatran tigers’
enclosure is roughly circular and they can be seen from any point on its
circumference. Indeed my snapshot captures the face of a woman peering
through a window on the opposite side. But it’s the animal’s own gaze that
gives me pause for thought. She is looking out of her cage, but not directly
at me or any of her other observers. Within this animal’s gaze but not the
focus of it, I feel uncomfortable, guilty, ashamed. This feeling returns
whenever I look at the photograph. (p. 177)
While not a part of an ethnographic piece of work in the strictest sense,

this excerpt nevertheless highlights some of the tensions we are signalling.
Simply assuming that the use of visual methods brings animals somehow
closer to us or enrols them as participants in our research is to forget that
the process of looking is, itself, imbued with unequal power relations.
As Armstrong acknowledges, the tiger at the zoo is subject to a human
gaze—one which constitutes her in a particular way; as an object to be
gazed upon, as an exotic beast worthy of collection and display. She is not
a willing participant in this construction of her bodily/object self, nor is
she in any way an interactant sharing a mutual gaze. She is, in fact, little
more than a decorative object on display, the focus of human eyes and
human interpretation—there is no mutuality here. And it is some sense
of mutuality—or perhaps a lack of asymmetry is a better way of framing
it—that we are arguing is needed if we are to develop a productive under-
standing of human–animal relations.
The asymmetry that prevails in much visual research can be paralysing.
It can place us in the uncomfortable role as onlookers, interpreters, curators
and world-makers. This leaves us in a difficult position. If we write visual
methods off entirely as humanist, we potentially contribute further to the
exclusion of other social actors by closing off avenues that might include
them better. In keeping with our desire to propose modest, tentative and
emergent methods, however, visual methods such as those briefly explored
here do, at least, ensure that animals are seen even if the interpretations that
follow are not necessarily liberating or practically useful for them. In think-
ing further about the idea that methods may carry some practical utility
for animals, in the next part of this chapter we consider how other forms
of visual research may bring humans closer to the world of animals: to
viewing the world as they do, as agents. A key component of ethnographic
study, after all, is attempting to see the world as others see it. Assessing the
contribution that other disciplines have made to visual methods, we con-
sider whether animal-mounted and virtual technologies offer potential for
revealing the agentic perspectives of animals and improving their lives in
relation to humans, particularly within agriculture.
Visual Data for “Beastly Places”

In 2000, geographers Philo and Wilbert (2000) offered up a useful distinc-
tion for studies of animals; the term animal spaces describes the organisation
of animals in space by human beings, while beastly places refers to the ways in
which animals experience space for themselves. Scientists (and indeed social
scientists) now know a great deal about animal spaces—the terrains in which
they live, forage, reproduce and so on—but beastly places are still under-
researched and remain mysterious. As Hodgetts and Lorimer rightly point
out (2015), one of the key reasons for this has been the lack of methods for
doing it well. Yet for us, the realm of the beastly presents an important space
of ethnographic enquiry. While shot through with possible risks of objecti-
fication, visual data applied in quantitative approaches may offer a means of
access. A recent scientific research project (Asher, Friel, Griffin, & Collins,
2016) at the University of Lincoln (UK), for example, used a head-mounted
camera to get as close as possible to the lived experience of being a pig. The
researchers watched the hours of footage generated and noted patterns of
behavioural change. By searching for configurations in the vast amount of
visual data recorded, they made predictions about stress, anxiety and unhap-
piness in the living spaces of pigs which, it is hoped, will make a genuine and
lasting impact on pig health and well-being. This is useful for speculating
about human perspectives on animals and practices of keeping them but
also the first-hand perspectives of these very animals: a radical step towards
acknowledgement of their very different agencies and interests. In this capac-
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ity, this method shares ethnography’s aim of gaining insight into the lived
worlds of others (although here these others are pigs rather than humans).
While this is by no means a traditional form of data collection within
ethnography, attaching sensors and monitors to animals is nothing new
within the life sciences. Indeed, as cameras and sensors are growing smaller
and less intrusive, they can now collect and send larger packages of data
than the more cumbersome radio transmitters of old. Many scientists are
developing new ways of (quite literally) seeing the world through the eyes
of animals. In some regards, this fulfils an important ethical imperative
of human–animal studies, that is, attempting to present multi-species
viewpoints in research findings. Even if we, as ethnographers, are not
easily able to interpret big datasets or the footage from animal-mounted
cameras, we can at the very least examine and possibly empathise with
the lived realities of Others like pigs and cows to pose new questions for
debate. Some suggest that we can go further still in using technologies
of observation. Advocates of animal-mounted technology, for example,
claim that they carry the potential to improve the lives of animals, espe-
cially those living on farms and in other “organised” environments.
As to how this might work practically, it is helpful to turn to another
example from the natural sciences. Amory, Barker, and Codling (2012)
have developed a cow-tracking mechanism that can autonomously moni-
tor cattle behaviour over prolonged periods and trigger calls for help.
Using a new type of cow-mounted biosensor that combines real-time
local positioning, a 3D accelerometer to sense movement, a magnetom-
eter for orientation, and a temperature sensor, cattle are being observed
in multiple ways to track the relationships between movement and dis-
ease. A smartphone-like package is worn around each animal’s neck to
capture information about activity levels, their proximity to herd mates
and the locations of their interactions. Amory et al. (2012) point to dis-
tinct changes in animal behaviour associated with disease and so regard
the benefits to be far-reaching, stressing that raising awareness of abnor-
mal behaviours might provide a tool for animal keepers to take a closer
look at an individual or to accurately predict health problems for groups.
Technology may even pave the way for automated alerts to be sent to vets.
While this form of data collection may seem a long way from posthuman
ethnography, we think there are possibilities to build interdisciplinary col-
laborations on the basis of work like this (something we consider specifically

in Chap. 8). If, for example, ethnographers could work with scientists, farm-
ers and vets to generate new understandings of the social aspects of findings
revealed by such technologies, there is potential to understand not only the
ways that animals experience their own beastly places but also how humans
interact with and influence those places (Hodgetts & Lorimer, 2015). From
this standpoint, there is potential for ethnographers to make recommenda-
tions for change and improvement in conjunction with scientists who are
able to bring different skills and insights to bear on the data. As Hodgetts
and Lorimer argue (2015), “technological advances in robotics and virtual
simulation hold out a tantalizing possible future for re-scaled, embodied
interspecies encounters” (p. 289), and, seen through this lens, the interdis-
ciplinary potential of visual images can provide further important resources
that lend themselves to learning, teaching and perhaps even advocacy.
It is worth noting, however, that projects in this area will inevitably
raise tensions. In the cases we have discussed above, technology may be
being used to improve animals’ welfare through learning more about their
preferences, for example, but a more critical reading is that technology is
being enrolled to understand how to exploit other animals. We also have
concerns in this regard but argue that the immediacy of visual resources,
be they artistic, photographic or filmed carries a unique capacity: a capac-
ity to make us think more deeply about human–animal encounters. At
the very least, visual media have an immediacy that challenges and pro-
vokes us to contemplate these very encounters in both cognitive and
emotive ways. Linstead (2016, p. 2) writes, “[the] non-reductive (-repre-
sentational) element [in visual media] produces a creative encounter that
is not preceded by a sense of volition (certain formations of subjectivity)
but rather hits us with an overwhelming force that produces a shock to
thought.”
An example of this in a practical context is the virtual slaughterhouse
simulator that was developed to help teach veterinary students about
slaughterhouse processes (Seguino, Seguino, Eleuteri, & Rhind, 2014).
This tool creates a literal “shock to thought” (Linstead, 2016) through
visual immersion. A similar virtual slaughterhouse simulator, the iAnimal,
co-produced by pressure groups, Animal Equality and Condition One,
is used for advocacy. Shown at film festivals, on college and u niversity
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105
campuses and available online (ianimal.360.com), iAnimal is “a virtual

reality project that creates a 360 degree, immersive experience in which
the viewer is transported inside factory farms and slaughterhouses” to
allow “the viewer to access the day-to-day abuses that are hidden from
the public by the agricultural industry”. These initiatives are provocative
because of their immersive and sensory approach and because they do not
rest upon language (Berger, 1972; Rose, 2001).
We have argued in this chapter that still and moving images take us
squarely beyond social science as a narrow “discipline of words” (Hughes,
2012, p. xxiii). We have demonstrated that visuals can provide a legitimate
vehicle for analysis and investigation, that they can be a useful source of
ethnographic data in itself, as well as providing a vessel for passing on,
discussing and sharing different perspectives. Images reveal important
insights into the beastly experiences of animals as well as human percep-
tions of their relationships to them in animal spaces. We note, follow-
ing Pink (2003, 2013, 2015), that images should be taken seriously in
their own right rather than as an adjunct to linguistic meaning-making
activities (Pink, 2003; Rose, 2001). While not circumventing language
entirely, visual approaches hold clear potential to advance the species
inclusive mode of work we are advocating throughout this book.
We have also noted that visual communication is different from verbal
communication because it requires particular reflexive skills on behalf of
the researcher, especially an awareness of the emotions involved when
considering our other senses more carefully. Allowing the space for emo-
tion, or at least reflexivity, is an important component of the form of
posthumanist ethnography that we support, in part because it offers a
corrective to overtly rationalist modes of thought (that often marginalise
other species) and, in part, because our relationships with other animals
are, themselves, often emotional.
Nevertheless, there are obvious ethical discussions to be had in any
exploration of visual, artistic or filmed data, both with regard to these
emotional demands as well as to the “utility” of visuals for serving nar-
row commercial interests (particularly as many of the best funded animal
research technologies appear to work in tandem with the commercial
farming of animals for food production). At the outset of any project
it is necessary to ask why we want to know something and to ascertain
who it benefits. But whatever the explicit motivation for a project, the

open-ended nature of many visual resources carry with them a degree
of uncertainty. We cannot easily anticipate an onlooker’s reaction or
interpretation. This indeterminacy might be unsettling but is a positive
advantage, a way that ethnography—a discipline traditionally reliant
upon words–may advance further into understanding the human–ani-
mal world by highlighting the non-verbal elements of interaction. This is
an important extension of ethnography’s emancipatory and liberal core
and, as we have shown in the foregoing examples, a largely worthwhile
one if we hope to evoke and showcase the important interminglings that
social lives with animals involve, however partially. In the next chapter we
pursue this principle further by considering other senses as ethnographic
“tools” that reveal and help us explore human–animal relations.
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6
Sensory Methods
Our previous chapter highlighted the increasing interest in visual meth-

ods such as photoethnography, visual elicitation and film, but it would be
a mistake to assume that an interest in the other senses of smell, taste,
touch and so on have been similarly embraced by qualitative research-
ers. While visual culture has prompted a whole range of new research
techniques, other sensory media have often been sidelined (Pink, 2015).
Many authors have noted that there exists a “hierarchy of the senses”
(Howes & Classen, 2013), with vision occupying the uppermost posi-
tion, and have rightly called for this to be challenged methodologically,
not by ignoring vision or relegating it to the sidelines, but by expanding
out from it and considering it alongside other senses.
As Pink (2015) argues, ethnography benefits from taking “as its start-
ing point the multisensoriality of experience, perception, knowing and
practice” (p. x). We agree and, despite our own preoccupation with the
visual in the previous chapter, we think there is space for broader multi-
sensorial research in human–animal studies, that is, for a more rounded
inclusion of the senses in multi-species accounts. In this chapter, we lay
out some possibilities for this by considering a number of examples of
the ways in which other researchers (often working in fields outside eth-

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_6
nography) have used their senses in their methods. Our argument for the
necessity of multisensory methods is twofold. Firstly, and pragmatically,
because animals inhabit a deeply sensory world where language is less
significant, tuning into our own senses equips us better for the sort of
posthuman, species-inclusive ethnography we advocate. Secondly, priori-
tising disembodied, “sense-less”, research works to maintain normative
assumptions about rationality located in mind/body dualisms. Given that
much work with other animals rests upon challenging such assumptions,
it seems hypocritical to continue using methods that signal an unreflexive
acceptance of them.
Ethnography and Equality
The work of bell hooks provides a good example, particularly her view
that ethnography is a way to experience the view from below (1989).
While hooks focuses on race, her arguments that ethnography can and
should be a tool to shine a light on marginalised groups are transferable
to our argument about species. In her later work she notes: “How often
contemporary white scholars writing about black people assume posi-
tions of familiarity, as though their work were not coming into being in a
cultural context of white supremacy, as though it were in no way shaped
and informed by that context. And, therefore, as though no need exists
for them to overtly articulate a response to this political reality as part of
their critical enterprise” (2015, p. 124). The same is often done in eth-
nographies where humans and animals are present. Animals are ignored,
sidelined or considered from a position of familiarity. From this follows
the uncomfortable suspicion that many of us seeking to do good multi-
species ethnography will have to interrogate our species privilege more
critically. As hooks argues, “surely it is important as we attempt to rethink
cultural practice, to re-examine and remake ethnography, to create ways
to look at and talk about or study diverse cultures and peoples in ways
that do not perpetuate exploitation and domination” (2015, p. 128).
That ethnography lends itself to exposing exploitation and domina-
tion is clear from works as diverse as Walkerdine (1998), who deployed
ethnography to show how working-class women and girls contributed
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113
to their own oppression, and Willis (1979), who revealed the subjective
viewpoint of the oppressed (in his case working-class “lads”) and the ways
in which their limited decisions entrap them to reproduce and shore up
powerful structures of oppression. In each case, ethnography evokes a feel
for the people under investigation, how their life-worlds are constituted
by the tastes, choices, conversations and emotions that they exhibit.
While our argument—stimulated by current interest in multi-species
ethnography—may seem radical and new, it is not. In fact, there is a
weight of existing work for us to build on. For anthropologists and eth-
nographers, an interest in the broad experience afforded by the human
senses has always been present (in some form) within their accounts. As
Howes (2011, pp. 437–438) points out, researchers on the Cambridge
expedition to the Torres Straight in 1898 (which marked one of the first
fieldwork expeditions within anthropology) deliberately selected physi-
cians with expertise in visual perception to accompany them and took
numerous devices to measure the other senses such as hearing, taste and
pain. The intended subjects of their tests and experiments were “native
islanders”. While this expedition marked one of the first attempts by
researchers to collect empirical data, the hypotheses these researchers were
working with assumed that “primitive” peoples had better senses because
less energy was being expended in “higher functions” of reasoned thought.
As such this early attention to the senses suited anthropology’s (and other
social sciences’) eurocentric racism. The experiments performed among
the Torres peoples threw the extant belief that the “noble savage” enjoyed
heightened sensory skills into some doubt but did little to destabilise
the implicit colonial hierarchy of the project which was, unfortunately,
an approach echoed throughout much nineteenth-century research. This
rested upon beliefs about differences between humans and other animals
with the notion of the “civilising process” (Elias, 2000) implying that
to be cultured, one must be above animal senses because “high culture”
required the suppression of the “lower” senses (Classen, 2012).
Problematic historic examples like these demonstrate that the way
we perceive the senses is itself ideological and tied up with social norms
and stereotypes. While contemporary ethnographic work is no longer
tethered to this pervasive colonial agenda and has moved firmly beyond
the treatment of senses as racially determined, there is still, arguably, a
favouring of visual over other senses in no small part due to rationalist

beliefs of the primacy of the mind over the body. This is, however, sub-
ject to small but concerted challenge where researchers are increasingly
making use of sensory data to explore the feelings of both the author and
the Other, and this is particularly the case in emancipatory and criti-
cal work within feminist (and postfeminist), postcolonial and postmod-
ern templates. In keeping with the emancipatory agenda of such work,
Low (2012) explains that it is vital for ethnographers to ask how sensory
ordering relates to social order.
Given that animals are sensory rather than linguistic creatures, it is pos-
sible to see that ignoring Low’s (2012) imperative legitimates the exclu-
sion of valued forms of data not only about human participants but about
nonhuman animals too. To ignore the senses is to collude with the anthro-
pocentrism that has pervaded post-Enlightenment intellectual thought,
something that has worked to reiterate the mantra of human superior-
ity through binary tropes of civility/barbarism. This persistent problem
is especially relevant to the study of human–animal relations because the
senses, often those which are especially important to animals—primarily
touch and smell—can often be unpleasant, thus seemingly supporting and
justifying their exclusion from research. After all, it is not pleasant to think
and write about shit, piss, vomit, saliva, and blood.
Multisensory Ethnography with Other Species

Some researchers are now starting to engage with such messy data in
order to shed light on the richness of animal life and indeed social life
with animals (e.g. see Thwaites, 2016). In her ethnography of farm vets,
for example, Hamilton (2007) drew on the concept of dirt and excre-
ment to understand how the human hierarchies of the veterinary practice
were ordered and maintained. Animal faeces were central to the argu-
ment that “muck” was a cultural artefact, open to interpretation and
having a unique transformative capacity to be polluting or scientific,
depending on who was handling it, when and where. The vets, at the top
of the organisational structure, were able to confidently handle “muck” as
experts and subjected it to scientific tests in the laboratory to reveal diag-
noses and facts. Meanwhile, the office staff saw the same “muck” as a pol-
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luting and disgusting substance—a presence that emphasised their lowly

status within the organisation as subordinates who tidied away and puri-
fied such by-products at the end of the working day, usually after the vets
had gone home. In this case, the same “muck” was simultaneously dirty
and clean, transforming between an emblem of scientific prestige and a
signifier of dirty work. By being there to watch these symbolic transfor-
mations take place, Hamilton was able to understand how important the
senses can be in daily life as well as in ethnographic research.
Similarly, in her (2016) research among upland farmers in the English
Lake District, Fraser advocates touching and smelling animals in order to
properly get a feel for the sorts of work that farmers do when they tend
to their sheep (something we explored in the context of visual methods
in Chap. 5). Despite the potential for the researcher to harbour feelings
of discomfort and repulsion at the sight and smell of pollution and dirt,
the range of sensory messages that emerge from human–animal entangle-
ments for Fraser implies that an interest in other-than-textual modes of
research is a necessary counterweight to redress the privileging of lan-
guage which has historically dominated the humanities. Drawing eth-
nographic attention to examples like these, however, we run the risk of
appearing uncivilised, yet these unpleasant and sometimes downright dis-
gusting aspects of corporeality are ours too. We are animals too, after all.
And while humans may take a relatively sophisticated view of their sen-
sory information, it is only because we operate behind a cultural veneer
where unpleasant odours and other bodily outputs that affect the senses
are sanitised, or at least contained. We are able to ignore them, recode
them or screen them from view in ways not possible for (or desirable
to) other animals, who, at least by human interpretation, “do” mess and
muck so publicly and with apparent carelessness or freedom—a word with
connotations worth thinking about.
Sound and Movement
An explicit agenda to include the senses in ethnographic work offers some-
thing important to human–animal studies, then, extending an already
strong foundation within this research approach. As to the practicalities
of this, motion-based studies (e.g. walking, bicycling, rambling, driving)
are useful vehicles for study. The fields of media and communication,
cultural studies and critical human geography (Zieleniec, 2007) have
already made use of these techniques, creating first-person accounts of
their movements with voice, music and/or sound recording (e.g. Giraud,
2016) to offer a multifaceted account that does not rely on descriptive
text alone. In a walking study, the researcher moves through spaces like
streets and public parks (Zieleniec, 2013), attends to the full range of
senses that come into play; the smell of cut grass, the sound of children
playing, the screech of birds and so on.
Recordings from their surroundings can be used alongside photos and
film from the walk to create an ethnographic vignette and that can be
used as a basis for further analysis. For example, fusing music compo-
sition with computing, Parker (2012) has attempted to document the
invisible infrastructures that lie behind the internet by listening to (and
recording) the unusual noises of server banks. In his view, this has pro-
vided a sensory method to politicise the social and cultural relations that
enable people to carry out mundane activities (such as sending an email
or uploading a picture to a social media site). There are some interesting
connections to be made here with the work of other thinkers who have
discussed the everyday aesthetics of digital culture. Fuller and Goffey’s
(2012) Evil Media, for example, draws attention to the relationships
between infrastructures, technologies and ecologies while Hine’s (2000)
Virtual Ethnography depicts the internet as both a site of cultural for-
mations and a cultural artefact moulded by people’s understandings and
expectations. Hine’s argument is that this complex online world requires
a new form of ethnography.
Responding to contemporary literature on digital, material and vir-
tual methods, as well as the ancient Japanese tradition of Shinrin-Yoku
(taking in the forest atmosphere or “forest bathing” for health benefits),
Giraud (2016) has made developed ethnographic tools that draw on the
senses. She has adapted walking as aural narrative or soundwalk, and she
combines auditory technologies with critical reflection (often in “blog”
form) as she travels through a particular space and meets the Others
who inhabit such spaces. On a soundwalk, Giraud argues, the researcher
should attend to a range of auditory cues: ambient sounds (difficult to
pinpoint, “white noise”, a background sound like distant traffic); sonic
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landmarks or noises which represent a signature of a particular setting

(e.g. the sound of barking in the kennel of a veterinary surgery); distinc-
tive foreground sounds (such as individual dog barks, bird song or car
alarms) as well as tiny and hard-to-detect sounds (barely recognisable but
perhaps important such as small mammals squeaking); and sounds from
invisible or mysterious sources or “acousmatic” sounds.
In focusing on these different forms of auditory experience, the field-
site can thus be imbued with fascinating meaning that helps locate the
researcher as part of rather than distinct from nature, a component
dwelling within an indivisible whole. This complements a posthuman
standpoint well, for, as Phillips and Rumens (2016) observe, “[i]f we can
embrace the materiality of our bodies, that we are organic beings embed-
ded in nature, then perhaps we can overcome our alienation and estrange-
ment from nature” (p. 58). In other words, we can empathise with other
species and perhaps more broadly with “nature” itself through cultivating
a respect for life based on understanding of the Other. The “Yellow Snow”
study of Marc Bekoff (2001) demonstrates the potential for generating
empathy with animal others through attuning to the sensory method.
In his study, Bekoff moved piles of urine-saturated snow from place to
place to see if his dog, Jethro, was more interested in his own or other
dogs’ yellow snow. This extremely simple study is novel inasmuch as it
attempted to see, move through and embody the world through a dog’s
perspective and to incorporate perspectives of motion, sight and scent in
the experiment which are important to those under study—in this case,
Jethro the dog. The aim was simple: to establish Jethro’s motive for action
but, intriguingly, the study used substances normally treated as “dirty” in
the human world to test a sensory method that would work as a mediator
of communication for the dog/human dyad.
A different and arguably more ambitious sensory and motion-based
project was developed and executed by Charles Foster (2016). He lived
as a badger, hare, fox, swift, deer and otter at various geographic locations
in the UK to establish what these animal lives were like from the inside
out. Part of his motivation was a deeply personal one; in a press interview,
he claimed that “in order to be properly human, we’ve got to be properly
animal” (The Guardian, Jan 23, 2016). We can liken this to the theoretical
strand of posthumanism that runs through much human–animal studies,
in that it also seeks to point to the continuities and similarities between

“us” and “them” and advocates seeing nature as a continuum rather than
as a domain neatly segregated from humanity (Taylor & Twine, 2014).
In common with our perspective on the continuities between the species,
Foster (2016) also claims that “species boundaries are, if not illusory, cer-
tainly vague and sometimes porous” (p. 1) and describes a sense of frus-
tration with the arm’s-length empirical accounts of other naturalists and
ethologists and their tendency to watch animals from a distance without
getting intimate in the sights, smells and feelings of being wild.
In explaining this he writes, “I desperately wanted to be closer to ani-
mals. Part of this was the conviction that they knew something I didn’t
and which I, for unexamined reasons, needed to know” (2016, p. 4).
From this epistemological frustration, we can draw a clear parallel with
the development of ethnographic methods which also sought to depart
from the early forms of immersive fieldwork that segregated the “tribe”
from the “scribe” (hooks, 1989; Willis, 1979). Foster’s methodology
involved engagement with the sensuality of the animal experience, mov-
ing through landscapes both urban and rural to experience being in place
as another species. He dug out soil with his bare hands to make nests and
setts (just as badgers do) he used bushes and hedgerows to create other
forms of accommodation, he used his senses of touch and smell to find
and eat wild foods (occasionally excavating rubbish bins to find waste as
foxes do) and foraged for worms, fish and insects. He ate all these things
without relying on human techniques of cookery or preparation. Some
(e.g. worms) were particularly abhorrent to him, but in keeping with his
aim to live like an animal, he ate them and sought to comment upon
their taste, texture (“gritty”) and unique smell.
Foster was able to develop new sensory skills such as detecting the
source of particular forms of excrement (as otters do), but in other ways,
he felt disappointed by his human-ness. He claimed he was not “olfactory
enough” to be a good badger, for example, that he was too grounded to
live fully as a bird and, in seeking to live as a deer, he also felt his human-
ity prevented him fully immersing himself in the wild experience. He
asked a friend to set his bloodhound on him so he could empathise with
the sense of being hunted and describes an initial surge of adrenaline
as he ran, but that the experience ended in humiliation when the dog
tracked him down, gave him a “contemptuous glance” and walked off.
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Reflecting upon his experiences, he states: “I found it impossible to come

down the pyramid and become a victim” (The Guardian, 2016). A similar
example of embodied, sensory research is Thomas Thwaites’s experiment
(2016) to live as a goat, adapting his body with an exoskeleton and pros-
thetic body parts to enable him to eat grass and graze with other goats.
For Thwaites, his method encouraged him to “live totally in the moment,
with no worries about what you’ve done, what you’re doing, or what you
should do” (2016, p. 15). Influenced by biomechanical engineering, ani-
mal behavioural sciences and shamanic traditions of spirituality, Thwaites
presents a first-person account of the sensory, embodied process of living
as a goat to take a “holiday from being a human” and to live without the
complexities and trappings of that humanity (2016, p. 15).
From our perspective, these research projects present a radical chal-
lenge to the tradition of participant observation. Not only have Foster and
Thwaites demonstrated the use of senses as a fruitful means to get close to
the experience of Others, they have shown how allowing an entirely dif-
ferent array of sensory experiences to come to the fore (including differ-
ent forms of movement and consumption) have enabled them to embody
and understand (albeit within human registers of thought and action)
the lived challenges of being an animal. Their multiple frustrations and
pleasures form a vital part of the resulting narratives, bringing their expe-
riences closer to us and evoking a vibrant new way to consider immersion
in the field. But perhaps tracking the sensory journeys that humans and
animals take together or in isolation is going native in extremis.
Some human animal researchers may see these examples as consti-
tuting exciting possibilities for a truly multi-species approach, a means
to apply the principles of ethnographic participant observation in radi-
cal new ways or they may be seen as self-indulgent ways to learn more
about the human condition. Others might see these examples as techno-
logical primitivism (Davis, 1999), the conflation of strange and futuristic
aesthetics with primaeval impulses (Campbell & Saren, 2010). At the
very least, the adaptation of the body or at least its surroundings and
usual sensory experiences to live as a goat, badger, deer or otter baffles
self-other researcher–subject dichotomies. It is a methodological disrup-
tion to the modes and methods of classical humanist enquiry (Braidotti,
2005; Campbell & Saren, 2010; Haraway, 1997; Hayles, 1999; Lash,
2001). While, on the one hand, the immersive experiences of Foster and
Thwaites may seem somewhat extreme, perhaps even a monstrous adapta-

tion of ethnographic immersion—an affront to the art of participation
and observation in its literary endeavour—many researchers (posthu-
manists, in particular) will find such examples exhilarating. We agree,
and would suggest that this constitutes a brave new approach to sensory
ethnography (whether or not this is the explicit aim of the projects in
question) that, at the very least, demonstrates the limits of traditional
inquiry and knowledge.
According to Braidotti, we live in the times of the “postmodern
Gothic” (2005, p. 173), where the social imaginary of postindustrial
societies produces monstrous formations—entities that because of their
technological character transgress conventions of everyday classification
or description (Campbell & Saren, 2010). In living as an animal, eating
and sleeping underground, we can see how this transgression is enacted
in species terms. These projects may seem monstrous, on the one hand,
but on the other, they represent the logical extension of posthumanist
applications to fieldwork by generating an insider’s view/smell/sight/taste
of being other-than-human. Braidotti’s approach is to analyse what she
sees as the growing number of nonunitary subjectivities (Braidotti, 2005,
p. 172) that are emerging in postindustrial society. If we consider this
project practically, living as an otter, deer or bird and eating the sorts
of things that such animals usually eat is one of very few ways to ful-
fil this mission ethnographically. Ethnographers, after all, are constantly
engaged in the philosophical conundrums associated with “the problem
of other minds” which can be simply defined by the question, how can we
know how others think, feel and experience the world? Foster and Thwaites
take this question to the next level, methodologically speaking, by seek-
ing to find out for themselves, digging holes, chasing prey and living
outdoors for prolonged periods.
Monstrous Methods
Braidotti’s use of the term “monster“ is useful in advancing an under-
standing of their radical methods further. The roots of the word monster
come from the Latin monstrare, which means “to show” (the scientific
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imperative to “de-monstrate” is thus an etymological offshoot of vision

and monstrosity) (Braidotti, 1996, p. 136). Braidotti (1996, 1997) argues
that monstrosity is something that both underlines and undermines
what we mean by humanity. Hence, if we regard Foster’s (2016) going
native as a badger as a means of, quite literally, showing marvel or show-
ing horror, in Braidotti’s sense of the word, it is possible to read this
extreme example differently; as a worthwhile and logical posthumanist
experiment. Going native as an animal is to embody monstrosity to bet-
ter understand and, perhaps more importantly, show and account for
a social world shot through with blurred distinctions rather than clear
dichotomies and rifts.
Aspects of this “monstrous” approach are actually quite easily adapted
for more everyday forms of ethnographic work. Attending to our sense of
smell, for example—so often overlooked in social science research of any
type—can transform the way that we engage with other species in our
fieldwork. Smell is vital to establish how animals move through spaces
and make it meaningful. We could design simple studies around everyday
processes like dog walking, for example, just as Giraud and others have
started to do.
An emphasis on sound and other senses as we move through space,
then, allows us to think more broadly about how to design more inclusive
projects. It also requires us to think about the limits of traditional enquiry,
particularly as it pertains to agency, a great deal more carefully. This is
underlined by actor network theory, which encourages us to decouple
agency “from criteria of intentionality, subjectivity and free-will” (Sayes,
2014, p. 141) and, in thinking about our engagements with the sen-
sory world around us, refers to anything that has the ability to make a
difference in social reality (Giraud, 2016; Latour, 2005; Sayes, 2014).
Rather than equating agency with a specific type of (human) action that
is intentional, an actor-network theory (ANT) framework dehumanises
it meaning that human-made sounds are placed on an even footing with
nonhuman sounds like birdsong.
Extending this argument, we argue that everyday technologies are
themselves important actors in constituting our lived experience. They
can also be considered to have agency, for, as Giraud puts it, “people can-
not bend technology to their will, but neither does technology determine
human action: culture is instead co-produced through human-technology

interactions” (Giraud, 2016, p. 3). Hence, auditory technologies should
be understood not just as passive mediators between players and narra-
tive but as actively “re-composing” space (Tuters, 2012, p. 271) in ways
that defamiliarise it and make it fresh for new interpretation and analysis.
Indeed, some see the growing interest in understanding human experi-
ences of space and territory as part of a “mobilities turn” (Hallam, 2012;
Ingold, 2012a, 2012b), an intellectual movement in which researchers of
many disciplines may show how spaces and places do not merely exist but
are actively engineered, brought into being and co-created by the “inter-
section and entanglement” (Low, 2017, p. 107) of people, landscapes,
materials and creatures (see also Ingold, 2011). This is a valuable philo-
sophical position to adopt if we are to consider the practical means by
which we can include animals (and their distinctive forms of agency) bet-
ter in social science research. Valuing the entanglements between humans
and Others, be they animals, technologies, objects or materials, creates
the room for a sensory approach to fieldwork in which the very act of
being in and with these Others is important as a means to knowledge.
The process of spatial and sensory defamiliarisation and recomposition
that Giraud describes as part of the soundwalk embraces this sentiment
by considering the vital materiality within which human bodies consti-
tute just one component. While this will be a radical mode of thinking
for many ethnographers more familiar with humanist ways of approach-
ing the field, it is helpful for us insofar as it opens the way for adaptation
to human–animal studies. It gives us a way to include and reflect upon
other-than-human agencies and their potential for affect as well as their
world-making powers. This can apply to car horns, bird song, dog barks
as well as speech and presents us with a radical respecification of the very
idea of social discourse. Ethnographers seeking to study human–animal
relations in more inclusive ways need to be attentive to all these atypical
discourses as well as what they “say” about power, difference and repre-
sentation. As a political project, sensory and embodied methods bring us
closer to other species within social and cultural spaces, so reminding us
of our shared corporeality, our co-creative potential, and thus of challeng-
ing and resisting the binary modes of thought (us/them; human/animal)
that serve to sustain beliefs in human superiority. Indeed, a fruitful ave-
6 Sensory Methods
123
nue of study might be to focus upon the labour that goes into suppressing
the sight, smells, sounds of animals in our social settings.
Following the actor network theory path, for example, encourages us
to see anything that makes a difference to an environment as potential
data; it matters less whether that is speech or it is something else entirely,
a smell, a sound or a sight. Pink supports this principle when she suggests
rethinking the ethnographic process through reflexive attention to what
she terms the “sensoriality” of the experience (2003). This is an argu-
ment that Bennett’s (2009) Vibrant Matter develops further although it
is not written with methodology at heart. Bennett’s analytic focus is not
the human experience of objects, but the objects themselves. Written
from a political theory perspective, the argument is that theorists should
recognise the active participation of nonhuman forces in processes and
events. She posits a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bod-
ies, both human and nonhuman, and suggests that our reading of events
might change if we accept that agency always emerges as the effect of ad
hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She claims that rec-
ognising that agency is not solely the province of humans helps develop
a more responsible, ecologically sound politics resulting in policies and
practices that take account of the subtle web of forces affecting everyday
situations.
A pragmatic means of approaching a multisensory or embodied eth-
nography is to use a combination of sound recordings, film and photos as
field data to evoke a sense of the researcher moving meaningfully through
space with others or alone. Carol Taylor’s sensory and walking research
into posthuman methods for educational environments provides a useful
case in point although it is not in the strictest sense about the inclusion
of animals. She argues (2016) that the notion of posthuman bildung may
offer conceptual sustenance to scholars intrigued by the concept of mov-
ing through space as part of their learning. The German word, bildung
refers to the qualitative learning experience, beyond the straightforward
acquisition and recall of facts and relates to self-development, reflexivity
and maturity. It is a holistic way of understanding how the whole person
develops character and who one is in the world. In German, a bild is also
the word for a picture (or photo), and bild, together with ung (referring
to a process), is how an image or artefact is moulded and evolving.
Developing this concept and etymology along posthumanist lines, for

Taylor, relates to the recognition of the inseparability of knowing and
being within an interconnected mesh of spaces and other agencies, human
and nonhuman. Instead of viewing a student as a singular body, whose
acting capacity is organised by space to retain facts, she speculates about
the complex materiality of educative relations, and the need to recognise
the ethical impacts of practice, policy and space. For Taylor, posthuman
bildung helps explain the interlocking processes of doing, experiencing
and being in the world with multiple others. Accordingly, the act of mov-
ing and listening, rather than participating, talking, asking questions and
observing is prioritised in her fieldwork (see also Forsey, 2010).
Giraud claims that such a sensory and experiential approach to space
“can imbue everyday locations with new, politicised, meaning” and that
its potential “is not confined to the narrative [but] is also generated by
the technologies used to disseminate it” (2016, p. 4). This means that
there is potential to treat mundane (and traditionally overlooked) spaces
like parks, beaches and pavements as political, multifaceted and infused
with ethnographic opportunity. A good example of this in multi-species
research is the smelly-walking work of Fiona Borthwick (2006), who uses
autoethnography to ask how the interplay of senses, particularly olfac-
tion, mediate her social relations with her dogs, Xena and Alice. As she
points out, after presenting her notes from an encounter by her dog with
a smelly substance on their walk, auto ethnography is an approach that
helps formalise reflection and learning about our relations with other
creatures and pushes us towards the possibility of seeing the world from
their perspective, even if this is only achieved through contrasting it with
our own:
In bending over and sniffing the dog I get lost in the disgust produced by
the odour. Only after this do I conceptualise/see “a dead thing” as the
source. The dog stinks, has particles of dead thing on her and is over-
whelmingly a DOG, that for dog reasons, is trying to cover her smell and,
in doing this, is much less my humanised companion. In contrast, the
olfactory mediation after the dog has had a bath and effectively smells like
a deodorised human is much more my humanised companion. (2006,
p. 3)
6 Sensory Methods
125
In this example, human senses and animal senses matter as a prime

media of communication of the will, desire and decisions between us
and other (alingual) creatures. “Bad” smells can, for example, insert dis-
tance, while “good” smells can humanise (and we may say companion-ise
the creature). Furthermore, such methods ensure the animals are present
in the research from a design perspective. And while this may suit our
own posthuman endeavours, it can also improve research. For example,
Cameron, Smith, Tumilty, and Treharne (2014) note the enriched data
they collected by including dogs in their walking study. While their focus
was on human health and well-being, and not on the inclusion of ani-
mals in a multi-species setting, the dogs are nevertheless present in their
research reports. They are named, commented upon, and included in the
transcription of their field notes. For example, participant one enthusi-
astically described her dog, Goofy: “You know he is 10 months old, his
birthday is going to be in April” (p. 165). The research team further note
that the walk-along interviews allowed them to see and sense emotional
connections between humans and their dogs, as well as note that the
presence of the researcher sometimes led to changed (“naughty”) behav-
iour from the dog.
Given the focus of this particular research was not the dogs in ques-
tion, nor was it an attempt to include animals in multi-species research,
the fact that they are so present in the data and the reports, and that their
presence offered something more than usual research techniques would
elicit, suggests that movement/walking studies could be a powerful tool in
the hands of researchers keen to explore either/both human–animal and
posthuman perspectives. Treated as a method, then, the most everyday
scenario (e.g. a dog walk) can become an altogether richer ethnographic
process attuned to the overlapping agencies and experiences that work
together to enact “the dog walk”—a lived and emergent event with mul-
tiple reference points and potentially revealing of diverse perspectives.
Sensory methods offer us potential to decentre writing as the primary
mode of communication but do not necessarily solve the problem of
including animals well and do not imply a “solving” of the problem of
seeing social settings from multiple perspectives. As Pedersen (2011)
explains: “it might, quite the contrary, obscure, dilute or displace
responsibility for their situation, reinforcing rather than dismantling
their exploitation” (p. 75). To counter the difficulties of the animal ques-

tion, there is a need to focus on the material realties of other animals
(Pedersen, 2011). Visual and sensory data helps point to the symbiotic
and co-operative nature of life which is, in many important ways, the
antithesis of post-Enlightenment paradigms that stress competition and
pure boundaries/binaries.
Current forays in multi-species work, while offering much potential,
stray perilously close to losing the animal in such a way that human inter-
ests/politics are prioritised. Nonetheless, in the examples we have exam-
ined in this chapter, we can see sensory methods like soundwalks are
helpful for human–animal ethnographers for—at the very least—they
prompt a more rigorous approach to setting the scene in writing ethno-
graphic accounts of particular settings. Our senses connect observation,
everyday experience and reflection and can act as a starting point for
debate and participation. We think that sharing sensory experiences with/
of animals includes them in human forms of research in ways that words
alone struggle to do. This is vital for troubling nature–culture dichoto-
mies that work to disaggregate humans from the rest of the natural world.
While we are aware that animals are not ethnographic respondents in the
normal sense (and we must not fall into the humanist trap of consider-
ing them objects or materials that furnish our own sensory journeys),
it is possible to see that by tuning into the movements that both we (as
humans) and they make, their bodies and their senses can be interpreted
as a form of communication, rethinking the very concept of discourse
along sensory lines.
A sensory approach, however we design and engineer it, encour-
ages other species to be present through our physical interaction with
them and their by-products. They can be seen and sensed in a literal
and embodied way. Whether we take the extreme participant observation
route (qua Foster and Thwaites) or whether we adopt the more straight-
forward approach advocated by Giraud, Taylor, Bekoff, Borthwick and
others, we feel there is a clear value in consciously decentring human
beings and their utterances as the prime source of ethnographic data. For
ethnographers, this may simply involve watching how people interact
and become entangled with the stuff of their everyday lives; how they
feel and experience the material world and its smells, sights and sounds.
6 Sensory Methods
127
While we are aware that the approach taken in all the examples we
have cited so far need much more scrutiny regarding these claims, and
there are certainly questions over the utility of the outputs to sustain
legacies of discussion and critique of a sociological nature, they at least
demonstrate how becoming attuned to the senses can offer intriguing
new grounds for creative participant observation with other creatures. At
the same time, we are aware that when discussing the senses in relation to
research most will probably wish to omit a consideration of some senses,
in particular taste. While taste has a place in a multisensorial approach to
studying various topics, as Foster’s attempts to eat worms and Thwaites’s
to eat grass demonstrate, including it in everyday (and less technologi-
cally oriented) human–animal studies research is difficult, if not impos-
sible for most of us. It may be that future research needs to attend to the
role of tasting other animals but this is not something we could advocate
and nor is it something we intend to study here ourselves (although those
interested in “meat culture” would do well to start with Fiddes, 1991 or
Potts, 2016).
Thinking about sound, smell and movement means researchers will
probably learn things they had never anticipated or expected, things
which their own senses do not pick up. We do not need to be etholo-
gists to interpret why these things matter and nor do we need to live as
a badger, deer or goat to utilise aspects of the sensory approach to field-
work in our everyday craft. Simply going on a walk with a companion
animal can be immensely revealing of the Otherness of animals as they
dwell with us in social space. So too can observing the sensory interac-
tions of others (as Hamilton did in the veterinary practice). Of course,
there are limits to our knowledge in using our senses just as there are
limits to animal awareness and interest in us as humans (and certainly
human researchers). In this chapter, we do not claim to have solved
the problem. What we can be confident about, however, is that an
attention to sensory information (and inclusion rather than the rejec-
tion of the messy and corporeal realities of animals) takes us further
towards empathy and understanding of the enmeshed life-worlds that
encompass a range of agencies, moving through space, having affects
and changing things. Ethnography has always taken a strong interest
in what our senses reveal and is an ideal vehicle to propel us forward
into monstrous territory, to rethink a dependency upon language as our

empirical mainstay.
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7
Arts-Based Methods
Barone and Eisner (1997) have pointed out that visual, auditory and arts-
based approaches have become more popular and acceptable within the
ethnographic community. At the same time, the range of techniques on
offer to ethnographers has vastly expanded, particularly as the use of web-
sites and audio-visual recording devices have become increasingly user-
friendly, affordable and commonplace (Hine, 2000; Pink, 2013, 2015).
We have highlighted some of the creative techniques on offer in the fore-
going chapters. Here, we expand our purview to review non-standard
ethnographic approaches further and consider how a deeper engage-
ment with the arts (specifically drama, poetry and craft) could be used to
improve our empathy and understanding of human–animal relations. As
Bhana (2006), Jones and Leavy (2014), Kara (2015) and the many oth-
ers who advocate arts-based methods have pointed out, when conducted
well, they can generate rigorous, exciting and relevant research that is
more accessible to nonacademic audiences. With an emphasis on practi-
cal tasks rather than interviews or focus groups, art-based methods like
drama and craft pave the way for engaged participation from community
members (Kara, 2015), decolonising social research (Denzin, Lincoln, &

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_7
Giardina, 2006) as well as generating useful insights into other ways of

seeing and experiencing the world.
In pursuing this in the current chapter, we are forging into entirely
unknown territory and our argument is necessarily exploratory and
speculative. This is because these methods have not yet been tested on
a significant scale and they have not been tested at all with regard to
human–animal relations. As Jones and Leavy (2014) rightly points out,
arts-based methods have led to some truly boundary-pushing social sci-
ence, for “arts-based researchers are not ‘discovering’ new research tools,
they are carving them” (p. 3). In doing our own methodological carving,
we argue that arts-based research—with its potential to bring people from
outside academia into processes of ethnographic research—makes space
for the study of meaningful relations between humans and other species
(particularly companion animals) in ways that are difficult for traditional
ethnography. Resting on the emancipatory (or at least participatory)
approach of arts-based research is the opportunity for humans to tell us
more about what animals mean to them, sometimes by including the
animals themselves (whether in a work or personal capacity), although
we acknowledge from the outset the manifold practical and often ethical
difficulties of extending participation to these very animals.
Arts in a Messy World

Arts-based methods are becoming more attractive as the ethnographic
community has accepted that social realities are multiple, overlapping,
messy and context-dependent and that methods are implicated in the pre-
sentation of reality when highlighting only partial truths and perspectives
(Kara, 2015; Law, 2004). In other words, agility is required by researchers
to address this complexity. Contemporary ethnographers, mindful that
social categories are no longer as fixed and secure as they (perhaps) used
to seem, are highly attuned to the ways that language such as the term
research subject is suggestive of passivity. One might say that this term is
so laden with power and hierarchy that it can be likened to the scientist’s
observation and dissection of a fruit fly on a microscope slide.
7 Arts-Based Methods
133
Postcolonial, feminist and activist (or emancipatory) research (see

Chap. 9) has flourished as the ethical dimensions of the researcher–sub-
ject relationship have been scrutinised (e.g. Telford & Faulkner, 2004).
It is widely accepted by contemporary ethnographers of all stripes that
even the most rigorous, embedded and longitudinal studies provide only
limited access to the private life-worlds of respondents, and it is also well
documented that fieldworkers often struggle to comprehend the subtlety
of the meanings that research participants create, that they may misun-
derstand or even be misled. As Van Maanen (1979) has put it, “the most
we can do with or without the scientific method is to wait for time and
fuller knowledge to explode whatever theoretical constructions we have
built” (pp. 101–102).
Ethnographers are usually highly reflective about the uncertainties of
their craft, and given the time constraints placed upon them in the con-
temporary academy, it is perhaps unsurprising that many are excited by
the prospect of arts-based techniques as a pragmatic route through their
uncertainty. In particular, this is because ethnographers are perceiving the
benefits of what purport to be co-creative modes of interaction that encour-
age an anti-oppressive approach to their chosen fieldsites. To explore this
concept further, we begin with an example. Degarrod’s (2013) installa-
tion Geographies of the Imagination is a study about long-term exile and
immigration issues which the author describes as “public ethnography
that unveils the acquisition and transmission of ethnographic knowledge
as interactive, emergent, and creative”.
In this project, art-making practices were used to create physical
expressions of knowledge among participants and the audience, a means,
Degarrod argued, of “stimulating new thinking” about people experienc-
ing movement and exile. The aim was to offer art as a way of building
empathy and mutual understanding between academics and community
members, a process both parties could approach democratically and with-
out need for training or expertise. In recording the experiences of those
involved during the craftwork and in exhibitions that followed, Degarrod
pointed to examples of discourse that suggested changing perceptions
among participants as well as growing compassion about emotive issues
of immigration and belonging. Importantly, in Degarrod’s view, it was
the arts-based approach that allowed this topic to be discussed and opened
out.
Further literature in this new field of creative methodology is begin-
ning to show some interesting effects on those who participate in arts-
based projects, including new experiences and ways of thinking, improved
empathy for other people as well as growing networks and bonds between
academics and indigenous people (Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). Hence,
arts-based methods carry the potential for transformational learning
(Lawrence, 2008) because they are immersive and require those involved
to be mentally and bodily engaged, rather than standing back to observe.
In turn, they encourage ethnographers to behave as rounded individu-
als that successfully juggle the “scholar-self ” with the “artist-self ” and
perhaps also the “activist-self ” (Burford, 2015, p. 3). Arts-based methods
differ from traditional modes of working in that they do not seek to dis-
engage the researcher from the field of study in neat or simplistic ways.
This stands in direct contrast to the ways that many traditional research-
ers have sought to erase themselves from their findings by segregating
their scientific researching selves from their domestic ones (for a classic
case study example, see Latour & Woolgar, 1978/1986).
Creative methods seek to unpick the powerful myth of research objec-
tivity at the seams, and its advocates are asking important and timely
questions: How do we acknowledge and work with/through the tensions
between observers and practitioners in writing ethnographic accounts?
How can community members and practitioners, with everyday forms of
knowledge, effect control over academic agendas and findings? How can
we decentre subject expertise and interact within research sites in more
democratic ways? These questions are highly relevant to the current cli-
mate of “impact” in research as well as to philosophy of methods.
Unlike many traditional data-gathering methods that seek to “fix and
limit meaning in a reductive way”, creative methods help ethnographers
to work with and through “the multiplicity of meanings that exist in
social contexts” (Kara, 2015, p. 8). Lawrence (2008, p. 65) states that the
“arts engage our senses, provoking strong, affective responses for both the
creator and the witness of art. Our emotions can provide a catalyst for
informal adult learning beyond traditional, cognitive ways of knowing”.
Ethnography is ideally suited to experimentation with the arts, for, as
135
Mose Brown and Dreby (2013) argue, there is already significant overlap
between the ethnographic immersion of the researcher-self with a whole
host of other identities: they suggest this method, in its embodied quali-
ties, constitutes a “bizarre mixture” of a whole variety of selves (p. 6).
Putting this into practical terms, some researchers (e.g. White, Bushin,
Carpena-Méndez, & Ní Laoire, 2010) are now using drawing and dia-
gram making to encourage participants to show their views in ways that
feel comfortable to them. Participants are shown an image or engage in
discussion, for example, and are then invited to reflect on how it makes
them feel (Kara, 2015, p. 89). This is used as the basis for their own
drawings or self-portraits (Elden, 2013). The resulting images can then
be used as a form of data and, in sufficient quantities, may also be used as
a basis for ethnographic theme analysis. The ethnographic (over)reliance
upon text is disrupted by creative visual techniques like this because they
invite us to work with materials other than participant observation and
transcribed interviews and conversations. Advocates of drawing as data
suggest that this can be just as revealing of the complexity of social situ-
ations as traditional field methods (Bartkowiak-Theron & Sappey, 2012)
and is an especially helpful method when there are language difficulties,
(e.g. when seeking to bring children or multinational participants into
research, White et al., 2010). In these respects, it is easy to see that such
methods have much to offer those wanting to better understand human–
animal relations. And while there are limitations due to species difference,
discussed later, such methods provide a starting point for alternative way
of seeing, chronicling and understanding our relations with other species
(and by extension the “natural” world).
Dramatic Methods
Drama is another technique that may offer alternative ways of under-
standing these relations and can be used at several stages in the process
of research. For example, ethnodrama is a process by which fieldnotes are
collected and analysed in a conventional way but are then edited (often
with participants) to create a script, voice-over, poem or monologue by
selecting “narrative collected through interviews, participant observation,
field notes, journal entries and/or print and media artefacts” (Saldana,
2005, p. 2). The terms ethnotheatre and reality theatre are also used to
describe similarly creative processes (Saldana, 2005). Advocates argue
that the immersion of participants in the process of acting a part can
trigger transformational learning and creative thought about social issues
and situations that matter (Kershaw & Nicholson, 2011). When used at
the end of the research process as a form of dissemination, for example,
advocates suggest that drama can enrich engagement between academic
and indigenous audiences by bringing them together through the experi-
ence of the performance. Saldana (2005) suggests that this exceeds the
reach of usual ethnographic publications (e.g. in journals), and thus
opens highlighted issues out to consideration by a far wider public.
The interactive documentary drama named Untold Stories of
Volunteering (Kelemen, Mangan, Phillips, Moffat, & Jochum, 2015)
provides a useful practical example. This ethnodrama was designed col-
laboratively, scripted from a collection of research data including ano-
nymised transcripts of nineteen interviews with volunteers (carried out in
2014 across the UK), and used material artefacts, props and scenery cre-
ated in five community-based workshops on the theme of volunteering.
The drama focused on organisational practices relating to volunteering as
well as the challenges faced by individual volunteers. The resulting per-
formance included voice-overs and scripted lines made up of interview
extracts as well as songs and poems written by the participants. It was
showcased in UK towns and cities, including Newcastle-under-Lyme,
Leicester and London in 2014 in front of large and diverse audiences.
The aim was to break down borders between academics, practitioners
and community members firstly, by taking ethnographic accounts out of
the “ivory tower”, and secondly, by removing its reliance upon text as the
prime means of communication.
For those keen to use dramatic techniques in this way, theatre pro-
vides “opportunities for participants with marginalized ‘offstage’ status
in everyday life to stand centre stage and tell their stories” (Saldana,
2005, p. 67). The performance itself mediates that engagement, the the-
atre being a place of creativity and imagination infused with possibilities
for exuberance and make-believe. The theory behind the volunteering
research project, for example, was that drama presents complex and
137
multiple perspectives and versions of truth more readily than traditional

ethnographic accounts; it does not close off interpretation or important
issues because in a play (unlike everyday life) anything is possible and
can be made temporarily real through props, sound effects and lighting.
Furthermore, scripted words have an advantage, in that they can be con-
sciously treated as fictional, thus encouraging actors to express difficult
or personal feelings that may otherwise be suppressed because they are
too personal (Blodgett et al., 2013). On a more global note, Tedlock
(2005) points out that performance ethnography has as its main strength
the ability to combine political, critical and expressive actions that dem-
onstrate lived experiences in local and international context. She notes
that dramatic retellings can demonstrate and shape cultural construction
in action and that, importantly for those interested in the extensions of
posthumanism, human–animal studies and ethnography, this can include
different agents, other animals and the environment.
Tedlock (2005) gives the example of the Zuni bicultural play Corn
Mountain/Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons, or Dowa Yalanne/
Ashek’ya Yalanne Debikwayinan Idulohha. In this play, three Zuni
and three Appalachian storytellers focus on caring relationships with
humans, animals and mountains (p. 157). Like the volunteering eth-
nodrama, this is a participatory drama in which the storyteller/per-
former has the central voice rather than the academic researcher/writer.
Interestingly, in this case, the ethnodrama was developed into a number
of further projects, including publication of a book, Journeys Home:
Revealing a Zuni-Appalachian Collaboration (Tedlock, 2002), music
and sound recordings, a website and blog, as well as touring perfor-
mances at universities, senior citizens day centres, museums, theatres
and cultural centres in New York City, Washington DC, Santa Fe (New
Mexico), Kentucky, Arizona and Louisiana. Project organisers hoped
that by using such a diverse range of forums for exhibiting this drama,
they would enable large and varied groups of people to get involved
with its main issues.
Turner has argued that it is desirable that “[w]e should not merely
read and comment on ethnographies, but actually perform them” (1979,
p. 80) in order to “learn more about the human condition” (Saldana,
2005, p. 60). When ethnographic vignettes are acted out, advocates
s uggest, it helps the researcher/performer to experience language and life

from the insider’s perspective, to take a few creative risks in exploring
the views of others by testing them out (Gergen & Gergen, 2012). We
agree with these principles and add the following clause to this: we can
perform ethnographies to learn more about relationships and interactions
between the species. How interesting and novel it would be, for example,
if participants in an ethnodrama chose to act the part of their companion
animal; to empathise with these animals, to imagine the world through
their eyes and even to imagine their “speech” and thought processes from
the inside. Scenery and props could be crafted to furnish these imaginary
worlds. Audiences would then be invited to reflect on the value of the
insights, to contest or dispute the imaginary world of the animal or to
suggest their own interpretations.
While we are not suggesting this would constitute (by any means) a
scientific method of understanding animals, it would undoubtedly raise
awareness of the issues and problems that human companion-animal
guardians perceive to be important within and about the animal lives
that they observe at close range. It would showcase a non-expert’s best
guess at their subjectivity; something we will perhaps always know little
or close to nothing about in spite of the exciting new technologies that
we briefly highlighted in Chap. 5. We also feel that research that is con-
ducted in a playful and imaginative way brings academics and animal
guardians together and may bring shared interests and issues to light. This
is exciting, although the idea that such techniques might be addressed to
human–animal relations is clearly shot through with difficulty. Would
it be more acceptable from an ethical standpoint to include animals as
actors on their own account, for example? Could we invite them to join
dramatic performances without the mediation of their handlers and
guardians? At what point does using animals as “tools” in the quest for
what is ultimately human understanding become unethical (Pedersen &
Stanescu, 2014)?
These ethical complications are difficult enough in commercial theatre
let alone in experimental performance research. Further, it is not appar-
ent to us that there are many useful precedents on which to base human–
animal ethnodramatic experiments. Most literature and drama, after
all, treats the animal as subordinate from the start. In the Comedies of
139
Aristophanes, for example, frogs, wasps, weasels, birds, and various other
creatures function as literary and dramatic devices to draw humorous
comparisons between humans and animals (Putz, 2006). In Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, Reynard the Fox warns humans of the dangers of flat-
tery and cunning. While animals are part of the story as characters in
their own right, they are vessels for human values, meanings and story-
lines. From Shakespeare’s donkey-headed buffoon, Bottom, to flocks of
real sheep being herded down mountains to create a climactic spectacle in
The Gathering, other-than-human creatures are usually moving props that
showcase human action and speech.
Perhaps one possible answer to this problem lies in new theatrical
prop-making and technology. Michael Morpurgo’s (2007) novel War
Horse, for example, presents an emotive storyline of a horse and boy set
against the backdrop of World War I. When this was dramatised with
life-sized puppetry, sounds and animatronic machinery, the character
of Joey the horse was made symbolically and physically present on stage
to highlight the affective bond between horse and human—without
the need for a genuine horse to be present. Nonetheless, the effect of
this on audiences has been powerful for, as Morpurgo stated in inter-
view (2014):
Midway, I was suddenly aware of this extraordinary atmosphere around

me: the audience was so engaged, in a way I had never seen before. At the
end, a thousand people rose as one. Tears were streaming down faces. It was
an extraordinary achievement. (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/
aug/19/how-we-made-war-horse)
Similarly, the dramatisation of James Rebanks’s autobiographical book

(2015) The Shepherd’s Life uses sophisticated puppetry, film, music and
live acting to bring to life his reflective account of experience as a farmer
in the Cumbrian fells. Of course, some commercial theatre continues to
draw on animals in a more literal sense. Chris Goode’s (2014) play The
Forest and the Field prompts the audience to reflect on the very purpose
of theatre. This is done by creating deliberately haphazard seating round
the stage and by having a cat in the room, “wandering nonplussed about
its perimeter and nonchalantly toying with [the] performer” (Exeunt
magazine, March 2013; see also Goode, 2014). The audience is informed
that the cat is called Antonio, and according to a contemporary review
of the show:
His presence creates unexpected ripples in the still waters of a watching and
listening audience. He’s a scene-stealer, all cats are, and […] he makes us
particularly aware of our presence. By being as interested in us as he is in
the performance, he contributes to a truer democracy of presence, a feline
demolition of the hierarchy of performers and their public. (Exeunt maga-
zine, http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/the-forest-the-field/, 9 March
2013)
But how does Antonio feel about being on stage? Is this cat simply per-
forming in a circus? Can we experiment with theatre and ethnodrama
that includes animals?
Cultural Animation Workshops

While theatre represents a new way to “heed the sights, sounds and smells
of multiple organisms (plants, viruses, human, and animals), with a par-
ticular emphasis on understanding the human as emergent through these
relations” (Ogden, Hall, & Tanita, 2013, p. 6), it is not unproblematic
when we seek to put it into practice. The relatively new technique of
cultural animation offers a way forward. Sharing similarities with par-
ticipatory action research (Chevalier & Buckles, 2013), cultural animation
is influenced by theatre and performance as well as democratic ideals of
learning by experience. In a cultural animation workshop, invited partici-
pants come together to talk, pinpoint pressing issues of importance and
work alongside academics to produce (or as advocates of this method put
it, co-create and co-produce) a range of objects that can include music and
art forms, collages, sculptures and other 3D forms as a way of structuring
debate around craftwork. The aim of cultural animation is, literally, to
animate or bring the community to life and given that all human com-
munities include animals in some form, we think this is a method that
could be adapted further to include different agencies.
141
Cultural animation workshops and exercises are designed to create a

“safe” space that avoids replicating existing social structures and so they
are often conducted in the relatively neutral environments of theatres,
village halls and community organisations rather than universities which
carry the imprint of status, expertise and formal knowledge. In keep-
ing with this sentiment, human participants are encouraged to draw on
a range of techniques including knitting, drawing and picture making
which require little or no formal skills or training. The theory is that by
getting involved with these practical techniques, they can think and talk
about difficult questions without the formalities of interview and focus
group conventions to constrain them. The focus on action leads to a
less confrontational experience of research and provides a more playful
environment for academics to interact with nonacademics. Within the
process, a central role is played by the “cultural animateur”, a facilitator
who helps participants draw on personal aspirations, heritage, culture
and experiences to immerse themselves in the exercises. The animateur
organises the work and art/craft making processes (Beebeejaun et al.,
2014) and provides useful materials.
An example may help put this into more practical focus. In a 2015
cultural animation workshop (Kelemen et al., 2015) that was conducted
at a UK theatre, a varied mix of participants (including academics and
community members) were invited by an animateur to write poetry in
groups. The purpose was to examine academic notions of impact from dif-
ferent perspectives, and particularly what nonacademics thought of this
concept. It formed a small part of a much larger project funded by the
Arts and Humanities Research Council (The Connected Communities
programme) that had set out to fund innovative methods that sought to
bridge the divide between academic theory and “real life”. During the
workshop, the animateur asked the participants to try writing a cinquain
or five-line form of poetic writing about what research impact meant to
them. Participants, working in small groups, were given specific instruc-
tions about the number of words and theme to be used in each line; the
first and the final lines could be a synonym, reflection on or different
meaning of “research impact” ideally in one word. Line two was a two-
word description of the change brought about by researching something,
line three was a three-word summary of the nature of impact, and line
four a four-verb description of the academic endeavour. In the resulting

poems, two of which are reproduced below, research was described as
an active process of transformation and as a reflective and continuous
process of collaboration (reproduced here with kind permission of the
Community Animation and Social Innovation Centre [CASIC] at Keele
University):
Poem One
Transformation
Metamorphosis, Rebirth
Change, Invigorate, Rumble
Doing, Doing, Doing, Doing
Done?
Poem Two
Us
Diverse, Together
Challenges, Boundaries, Messages
Compromise, Survive, Discriminate, Story Telling
ME/WE
In both examples, the research team noted that participants regarded
academic impact as something that was best achieved through genuine
collaboration between researchers and nonacademics. The line “Diverse,
Together” and “ME/WE” make this particularly plain. When we, as
authors, attempted to use the cinquain technique with a human–ani-
mal theme, we decided to use similar instructions; a synonym or differ-
ent meaning of research in lines one and five, line two contained two
words that described our relationships with animals, line three was to
be three words that described the challenges faced by those interested in
human–animal ethnography and line four was to comprise four words
that expressed positive feelings about challenging them. We produced the
following cinquain very quickly:
143
Poem Example
Investigation
Joyful, Fascination
Voiceless, Hierarchies, Difficult
Motivation, Emancipation, Creativity, Change
Look again
While neither of us would claim that this is by any means good poetry
as defined by literary scholarship, it is important to note that this was
never really the aim of the exercise. Attempting the cinquain for ourselves
demonstrated how quickly ideas formed when structured into five lines
with tightly controlled rules for each. The bounded nature of the writing
made it easy to spark ideas and prompted us to think about what words
mattered most. This technique could work in a number of ethnographic
settings, especially as a non-academic means to start a discussion (just as
visual and artistic images can do) or as part of a bigger workshop or focus
group. It is useful in teaching; indeed, it has already been proven an excel-
lent way of breaking the ice and starting a discussion (Beech, MacIntosh,
& MacLean, 2010; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). This is particularly
important when seeking to bring diverse individuals together in groups
and to give them a shared (albeit temporary) means of working together
productively.
The same research team that adapted the cinquain method to cultural
animation travelled to Japan in 2013 to conduct two further cultural ani-
mation events. In this case, the subject matter was entirely different and
addressed the problems that people had experienced during the 2011 tsu-
nami. The workshops were attended by academics, community members
and practitioners from local government, co-operatives and community
associations and focused on object making because objects appeared to
be important and symbolic to the participants who had experienced loss
in the aftermath of the natural disaster. Working together, participants
produced an artistic installation called the “Tree of life” (this concept was
selected because in Japanese mythology the tree is a symbol of endur-
ance and longevity) that was decorated with objects made during the
workshops and which had significance to participants’ lives both during
the tsunami and beforehand. The objects were “hung” onto the bare
branches of the tree as physical emblems of these shared stories of survival
(Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). In common with the ethnodramas that
we highlighted earlier in the chapter, after the workshops finished this
tree installation moved into new networks, embarking upon an interna-
tional journey beyond Japan where more participants engaged with it and
added their own crafts. It became useful as a “door opener” and a means
by which to structure and extend subsequent networking and workshop
activities (Kelemen & Hamilton, 2015). Finally, it was exhibited at a
major international summit in a UK university where it formed part of
a visual and audio display about the impact and significance of creative
methods (https://www.keele.ac.uk/casic/).
Cultural animation workshops are loosely structured, sociable and
often playful. By giving equal status to academic expertise and practical
skills, they seek to connect learning with action, a conscious strategy to
disassemble theory-practice hierarchies which has been cited as a possible
way to bridge the relevance gap between research and everyday life (Beech
et al., 2010; Van de Ven & Johnson, 2006). Workshops need not have
a formal output but many aim to work around the production of art
installations like the Tree of Life. Their main function is not aesthetic but
is rather to provide a medium through which participants can exchange
their ideas and thoughts: it is the coming together of academics and com-
munity members that matters here, along with the use of creative meth-
ods that facilitate this coming together. Through the making and craft
process, it is argued, participants are more able to examine sensitive and
serious issues (Kara, 2015) because, unlike formal interviews, the process
is relatively passive and ideas and comments arise more naturally while
attention is focused on the task in hand.
Workshops aim to tackle serious questions that relate to everyday life
such as what does poverty look and feel like? How do people with disabilities
cope at work? What is old age like if one lives alone? Given that animals
often take centre stage in the lives of those experiencing such social prob-
lems, we suggest that their inclusion in a cultural animation workshop
is likely to generate fruitful discussion although we acknowledge that
it still may not satisfy those who want animals to be present literally
in our research endeavours. We can, however, attempt to include them
145
physically and literally by having them present. This could be as simple as

encouraging human participants to bring their animal companions along
and letting them interact with other (human and animal) participants
(assuming basic safety protocols had been followed such as ensuring the
animals are not aggressive with each other or with humans).
We contend that there is limited potential for harm in including certain
(companion) animals in cultural animation when compared to drama
and theatre methods which require animals to be on show or to adapt to
organised human routines. However, we note that someone knowledge-
able about the individual animal and their preferences as well as someone
knowledgeable in animal welfare and well-being would need to part of
the organising committee to ensure the animals’ safety was considered
(e.g. before mixing multiple dogs their compatibility would need to be
ascertained; if cats were to be included then making sure the dogs were
cat friendly and the cats were comfortable around dogs and other cats
would be paramount; up to date vaccinations would be needed for all
animals; water, food and bedding would need to be provided, etc.). And
it must be made clear to the human guardian of the companion animal
that if any stress were detected or the animal seemed unhappy and did
not want to be there, that they should leave immediately. To potentially
overcome some of these complications, as well as addressing ethical con-
cerns relating to bringing animals into humanised spaces, as we high-
lighted in the Loving me; Loving you project (in Chap. 5), researchers
could utilise online exhibition space to further reduce the demands upon
animals to be compliant or to adapt to the constraints of moving through
theatres and art galleries, populated by humans.
In speculating further on some practicalities, we consider that it would
be feasible to adapt the sensory method of the soundwalk within a cul-
tural animation approach; if human participants were tasked with the
job of devising a manifesto for a more inclusive human–animal society,
for example, while also attending to and recording their sensory experi-
ences with other species on the walk, the experience could be turned
into poetry or dramatised on stage with elements of recordings being
used alongside performance. Doing so would perhaps circumnavigate the
problem of displaying animals in performance as they would be present
in the dialogue and audio material. We think that, at the very least, such
a project would open up reflections and ideas for a further set of partici-
pants, just as a number of the examples we have examined have appeared
to do.
Advocates of cultural animation techniques claim that immersive
experiences produce lasting legacies as well as immediate impacts, in that
they raise and explore issues in collaboration. But however participatory
they may set out to be, there are certainly ethical issues to ponder before
designing such a venture for human and animal participants. It is by no
means clear whether animals would appreciate being involved in such
experimental practices, whether they have the same capacity for benefit-
ing from involvement or whether human participants would get the same
benefits from making or using puppets, for example, as they would with
living creatures. At the same time, we feel that if further work could
investigate the hows and whys of arts-based work like cultural anima-
tion, to iron out some of these practical and ethical uncertainties that are
inherent in such a new and innovative method, we are presented with
an exciting new opportunity to broker relationships with practitioners
and community members that will enable us to look at, investigate and
empathise with the human–animal tie more closely. However, it needs to
be abundantly clear that in discussing these possibilities we are not advo-
cating that animals simply be included ad hoc into various experimental
methods.
There may be extremely good grounds for not including them physi-
cally, despite an overall aim of including them in our research methods
so they are not sidelined or silenced. Their safety, comfort and willing-
ness have to be the primary consideration in any research purporting to
include them, and this may necessitate discussions with animal welfare
specialists and/or animal behaviourists. We think it important to include
animals more robustly in human–animal studies because their exclu-
sion contributes to their marginalisation—and thus poor treatment—in
human societies. But including them in ways which compromise their
safety or which set them up as “tools” to help human meaning-making
endeavours simply does the same and so considerable thought and effort
as well as planning needs to go into any work that does attempt to include
them. If this field is to move forward then research ethics committees
will need to rethink their approaches. As it currently stands (university)
147
ethics committees are separated into human/social research and animal

research purviews with the latter focusing primarily on invasive animal
research. What we are proposing is research from within human/social
research boundaries that includes animals and their well-being needs to
be taken into account—by consulting with professionals if necessary—by
such committees.
To conclude, we consider that arts-based methods offer something
different to ethnographers of the human–animal relationship. They
go beyond rational-cognitive ways of learning and provide new ways
of understanding the relationships between species. Importantly, they
offer the potential to build on the sensory and visual techniques that
we described in the previous two chapters and to extend the reach of
research projects into new networks and audiences. They present a
means to engage with members of the public in new and interesting
ways (Degarrod, 2013). We are open to new innovations here while we
are also aware that there is a risk that the radical potential of arts-based
techniques will be subverted into simply another—albeit novel—collec-
tion of methods for understanding the human condition. This would
be a missed opportunity for both epistemological advancement and for
any public ethnographies (Degarrod, 2013) aimed at improving animal
lives by better understanding their treatment in human societies. To help
prevent (or at least reflect further on) this, there is a need for those of us
who openly embrace the spirit of posthumanism (albeit not uncritically)
and see an attendant need for the development of multi-species methods
to better understand and improve animal lives—however we may define
this—to focus on the politics of human–animal relations and to attend to
new methodological developments that may help drive change.
As Ogden et al. (2013) put it, in describing the new field of multi-
species ethnography:
We find [it] to be saturated with the anticipation of knowing life outside

the boundaries of human experience. At the same time, it is an endeavour
shrouded by concerns over human exceptionalism’s continued blindness to
the world’s increasing fragility. Certainly there is a hope that these alterna-
tive perspectives of what it means to be human will inform a new ethics of
living in the world. To do so [multi species ethnography] must continue to
reveal attachments to other species and things in ways that make us “think,
feel, and hesitate” to paraphrase Stengers. (p. 15)
In other words, ethnographies that seek to understand animals within

human society (and vice versa) must think, feel and hesitate. They must be
innovative but they must be careful of the animal participants (if there are
any). Above all, we think they should be a mode of wonder that allows the
researcher to experience rich sensory detail and empathise with multiple
perspectives; to create the possibilities for transformational learning with-
out closing off angles of investigation from the outset. In surveying the
foregoing arts-based examples, we have speculated about the practicalities
of bringing animals into them and have questioned how feasible it is to
attend to the materialities and subjectivities of life outside our own spe-
cies. Can art help us go beyond humanism in our ethnographic endeav-
ours? And what possibilities are open to us? This chapter has set out a
few exploratory possibilities for furthering the ethnographic imagination
through the use of theatrical and artistic techniques. By no means tried
and tested, and by no means seeking to solve the problem of accessing
animal experiences, these innovative new approaches to social research
and engagement are speculative, experimental and ripe for adaptation
to the multi-species setting. They present a playful and creative means
to bring academics, members of the public and animals together and
to shed light on the nature of the human/animal relationship for larger
audiences.
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8
Hybrids of Method
The emerging field of multiple species research has yet to be firmly or per-
fectly defined, but in seeking to test out some ideas, the foregoing three
chapters explored the potential of several creative tools for approach-
ing the difficult problem of accessing and understanding the interac-
tions between humans and other species, looking at techniques that can
incorporate other agencies rather than ignoring them. In the previous
chapter, we considered how cutting-edge participatory methods could
develop further still, and suggested that the creativity and sociability of
art and craft-making could break down borderlines between academics,
animals and their human guardians. The question we explore in this cur-
rent chapter returns to a more formal academic context and asks whether
collaboration between differently skilled researchers and the use of mul-
tiple research methods, including ethnography, can provide another basis
for new insights.
We frame this discussion with the concept of interdisciplinarity or,
as we term it, hybridisation. We look at two distinct styles of work that
emerge in bringing methods together: firstly, by focusing on the pos-
sibility of teamwork (differently skilled academics each bringing their

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_8
own knowledges, experiences and methods to bear on shared research

questions), and secondly, by considering the value of adopting qualita-
tive lenses (such as ethnographic fieldwork) to view scientific/practitioner
contexts such as laboratories and agricultural settings. In the latter regard,
we examine cases from the STS which have proven insightful in several
domains traditionally thought to lie outside qualitative study and which
suit the turn to species within which we are currently working. We also
point to some of the ramifications of posthuman thought on practical
methods.
owards Hybridisation in Human–Animal

T
Studies
The idea of interdisciplinarity is often seen as an overly complex way of
describing and theorising what amounts to simple academic co-operation.
Much of this simplicity has been lost over the centuries as researchers
have tried to carve out ever more specialised niches and fields, each with
their own canons of literature, with the result that any attempt to work
outside these silos has been regarded as innovative rather than necessary.
Perhaps the contemporary excitement surrounding interdisciplinarity is
a corrective phase of resistance against this specialisation. Paradoxically,
however, even the concept of interdisciplinarity has become specialised in
the last decade or so and there are now considerable disagreements over
the use of terms such as “multi-disciplinary”, “cross-disciplinary” and
“intra-disciplinarity”. Some regard a degree of theoretical heterogeneity
within the same field as constitutive of interdisciplinarity, while others
take an approach that involves blending different practical techniques
(e.g. in using mixed methods). The debate over what constitutes interdis-
ciplinary work seems ever more baffling, inward-looking and circular.
Our framing of this concept is a pragmatic one. We consider that
the methods we are thinking through in this book work towards greater
understanding of human–animal relations—a broad and complex field
of enquiry, potentially touching on many academic disciplines—and so
we have chosen a definition accordingly. We follow the work of Klein
(1990), who defines an interdisciplinary project as follows:
8 Hybrids of Method
155
To answer complex questions; to address broad issues; to explore disciplin-

ary and professional relations; to solve problems that are beyond the scope
of a single discipline; to achieve unity of knowledge, whether on a limited
or a grand scale. (1990, p. 11)
As Klein puts it: “All interdisciplinary activities are rooted in the ideas of
unity and synthesis, evoking a common epistemology of convergence”
(1990, p. 11), and this arises, in her view, from a significant change in
the way that knowledge is currently being conceived of, arising from
“hybrids” of teaching and learning, holistic perspectives emerging from
the “blurring and mixing of genres and labels” and a sense of epistemo-
logical “crisis” in the way that truth itself is understood. This is a working
definition which, we feel, has something to offer by way of clarity and
supports the blurring of species distinctions in entanglements which has
been central in our argument thus far (Haraway, 1991).
One of the biggest questions we are keen to answer in our work is how
we can bring animals into research more easily, and more specifically, how
ethnography can adapt to this agenda by engaging in new or different
approaches. Following Klein, we regard this as a broad issue touching
on more knowledges and methods than we as social scientists can eas-
ily access. In other words, as a project, it exceeds our own disciplines.
Hence, we feel a clear need to draw on the ideas of others, beyond our
own disciplines, and to venture into the literatures of (among others)
media and cultural studies, geography, management and organisation,
veterinary and natural sciences, as well as sociology. To a degree this is
common to all “animal studies” which can be defined loosely as a field as
opposed to a discipline precisely because it crosses numerous disciplines.
But as we made clear at the outset of this book, while there is wonderful
cross-pollination of theories and concepts in animal studies, attendant
methodological innovations are lacking. We have addressed this so far
in advocating experimentation with visual and filmed data, sensory and
motion-based methods and other techniques which have the ability to
cross-cut different ways of knowing the world. We suggest that a degree
of overlap is desirable epistemologically as well as practically, between
usually distinct subject areas and between the methods that are typically
used in each. Following Klein’s principle of “hybrids” of research, we see
great potential in relaxing these distinctions in usual modes of work and

thought.
The term hybrid is, of itself, intriguing to us and provides a way of
thinking about this. In the biological sciences, it carries a very particular
meaning: the result of a mix of two animals or plants of different breeds,
a taxonomic blurring of distinctions to produce a distinctive offspring.
Hybrids sometimes result from mixing different subspecies within
a species (such as the Holstein cow and Jersey cow) and are known as
intraspecific hybrids. In extending this analogy, we could compare the
intraspecific hybrid to the blending of photography, participant observa-
tion and interview to create photoethnography: a relatively easy mixture
to handle and one which has been carried out successfully many times
before (see Chap. 5 for further discussion). Hybrids between different
species within the same genus (such as between cattle and yaks, both
within the genus Bos) are known as interspecific hybrids. At this level of
distinction, we can compare such a cross to the matching of art-making,
immersive participation and interview within an ethnography informed
by cultural animation. Hybrids between different genera (such as between
dogs and foxes) are known as intergeneric hybrids. We can see how, in
methodological terms, such a match would be possible albeit rarer and
more difficult to manage in practice; we can liken the combination of
analysing large data sets from animal-mounted cameras (in conjunc-
tion with quantitative methodologists) with ethnographic participant
observation and interview in single farm sites as an intergeneric hybrid of
method. We could call this, for simplicity’s sake, mixed methods ethnogra-
phy. It matters less what we call it, however, than our acknowledgement
of its more radical and potentially emancipatory nature.
We use the term “radical” both in the sense of innovation and because
mixing methods from different disciplinary backgrounds invites multiple
lenses to be trained on one underlying problem or question (and the Latin
term for radical is radix meaning root). In our view, there is a home for
all three variations of hybrid in contemporary ethnographic study: each
has the potential to offer something unique to human–animal enquiry
because it can bring multiple perspectives to bear on the most intractable
of research questions, stimulating conversations about what research mat-
ters and how to create knowledge that has impact. In short, we consider
8 Hybrids of Method
157
that cross-pollination of values and ideas (and by extension methods) is

of benefit to ethnographers. We are aware, however, that our advocacy of
hybridisation (in whatever form is possible, radical or less so) is also riven
with difficulty and indeterminacy.
Successful projects often require mastery of specific competencies, not
least a proficiency in team working, interpersonal skills and networking.
Yet prevailing institutional structures, often underpinned by the adminis-
tration of different budgets and discrete cost-centres, sometimes make it
impractical for academics to work across subjects (even within the same
universities). Supportive strategies and resources are often lacking. It
has often been the case that those seeking to conduct interdisciplinary
research need external funding, an extra layer of administrative bureau-
cracy (with limited success rates) to overcome before the job of question
setting and problem solving can begin. Despite these difficulties, how-
ever, the combination of discipline-specific and collaborative working
methods has already been used profitably in a variety of areas of enquiry,
including engineering, mathematics, computing and electronics.
One of the most visible areas for interdisciplinarity has been medi-
cine and health studies. Because of the complexity of health services, the
need for patients to be seen by a range of differently skilled and quali-
fied practitioners and the overlaps between medical theory and practice,
social care and medicine, interdisciplinary work has long been seen as a
form of best practice. Ethnographers have already been involved in inter-
disciplinary collaborations in medicine and social care as well as social
justice and criminology, management and marketing but their engage-
ment with animal studies and animal sciences remains sparse. There are
ethnographic accounts of veterinary surgeons and their work (Hamilton,
2007; Sanders, 1999) and their decision-making strategies and disposi-
tions (Sawford et al., 2012) just as there are studies of shelter workers and
a whole host of animal workers (e.g. Hamilton & Taylor, 2013; Taylor,
2010) but most of this work has been within qualitative templates, rather
than more radical or intergeneric methods. Once again, the focus has
been on humans rather than on their relationships and interactions with
other species.
The relative lack of such research is not only due to a lack of access to
researchers and their materials from other fields of study, although that is
a large part of it, but also comes down to the question of what constitutes
a problem worth solving—a problem that is worthy of the combined
efforts of differently qualified academics and practitioners and the time,
cost and perceived benefits of such activities. The question of what con-
stitutes a worthwhile research focus is bound up inextricably with the
interplay of power in and through societies and, in turn, the value that
we—as academics—place upon problems that affect species other than
“us”. When learning about research methods, for example, it is common
for students to be prompted to consider the quality of the research ques-
tion: Is there a clear rationale for the question? Why does it matter? Why
is it of interest and to whom? Similarly, such questions are often asked
of established academics through, for example, their institutional ethics
committees. When those affected by the issue in question are not human,
however, such questions are shot through with species (and usually specie-
sist) politics. For researchers of many disciplines, animal problems are
often only addressed when they become human problems, affecting the
quality of food consumption, for example, or preventing humans from
acquiring some other form of benefit from other species. If questions are
deemed unworthy enough to ask, it is hardly surprising that a lack of
empirical research work (and methodological innovation) follows.
In Pursuit of Intergeneric Research

An area that places animal bodies and health at the top of the research
agenda, however, is veterinary science. Veterinary researchers consider
their most pressing research questions and problems from the perspective
of the animal. They ask how to reduce animal suffering and pain, how to
get animal handlers to adopt different approaches to animal care, what a
“good” animal life/death looks like, how medicines and treatments work
and what animal keepers think about such treatments and medications.
As many veterinary researchers openly acknowledge, however, they do
not always have the necessary expertise to make their suggestions “stick”
when faced with the complexity of the social networks that surround and
enmesh animals. Just as many qualitative researchers have tended to focus
on the human at the cost of the animal, veterinary researchers often lack
8 Hybrids of Method
159
the tools to investigate the human facets of animal problems such as the
attitudes and motivations of animal keepers, policymakers, businesses in
their relations with other species.
Many veterinary researchers openly profess an interest in working
with social scientists to close these “gaps” (Whay & Main, 2009). Such
intergeneric hybrids of method—if conducted well—provide a means
to forge important connections and to generate new knowledges with
practical application: a meeting of the ideal and the pragmatic. One
example of this is identifying and preventing links between domestic
violence and animal abuse. Increasingly, the area is seeing disciplinary
and methodological hybridity as forensic veterinary professionals work
with social scientists to consider, for example, how veterinary knowledge
about deliberate animal injuries can be used to devise or complement
cross-reporting schemes for violence (i.e. human service professionals
reporting violence to animal welfare professionals and vice versa) (for dis-
cussion, see Animal Sentience special edition on “Breaking the Silence:
The veterinarian’s duty to report” 2016/076). Aside from the adminis-
trative difficulties inherent in such projects, however, there are paradig-
matic obstacles too. While we are oversimplifying, we can boil this down
to the problem of combining quantitative with qualitative approaches.
There are, very often, major differences in epistemological and ontologi-
cal sensibility attached to these very different styles of work; a profound
philosophical tension between accepting and challenging that truth and
knowledge are the same.
Veterinary researchers, for example, examine the health and welfare of
whole populations of animals (e.g. see Whay & Main, 2009) by focus-
ing on metrics such as “body condition scoring”, “locomotion scoring”
or data from mass-scale observations. In developing their findings, they
draw upon mathematical estimates of the risks and benefits of particular
actions to develop models and predictions. Their research is usually vali-
dated by a range of mathematical evaluation criteria such as computer-
assisted sensitivity testing, statistics and frequency counts. We briefly
examined an example of this in our discussion of beastly places (in Chap. 5)
when we considered the contribution of animal-mounted cameras and
the large data sets they provide on bodily movement and disease. The
positivist science traditions that inform such approaches rest upon a core
assumption that the real world can be discovered, tested and measured;
that reality can be presented via mathematically informed methods that
use sizeable and “valid” samples of data. Indeed, these precepts are impor-
tant for researchers to establish testable findings that can be applied to
future cases and problems.
With its interest in process and meanings, however, qualitative research
including ethnography does not rely upon experimental examination in
terms of “quantity, amount, intensity, or frequency” and instead stresses
“how social experience is created and given meaning” (Denzin & Lincoln,
2011, p. 13). Qualitative work privileges semiotics, discourse analysis,
survey research, focus groups and interviews, and now a selection of cre-
ative tools such as visual, sensory and arts-based methods. While some of
these techniques are new, most draw upon long histories with their own
distinctive literatures and, of course, they are informed by a wide range of
theoretical approaches from the positivist and humanistic to posthuman,
postmodern and constructivist. While qualitative research can crosscut a
number of disciplines there is usually a core appreciation from the out-
set—albeit superficial in some cases—of the tangled and interwoven poli-
tics of method, epistemology and ontology; that is, research, knowledge
and sense-making. This political sensitivity is not a usual component of
the quantitative approach.
Of course, the tendency towards small-scale data sets in qualitative
research carries its own set of problems. There are questions of access
and sample size, persuasiveness and impact, and—as we have already
acknowledged—small data sets become even smaller if we exclude certain
species on the basis of their biological differences and inability to answer
questions. Savage and Burrows (2007) have gone as far as to argue that
there is a “crisis of empirical sociology” stemming from the realisation
that other sectors (particularly private enterprises like veterinary prac-
tices) have access to significantly more information, which can be used
to generate greater impacts upon everyday working practices. They claim
that qualitative researchers should respond to this crisis by reimagining
their methods and, indeed, their “worlds” of research—a call echoed by
many scholars over the last decade or so (e.g. Law & Urry, 2004, p. 390).
We suggest that if we are to develop collaborations and hybrids of
our own, specifically aimed at multi-species research, we should attend
8 Hybrids of Method
161
closely to the ontological politics of methods, be they socially or naturally

scientific, qualitative or quantitative, because these politics (or at least a
lack of acknowledgement of them) are perhaps the biggest hindrance to
cross-fertilisation between disciplines and paradigms (Law, Ruppert, &
Savage, 2011). As Law (2008) explains:
We need an archaeological reading if we are to start to articulate the reali-

ties they [methods] imply. Such an archaeology is relational, always incom-
plete, always capable of articulating new versions of performativity. (p. 12)
The incompleteness, the politics and the frustrated possibilities of research

are deserving of far more “archaeological” scrutiny than they have been
afforded to date. And, when we include other species into this mix of
already knotty issues, we find that matters become even more problem-
atic—as we have asked throughout this book, precisely how are we to
include nonhumans in such a way that their reality is represented, never
mind performed, by method?
Perhaps hybridisation requires a pragmatic tolerance of epistemological
and ontological difference rather than an attempt to solve it. Many take a
less circumspect view, however. Lowe, Phillipson, and Wilkinson (2013,
p. 207) argue that effective interdisciplinarity depends upon “overcoming
basic assumptions that have structured past interactions: particularly, the
casting of social science in an end-of-pipe role in relation to scientific and
technological developments”. The idea of qualitative approaches becom-
ing the back-end fix of science is unpalatable to us for obvious reasons
but we question whether overcoming this is as simple as Lowe suggests.
Nonetheless, we have noted several recent forays into interdisciplinary
work that have emerged from veterinary faculty and offer tantalising
prospects for rethinking interdisciplinary relationships.
Veterinary researchers, Main et al. (2012), for example, focus on the
welfare of dairy cattle and the problem of foot health and lameness. In
this three-year study, farmers were recruited to test what they called “novel
intervention approaches designed to encourage farmers to implement hus-
bandry changes” (p. 2946). The methodology rested upon a blend of tar-
geted scientific advice to farmers, regular measurement of the problem of
lameness (locomotion scoring) as well as using social marketing principles
to “sell” the idea of change to farmers. The aim was to stimulate a genuine
impact on the well-being of the cattle involved, although the final results
were inconclusive. In reflecting on this, Main et al. conclude that more
and different data was needed to identify better ways of talking to and
understanding farmers.
Experimental studies like this one, in which different methods are
treated as complementary rather than oppositional, allow us to think of
qualitative and quantitative methods as being on a continuum (Gray &
Densten, 1998), for viewing methods as polar opposites is often a false
dualism and entrenches unhelpful borderlines between them. In reading
the conclusions of Main et al. (2012), we regard their openness to new
data as an ideal basis for intergeneric work with ethnographers, trained
in evaluating the meanings and processes of daily life. This is only one
example and there are doubtless many more cases where ethnographers
could add value by drawing upon in-depth qualitative approaches to tar-
get practical problems. As Richens et al. (2016) have claimed within a
context of dairy cattle vaccination, for example: “There is limited research
investigating the motivators and barriers to vaccinating dairy cattle.
Veterinary surgeons have been identified as important sources of infor-
mation for farmers making vaccination and disease control decisions, as
well as being farmers’ preferred vaccine suppliers” (p. 1). As they point
out, however, vets’ perceptions of their own role and communication
style can be “at odds with farmers’ reported preferences” (p. 2).
Richens et al. (2016) have sought to tackle this particular research
problem by adopting qualitative methods, albeit within highly structured
sampling frames (rather than ethnographic or naturalistic modes of data
collection). Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 dairy
farmers from across Britain and the data set was subsequently analysed
using thematic analysis. Richens et al. conclude that farmers perceive vets
to have an important role in facilitating decision making in all aspects of
vaccination but that what was missing from their findings was a qualita-
tive view of the attitudes of vets towards vaccination and their perceptions
of their professional relationship to farmers. In short, the survey only told
them one what side of the interaction (the farmers) thought of the other
(the vets) but revealed next to nothing about the “interface” itself. We
would also add to this that the animal’s perspective was missing entirely,
8 Hybrids of Method
163
although the a priori assumption that vaccination is good for the cow is
most certainly taken as read. And this raises a different, perhaps insur-
mountable, set of problems. Working across methodologically paradig-
matic boundaries might well necessitate working across ideological ones
as well. For some, this will be unpalatable. Working within a framework
that sees animal welfare as a way to increase productivity by and from
their bodies for human consumption will not easily, if ever, mix with the
more emancipatory view of many animal studies scholars.
We draw on research examples like these, because while shot through
with problems, they are nevertheless heartening in some respects. They
demonstrate an interest in the benefits of hybridisation in our research,
with greater acknowledgement that (very often) the root problem requires
greater understanding of the human–animal or human–human nexus. As
Lowe et al. (2013) argue:
For the scientist or technologist [interdisciplinary work] may mean

improved strategic awareness of public concerns and policy issues relating
to their research, improved sensitivity to cultural and social differences
between different social groups, and more effective communication with
policy-makers, practitioners and the wider public. (p. 207)
There is clearly some way to go in bridging the paradigm gap between dif-
ferent disciplinary approaches and “selling” the idea of ethnography as a
viable addition to such projects. We are in no position to offer any quick
fixes. But if ethnographers can build and nurture relationships with those
who focus on practical animal issues, dilemmas and questions and whose
training gives them a wholly different viewpoint and methodological
approach from their own, there are clear opportunities to understand the
animal–human interface in radical new ways. Teams of researchers could
set research questions together, for example, followed by a phase of more
specialist considerations with quantitative and ethnographic approaches
being used independently before coming together to discuss findings
and to share ideas. Navigating the ethical, political, epistemological and
methodological terrain involved in such a plan will prove difficult as it
requires us to challenge allegiances and boundaries. After all, we all come
to research as creatures with belief systems that we hold dear. Of course,
we realise that we are advocating that people from different sides of the
fence “get together” and work through the issues openly and we acknowl-
edge that this is difficult both as an intellectual exercise and in its “real
world consequences” (e.g. in getting grants, publishing academic articles,
etc.). We argue, however, that the passion that often goes with intellec-
tual curiosity will go a long way to offset some of the problems, as will the
potential benefits to animals (as well as humans).
While mindful of the human politics of knowledge, the kinds of social
worlds we want to make more real, we think that hybrid methods—rest-
ing upon strong and positive communication between differing disci-
plines—could make a real impact on our everyday lives with animals. We
have already argued that ethnographers need a degree of theoretical and
methodological heterodoxy if they are to be pragmatic in their investiga-
tions of human–animal relations, to get involved with veterinary projects
on lameness and disease prevention, for example. Without seeking to
take a combative stance on this, we think this necessitates softening some
epistemological/paradigmatic allegiances in the name of pragmatism,
and scholars within the field of the STS and actor network theory have
already made inspirational headway in doing precisely this.
Qualitative Lenses on Scientific Knowledge

When Latour and Woolgar (1978) first devised their “anthropology of
science” (p. 27), their aim was to demystify the processes of science often
reified by a particular style of reporting (e.g. in scientific journals) which
completely concealed the social processes involved in making and pre-
senting knowledge. It was an approach to knowledge and truth-making
that reflected upon the research and representation process in its own
right. They achieved this through immersion—participant observation—
in the laboratory and its processes to ascertain how “scientific order is
constructed out of chaos” (p. 33). This opened the way for a number of
similar studies which, importantly for our point, often involved other
species such as scallops (Callon, 1986), sheep (Law & Mol, 2008) and
foxes (Woods, 1998).
8 Hybrids of Method
165
Our current climate of biotechnical science has created further, indeed

unprecedented, opportunities for critical study of the scientific research
terrain and its meaning-making and meaning-breaking powers. New
reproductive technologies, cloning, genetic modification, artificial intel-
ligence (to name but a few examples) appear to have given laboratory
scientists new ways to manipulate “nature” and for those outside the lab-
oratory, this work has positively encouraged new ideas to consider how
and why the category “nature” is open to manipulation (Graham, 2002).
As Haraway points out, the malleability of the concepts of humanity,
nature and culture call into question the ontological purity that has been
the mainstay of the natural sciences—and indeed Western society itself
(Graham, 2002; Haraway, 1991, p. 21).
Lien and Law’s (2011) study of salmon farming provides a useful case in
point. The researchers tracked the multiple “ontologies of fish” that make
the routine practices of epistemology difficult and precarious. A salmon
is never just a salmon, in Lien and Law’s analysis, but a multiply enacted
“becoming” enmeshed in extended actor-networks like fish farms, water-
courses, food supply chains, freezers and shops (Barua, 2014; see also
Hinchliffe, Degen, Kearnes, & Whatmore, 2005; Lien & Law, 2011).
Lien and Law demonstrate the multiplicity and the unpredictability of
this extended cross-species network and look particularly at the “doings”
and enactments of the fish–human network. Likewise, Holm’s (2001)
analysis of the “cyborgization of fisheries” is an important complement
to this work as it tracks the wider historical networks that emerge around
so-called natural animals, for example, by illustrating how business man-
agement is a function of the network of production, sale and consump-
tion of animals such as fish—rather than the causal agent responsible
for its creation (Holm, 2001; Johnsen, Sinclair, Bavington, & Holm,
2009). Such studies have made valuable in-roads towards demonstrating
how powerful orderings are produced, deconstructed/disassembled and
reproduced through the interaction of humans, animals, technology and
material objects not least through their own demonstrations of what is
considered important in research (understanding networks) and what is
not (a politicised reading of the exploitation of salmon on a daily basis).
The actor network approach has opened up new areas of exploration
for social scientists and has provided a counterweight to hegemonic
humanism. The ontological and epistemological ramifications of this—

seemingly simple—acknowledgement are yet to be fully understood but
should not be underestimated. They have, for instance, given social sci-
entists “permission” to study areas previously considered off-limits either
because they were the realm of a different discipline (e.g. biology, vet-
erinary medicine) or because they were considered unimportant to the
rationalised, public space conceived by liberal humanism as the only
important one. This turn to enactment (or turn to species, from our own
perspective) has led to numerous doors opening for scholars of different
theoretical families to begin to study animals. In business and manage-
ment, for example, there is growing interest in the topic of climate change
and animality (Labatut, Munro, & Desmond, 2016). Similarly, those
within gender/queer studies, feminism and women’s studies have made
good headway in engaging with (and challenging) “natural science”, in
part due to the philosophical permission granted by STS and, more lat-
terly posthumanism, to study a subject traditionally off-limits to those
outside the discipline (Connell, 2001; Lloyd, 1993). Feminist approaches
have the potential to mount a radical challenge to humanist academic
discourses and practices surrounding sustainability, social responsibility
and justice (Plumwood, 1993). Donna Haraway’s (2008) discussion of
the cyborg, for example, has proved pivotal to feminist contributions to
both sociology of science and posthumanist thought. Responsibility for
nature, women’s participation in the advanced techno-sciences, as well as
moral questions over agency all extend from her important writing.
Summarising just a small amount of the research work emerging within
such overlapping fields demonstrates that “social science” is changing
because the idea of “the social” is itself changing to include a greater ter-
rain of study, beyond humans to the material world of “nature”. The STS
and actor network tradition and the postmodernism and posthumanism
that have followed it engender new kinds of researchable entities which
allow social scientists to reconsider the very notion of empirical research
and to think beyond qualitative/quantitative binaries. Importantly, such
theories have questioned assumed differences between actors of various
species and have paved the way for new methods by which to study ani-
mals and their relations with humans; methods which do not underscore
8 Hybrids of Method
167
the old order, the old power games and discourses by silencing animals or
relegating them to the “natural order” of things.
By emphasising the networking of people, animals and things—its
embrace of multiplicity of meanings, and its disavowal of static, struc-
tural entities in social life—posthumanism offers new hope to bring
other-than-human life under the purview of ethnography. Pure binary
constructions have been problematised and the line between social and
natural and between human and animal has become permeable. Social
scientists (including ethnographers) no longer have to restrict themselves
to the narrowly defined study of society/culture which was always pre-
sumed to be exclusively human. Instead, they are free(r) to contemplate
studying entanglements of the human with nature, or with other spe-
cies—with “naturecultures” as Haraway has labelled it (Haraway, 2008).
It represents a whole new world of posthuman study, a world that poten-
tially embraces the concept of hybridity.
As Lestel points out, disciplines and their foci change, shift and evolve:
“The profound renewal of ethology itself ” (2006, p. 148) spearheaded by
the pioneering work of Jane Goodall is based on a transformation of ethol-
ogy into ethnology; it became accepted and understood that the societies
of animals studied were far more complex than expected and that an eth-
nographic approach was crucial to their understanding (p. 149). Kirksey
and Helmreich (2010) similarly point to the importance of ethnography
as central in opening up new ways of seeing the world:
Creatures previously appearing on the margins of anthropology—as part of

the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols—have been pressed into the
foreground in recent ethnographies. Animals, plants, fungi, and microbes
once confined in anthropological accounts to the realm of zoe or “bare
life”—that which is killable—have started to appear alongside humans in
the realm of bios, with legibly biographical and political lives. (p. 545)
Those of us interested in “contact zones where lines separating nature from

culture have broken down, where encounters between Homo sapiens and
other beings generate mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (Kirksey
& Helmreich, 2010, p. 546) are in need of new approaches that can deal
with entanglements that are the basis of our reality, not pure distinctions
(Haraway, 1991).
One of the great strengths and limitations of posthumanism is that
it paradoxically both resists and embraces method. It encourages us to
ask questions that are difficult to answer, research topics and issues that
currently have few (or no) methods to bring into play. Given its posi-
tioning—beyond the postmodern critique of an external, knowable real-
ity—there is a rejection of pure distinction between theory and method,
between finding out “the facts” and accurately writing those “facts” into
accounts. The “radical egalitarianism” (Chagani, 2014) which reconceives
the human, social, technical, material as on an equal footing, or entangled,
necessitates an awareness of the role(s) that methods play in constituting
the social world as opposed to reporting on it. There is an assumption of
praxis that underpins the theoretical decentring of the human. This is its
strength. But it is also its limitation, in that it limits the ability of those
working within posthuman frameworks to attend to structural politics
at a local level, and more worryingly perhaps given our argument in this
chapter, to build bridges with positivists working on living problems that
work from a humanist prerogative to exercise power to do good. This may,
effectively, wreck a posthumanist–veterinary collaboration before it even
begins for the questioning of human centrality and power is at the heart
of the posthumanist project. This may not be especially problematic for
those posthumanists working with human–object entanglements such as
robots, cyborgs and so on, but it certainly is a significant obstacle for those
of us concerned to investigate human–animal entanglements because the
aim is to acknowledge, accept and try to move beyond our limitations
as human researchers embedded within human culture and society and
to use methods to create the world we want to live in (Law, 2004). As
Ferrando (2012, p. 10) points out: “Posthumanism is decentralized and
does not employ representative democratic practices: no specific type of
human can symbolically represent humanity as a whole, just as no spe-
cies can hold any epistemological primacy”. It is a way of destabilising
and deconstructing the “ontological hygiene” of humanism, the ways
we, as humans, feel we know our world and what makes sense within
these worlds (Graham, 2002). This view presents a serious problem if
the objective is to forge new connections with those who assume human
8 Hybrids of Method
169
power, albeit to drive an improvement and change agenda in spaces like

farms, fisheries and veterinary practices (Lachance, 2016).
We clearly have some difficult terrain to navigate. This chapter has
considered that terrain through a speculation on the possibility of hybrid-
isation, that is, selecting and working on research problems that are big-
ger than a single discipline, philosophical family or method. We have
considered the difficulty of working across disciplinary boundaries and
different research paradigms. We have suggested that it may not be pos-
sible to accept a posthuman decentring of the human, on one hand, and,
on the other, to still work with those who seek to improve how we, as
humans, farm animals for food (e.g. see Agamben, 1998). These matters
represent just a few of the sizeable difficulties we encounter when think-
ing through the politics and practicalities of methods for human–animal
studies. But we have also pointed to some examples that give us hope that
things can change.
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9
People Writing for Animals
Writing is ethnographic method-in-practice (Law, 2004) and argu-

ably the most powerful of its world-making tools, shaping and creat-
ing the representation of social relations to influence what is known and
believed to be true. By translating everyday life from lived experience
to words on a page, ethnographers reduce and simplify the world about
them to create narrative. Through this process, we necessarily have to
make choices about overlooking or editing out particular actors, events,
mistakes or even entire species, and such choices inform the worlds and
truths we make and live within (Latour & Woolgar, 1978). Whether or
not we do so reflectively, editorial power puts participants at risk of being
constructed in specific ways, inscribing and thereby limiting accounts
of their lives, their social function and their (so-called) place in society.
Writing, then, can lead us into the imperialist trap of underlining rather
than questioning hegemonic norms about particular groups. It may inad-
vertently reproduce myths and create “master statuses” (Becker, 1967)—
such as young people are dangerous or problematic (Cohen, 1972)—by
“fetishizing” and “exoticising” these individuals as Others.

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_9
Yet this stands against ethnography’s long history of critical, evoca-

tive, true-to-experience account writing, drawing on literary and eman-
cipatory techniques to give marginalised and powerless groups a chance
to be heard. And, as we have shown, a small number of ethnographers
are increasingly building on this heritage to make both marginalised
humans and animals “heard”. A case in point is the work of Niki Rust
that, based on interviews and participant observation with Namibian
farmers, has revealed a new way of thinking about carnivore–human
conflict, one that does not start from the point of view of human supe-
riority (see Rust, 2016; Rust & Taylor, 2016).
Although ethnographers have often worked to avoid the charge of
elitism through their writing, they have not always managed this in the
case of animals. Much extant ethnography has (perhaps unwittingly)
replicated and empowered speciesism by going in search of the human
story: editing animals out, taking-for-granted their object status, skim-
ming over their importance by conceiving of them in terms of use
value as human food, human entertainment, or as valuable “devices”.
Without capabilities for reading, speaking and participating with us
ethnographically, animals have little or no opportunity to redress the
balance. They cannot challenge hegemonic assumptions embedded in
our methods of understanding them. So it becomes particularly impor-
tant that we ensure they are (fairly) represented in the process of ethno-
graphic writing. However, as we have argued so far, given ethnography
is a process of people writing, this is especially challenging.
With that in mind, this chapter considers the potential of ethnographic
writing in a different way—as part of the emancipatory and critical
endeavour of posthumanist scholarship. Our consideration is informed
by postcolonialism, eco-feminism and critical theory and explores the
process of writing as a means of generating empathy by, and leading
to, advocating for nonhuman animals. Because we are aware of the sig-
nificant (humanist) limitations of writing to capture the subjectivity of
a-lingual animals, we pursue this agenda with modesty and trepidation as
well as enthusiasm for the potential benefits (rather than harms) that we
can bring about through the development of different styles of represen-
tation. We accept the limitations of writing as a humanist craft; we also
understand that it is a technology which participates in the empowering
9 People Writing for Animals
175
of certain versions of reality, but we also feel that our enquiry into this
complexity needs to be practical: How can we use our implicit human
power to author less reductive accounts of human–animal entangle-
ments, to challenge old hegemonies and to adapt our style of writing to
a more inclusive approach?
Voices and Stories
Academic writing—in general—is often criticised because it is dull (Kara,
2015), convoluted (Jones & Leavy, 2014), alienating (Gergen & Gergen,
2012) and/or that it speaks to limited and elite audiences rather than to
wide and diverse ones. Ethnographers have long been attuned to these
critiques and have used their words creatively in the hope of encouraging
marginalised voices to be heard through polyvocal narratives and tales
(Fraser & MacDougall, 2016; Van Maanen, 1988). Ethnographic writ-
ing, then, has rarely been viewed by those conducting it as a vehicle for
passing on “pure information”. Most have, quite rightly, seen it as creative
method-in-practice (Law, 2004) with the power to reveal as well as create
whole worlds of meaning.
While, as Benjamin (1968) states: “The value of information does not
survive the moment in which it was new”, by contrast, an ethnographic
narrative is different: “A story is different. It does not expend itself. It
preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even
after a long time” (p. 90). Ethnography’s impact as an inscription device
lies in the concentrated strength of its storytelling. In other words, ethno-
graphic narratives and stories carry the potential for long-lasting effects
upon the listener/reader by exceeding the limits of information and out-
living the moment of transmission. The art of writing in thickly descriptive
(Geertz, 1973) ways helps produce accounts whose effects last. But there
is a moral question here too, for, as Taussig (2006) helpfully points out,
we also owe an ethical debt to our participants to see and present their
words and stories in useful context rather than as data sources gleaned
for our use.
This ethical debt involves treating speech, ideas and stories with
respect. It is a mistake to view the words and stories of our participants
as raw data without attending to the way that stories help constitute the
very lives we seek to describe and inevitably produce through writing. As
McGranahan puts it, this is to “miss the power of stories and storytell-
ers even as we tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our
points. We miss that the stories are the point. They are the getting, and
they are the there” (McGranahan, 2015, p. 1). For those of us interested
in questioning implicit hierarchies between humans and other species
through an emancipatory or posthuman form of ethnography, however,
this ethical concern is hard to apply. It is hard because animals do not
tell stories. Yet it is more than this. The traditional silence of animals in
ethnographic work can be tracked to bigger questions of species hierar-
chy, hierarchies that writing (no matter how descriptive or nuanced) have
done very little to address.
Animals, through a lack of “voice” have been marginalised and their
ethnographic muteness perpetuated by a preoccupation with human sto-
ries (about humans). Doing posthumanist research, however, necessitates
interrogating the links that connect the personal with the political and
seeking to understand the effects of social problems in ways that provide
opportunities for multiple species to participate in research. The aim is
to grapple with different forms of agency to disrupt assumed power rela-
tions; to find creative means of revealing and elaborating the social status
of these very different agents and the ways their agentic properties relate
to bigger cultural and social wholes.
If we are keen to go beyond reductive information transfer and produce
posthumanist writing that actually makes a difference to the treatment
and inclusion of animals as social actors, we must acknowledge our limi-
tations as humans and seek to do writing differently. But how? We need
to find a comfortable way to live with our uncertainties about humanist
authorial power and, at the same time, develop techniques of writing to
acknowledge that animals may have their own stories to tell (even if they
do not have the physical or cognitive capacity to tell them). Since animals
do not write or tell, however, the best (in fact, the only) means we have at
our disposal is to use our humanity to tell stories about and for them: sto-
ries that destabilise reductive assumptions about their object status, their
lack of social importance, and bring them into the ethnographic account.
177
We have already experimented with this ourselves by encouraging

our human participants to speak and tell stories about and on behalf of
the animals they work with (Hamilton & Taylor, 2013). Other ethnog-
raphers are starting to do the same. For example, Dashper (2016) has
written about the involvement and mutuality of humans and animals
in horse riding and has used evocative thickly descriptive writing and
selected vignettes to foreground horses as participants, or in her words,
“as individual, sentient beings with intrinsic value beyond their relation
to human activities”. This narrative approach, Dashper argues, can lead to
the development of a greater empathy and understanding of the “mutu-
ally rewarding interspecies relationships and partnerships within sport”.
Through storytelling on behalf of horses, Dashper tries to show what it is
really like for humans and horses to walk together.
An alternative approach to “telling animal stories” has also been tried in
a project called In Good Company (Fraser & Taylor, forthcoming). Here,
female participants in focus groups were asked to explain the meanings
of animal companions in their lives. Participants were asked to share pho-
tos of their current or past animal companions and talk about them.
In doing so, participants built up intertwined biographies of themselves
and their animals. The researchers heard about animals’ names (and how
they came to be), their histories, personalities, quirks and on occasion
about their deaths. In analysing these biographies, it was possible for the
researchers to understand a great deal about the women’s relationships
with their animals—that they often played the role of helper, comforter
or therapist, for example. Importantly, the animals were present in these
stories of research, not “in person”, but through narratives about them
and their lives. The fact that the companion animals did not speak for
themselves does not make this a “bad method”. It was a subtle, multifac-
eted way of hearing about and narrating the complex and entangled lives
of animals and their human keepers. While not an ethnography in the
strictest sense, this example nonetheless supports Dashper’s (2016) argu-
ment that through writing, we can encourage empathy for other species
through storytelling and narration. This acknowledgement is critical to
our argument because, for us, writing with empathy is the basis for inclu-
sion and advocacy.
Writing That Advocates for Animals

Explicitly advocating through ethnography has always enjoyed a some-
what contentious status in the academy. While storytelling and thickly
descriptive writing is often regarded as an important part of the ethno-
graphic craft, advocacy has often been disparaged as explicit bias and
thus of limited value. It is subject to various critiques that turn on the
idea that to be ideologically and/or politically motivated is “bad science”.
This view is mired in post-Enlightenment positivism and increasingly
supported by neoliberal agendas in academic institutions (see Chap. 4).
Recent theorisation has posed a significant challenge to this, however,
particularly in the last couple of decades when we have seen considerable
discussion about the nature of academic impact and the need for engaged
scholarship. Burawoy (2005), following Mills (1959) and Gouldner
(1971), has argued passionately for a public facing scholarship, one that
engages with the community about issues of inequality. We support this
case and see, at least part of that, as being fulfilled through advocacy
scholarship.
We are aligned with Mills and Gouldner in that we see—and wish to
lay bare—the epistemic methods that uphold normative beliefs regarding
the neutrality of research methods. It is our view that slavish devotion to
the idea of the (one) scientific method is one of the ways in which tra-
ditional sociology (although this is not necessarily unique to sociology)
maintains its critique of research designed to be politically engaged and
on behalf of certain (disempowered) groups. Our position is one that is
critical of any claim to the “truth” irrespective of the methods that sup-
posedly allow researchers to access it. We see all knowledge production—
research and dissemination—as value infused, as taking a position and
a stance, as taking sides (Becker, 1967). We see writing as taking sides:
whether through simplifying, purifying or editing out extraneous data
or whether we explicitly seek to bring marginal voices into the spotlight.
If we accept this, pragmatically, then the step to advocacy scholarship
is not a large one and—considering the weight of power that humans
hold as authors, editors, storytellers and world-makers—it is a mandatory
one. It is impossible, we think, to acknowledge the workings of power
179
through knowledge production and creation and not ask “whose side are
we on?” (Becker, 1967). Similarly, we think it difficult, if not impossible,
to acknowledge the ways inequalities are embedded in social structures
and institutions without wanting to challenge and dismantle them. As
such we are each, in our own—often different—ways, involved in “public
sociology” (Burawoy, 2005) in that we orient towards a particular view of
“democratic socialism” and that we see ourselves as allies of social move-
ments designed to bolster civil society (Burawoy, 2005, pp. 319–325).
The difference for us is that our scholarship advocates for nonhumans,
meaning it may be seen by some as doubly suspect.
Peggs (2013) points out that although human–animal relations are
entirely suited to sociology, there remain questions as to whether ani-
mals are a proper focus for sociologists. It can be seen as academic “dirty
work” (Wilkie, 2015) precisely because “by breaching anthropocentric
norms, animal scholars, nonhuman animals and animal-related issues are
out of place in the social sciences” (p. 225). This gives scholars in the
field a marginalised, if not tainted, status. Scholarship that then aims
to advocate openly on behalf of other animals risks becoming doubly
tainted: questionable both in terms of its bias and focus. As Peggs (2013)
points out, even though advocacy scholarship has become more accept-
able within sociology, this does not necessarily extend to the sociology of
human–animal relations. It makes it difficult, then, to call for a means to
write for animals in our ethnographic work.
Advocacy writing for other animals, then, is often in a double if not
triple bind. It may be considered suspect in terms of content (other
animals), bias (political engagement), as well as threatening taken-for-
granted assumptions about human superiority. In many ways, this echoes
the struggles of (early) feminist, black/feminist, and other critical schol-
arship fields in that they consistently had to resist their own intellectual
marginalisation from a perception that they threatened the status quo
(both inside and outside of the academy). In the human–animal studies
field, some have made robust defences of their “scientific right” to con-
duct nonanimal focused work; others have been more modest in argu-
ing that animals are tangential to their focus on humans, while others
have revelled in their marginalised and deviant status which offers them
a certain freedom to push the boundaries of established scholarship and

writing convention.
Critiquing this state of play, some have instituted and focused on new
intra-field hierarchies in an attempt to demarcate “good scholarship” from
“bad”. Naturally, there is slippage across these responses. Increasingly, in
human–animal studies, however, this slippage is lubricated by the grease
of politics. Those demarcating themselves as belonging to the subfield
of critical-animal studies (Taylor & Twine, 2014) often argue against
“impartial” scholarship and engage with the material realities of other
animals in order to criticise their treatment morally, ethically and legally,
with a view not only to describing it in their accounts but also changing
it through actions (Wilkie, 2015). In other words, there is an acceptance
of advocacy writing—certainly at the more radical edges of animal stud-
ies. This does not mean that in order to write for other animals through
scholarship, one has to use the label of critical animal studies. It means
that critical animal scholars have gone some way towards normalising the
idea of scholar-activism within the field which can provide a useful home
for new forms of writing.
Acknowledging Our Intellectual Legacies

Human–animal studies, and its advocacy-focused cousin critical animal
studies, did not evolve in a vacuum. Like other areas of knowledge, they
grew from seeds planted in previous scholarship and as a result of the
breadth of the field now have the luxury of drawing on various disciplines
for their theoretical underpinnings. Crucial to the development of criti-
cal animal studies, and much human–animal studies work, is feminist
theory. Broadly speaking, feminist epistemology starts from the point
that the production of knowledge is always and irrevocably effected by
gendered power relations, that “gendered power structures of society
affect the shape of and possibilities for knowledge production and the
exercise of epistemic agency” (Grasswick, 2011, p. xv). A key concern of
feminist epistemology has been to show how dominant binary paradigms
(e.g. man vs woman, human vs animal) structure knowledge production
in ways that benefit the powerful side of the equation (men and humans
181
in the example given). They have also called into question the very prin-
ciple of thinking through binaries. Adopting and adapting these critiques
to the study of human–animal lives offers a way for posthuman scholars
to move beyond established positivist tropes in the production of knowl-
edge, and the writing techniques deployed in their ethnographies.
Key to any attempts to produce knowledge about human–animal rela-
tions in ways that do not simply reinscribe mainstream binaries is ensur-
ing that multi-species research is interdisciplinary (or as we described
in Chap. 8, hybrid forms of research). Again, we can learn from femi-
nist scholars about the importance of this. Mary Maynard (1997, p. 2)
argued, when considering the aloofness of women’s studies to science,
that we ignore the “other side” at our peril. As we argued in Chap. 8, not
only do the biological and environmental sciences have much to tell us
about other species, but they are often the authoritative and dominant
voice vis-à-vis other animals. While these voices are often used on the
behalf of other animals, they have also been (and continue to be) used
against other species as is the case, for example, when environmental sci-
entists become enrolled in calls to “cull” certain animal populations, or
when biological scientists use animal bodies to advance our understand-
ing of them. Ignoring these disciplines because their concerns are so dif-
ferent from our own is problematic. While it is tempting to silo oneself
off from the “other side” in order to advance criticisms of its internal
paradigms, this is not always desirable in human–animal studies where
knowledge about other animals is paramount. If we refuse to engage with
scientific studies and understandings of other animals, we run the risk of
restricting our understanding of other animals. Adopting this position
also excuses those voices from any critique or accountability, potentially
allowing them to “maintain their position and evade responsibility for
their own actions” (Lorde, in Crowley & Himmelweit, 1992, p. 47).
Posthuman ethnographic methods encourage us to move beyond
universal, essential and biologically reductionist ideas of “the animal”.
As Maynard (1997) argued when considering the suitability of feminist
extensions of traditional masculinist theories “once essential and uni-
versal man dissolves, so does his hidden companion, woman” (p. 339).
We can borrow and paraphrase this idea, “once essential and universal
human dissolves, so too does their hidden companion, animal”. Just as
the rejection of the universal category “woman” was a watershed for femi-
nism so too should the rejection of the universal category “animal” be for
human–animal studies. Because ethnography attends to the particular,
the local, the emergent, it allows us to avoid reductive simplifications
like animal-as-category and instead see the myriad roles individual and
specific animals play in our lives, organisations and social and political
arenas. Posthuman methods, based on ethnographic principles of evoca-
tive, rich and thickly descriptive writing, can fruitfully tell stories about
the roles humans play in animal lives, as well as the impacts humans
might have on animals. A posthumanist methodology starts from the
assumption of entanglement, disavowing “pure” categories of human and
animal, or social and natural, in order to recognise that we share com-
mon worlds that are collectively made, and that we impact one another
intersubjectively (Stacey, 1988).
Posthuman and multi-species ethnographers must hold ideological
investment in what/who they study “because in ethnographic studies the
researcher herself is the primary medium, the ‘instrument’ of research,
this method draws on … resources of empathy, connection and con-
cern” (Stacey, 1988, p. 22). It is this sense of empathy and connection
that often drives ethnographers towards activism/advocacy in their meth-
ods of writing (Garfinkel, 1967) and new methods of storytelling that
include rather than erase other species. Our argument, then, is that—for
the scholar advocate at least—writing which deliberately cultivates close-
ness and empathy between researcher and researched is to be embraced,
not held with suspicion precisely because of that closeness.
Take, for example, the work of Jan and Steve Alger whose ethnogra-
phy of a cat shelter “Whiskers” (2003) made use of emotive, first-person
reportage to stress how important the cats were to their story, not as
“data” but as fellow beings. Taking this stance enabled Alger and Alger
to gain acceptance by the human workers in the Whiskers community
so they could conduct participant observation alongside them. In their
own words:
We knew the kitten would not live until morning without medical
attention. So, I said “Let’s take her to the emergency clinic on our
own.” Steve agreed saying “We have to try to save her.” Alice and her
183
boyfriend had placed a small cloth over the kitten for warmth and they
agreed also. So, we took off with the kitten … I kept my hands on the
kitten to keep her warm and watched for signs of life. Every so often
she made a little movement or sound. I didn’t dare pick her up as she
was so incredibly fragile. It was almost as if there was nothing inside the
fur. She was completely limp. It seemed to take forever to get to the
hospital. We finally got there and Steve ran inside with the kitten while
I closed the car. He told the receptionists we had a dying kitten and
they scooped her up and brought her to the doctor while we filled out
forms. After a while the doctor [vet] emerged and told us they had to
put a catheter directly into the bone to deliver fluid immediately to the
kitten who was 10% dehydrated which was consistent with death
[meaning, life threatening]. They also had to get her warm as her tem-
perature had dropped to 93 degrees (a cat’s normal temperature would
be about 101 degrees [Farenheit]). With that preparation, the doctor
took us in to see her and she was a sight. Lying on a heating pad and
surrounded with rubber gloves that had been filled with warm water
she was trying to hold her little head up. They estimated her age as
4–6 weeks. She had goop in her eyes from medication and was as weak
as a dishrag. The doctor said the next two hours would be critical and
we should call back at that time. But we felt so elated to see that tiny
kitten alive such cautions meant nothing to us. We were just glad we
had taken the chance. (pp. 43–45)
Seeing, Witnessing, Translating

Assuming access has been negotiated and the ethnographers are willing
and able to enter a particular site, there is then the problem of what they
may “see” while carrying out their routine participant observation. Seeing
has consequences. It is both how we remain open to the plural perspec-
tives that lie before us and how we “close them down” by interpretation,
analysis and translating into text. Yet the act of translation need not be so
reductive if we remain open to the potential of advocacy. Consider this
excerpt from Naisargi Dave’s (2014) work on how the senses of sight and
smell were integral to how key figures came to act on behalf of “suffering”
animals in India:
The sight of a suffering animal, the locking of eyes between human and
nonhuman, inaugurates a bond demanding from the person a life of
responsibility. That event is uniquely intimate because it occurs between
two singular beings—because based on the locking of eyes, the human’s
knowledge is not of all animals in general, but of this animal, at this
moment. The moment is uniquely intimate, too, because it expands ordi-
nary understandings of the self and its possible social relations. (p. 434)
In this excerpt, Naisargi Dave reflects upon how sights of the field
prompt a commitment to activism on behalf of other animals. In describ-
ing this episode in her written account, she is seeking to make this “exotic
encounter” more accessible to readers while at the same time drawing
attention to the plight of animals in India. In other words, there is a move
here from seeing and feeling, to writing and advocating. A similar move
is noted in the ethnographic work of Gillespie (2016) whose work in the
USA with dairy cows suggests that openness to the experience of other
animals—witnessing—can be an important ethnographic research tool
in and of itself, one that relies on the ethnographer engaging politically
with the “subject’s embodied experience” (p. 2). She explains how what
she saw—or bore witness to—while doing openly activist-ethnography
led to her reflecting on emotions in fieldwork:
During fieldwork I conducted in 2012 on the lives of cows in the dairy

industry in the Pacific Northwestern United States, I sat in the audience at
livestock auction yards and watched as animals were auctioned off in rapid
succession, their lives blurring through the auction ring as they were com-
modified for their productive and reproductive potential. At one of these
auctions, the sale was delayed and I sat in the bleachers with the other audi-
ence members, waiting impatiently. Later, I was told nonchalantly by a
woman in the audience that a steer had jumped the fence and escaped from
the holding pens behind the auction yard. He ran away, down the country
highway, and the auction employees had chased him in pickup trucks and
shot and killed him on the side of the road. My eyes welled up with tears
and I quickly looked away, self-conscious about the impropriety of grieving
for an animal in this space.
Witnessing—as a research method—is a political tool because “it has

the potential to reveal and document hierarchies of power and inequal-
185
ity that affect the embodied experiences of marginalized individuals

and populations” (Gillespie, 2016, pp. 1–2). Importantly, it includes
or “writes in” the researcher, thus dissolving all pretence to objectiv-
ity or remote and unbiased distance and, also in doing this, questions
and undermines distinction: not only those distinctions which operate
between the species but also those between writer and reader. In think-
ing this through methodologically, we can learn from feminist scholar-
ship that points out that disembodied research is an impossible goal of
rationalist epistemology (Warkentin, 2010) and one that institutes dif-
ference while denying similarity. Difference shores up species boundaries
and works against posthumanism’s emancipatory ethos. A new way of
looking at and writing about other animals is called for, and, in this
important task, empathy has a role to play in reflecting upon what can
be known about the Other.
Churchill (2006) argues that empathic understanding provides
the “means by which we enter into the otherwise private space of the
other—and within this space of the “in-between” find ourselves engaged,
enthralled and even enraptured” (p. 2). This turns on imagination, empa-
thy and embodiment. In seeking to understand the interaction between
himself and a bonobo at a zoo, Churchill writes that “we thereby sense in
and through our own bodies the intentions and affects that animate the
other, and simultaneously understand our tacit experience as significative
of the other’s experience” (p. 7). He concludes that
[t]he problem of animal minds is ultimately a problem of access: anyone

who has an animal companion “knows” that there is sentience, intelligence,
intentionality, even “soul” within the animal. The ontological “fact” of ani-
mal cognition (and even animal “personality”) does not present a problem
to common sense; but it does to science … perhaps we need to consider a
third approach “between” the extreme alternatives of methodological sub-
jectivism and methodological objectivism: a way out of the dilemmas
posed by the Cartesian framework of inner and outer, subject and object.
(p. 8)
While our focus is not animal minds per se—and we would even call into
question Churchill’s focus on the mind while trying to negate Cartesian
dualisms of mind/body—we can borrow from this idea and extend it
by arguing that allowing empathy for other beings, and writing accounts
that stress the shared embodiment of our lives, can give ethnographers a
different way to depict other animals. In 1990, Shapiro attempted pre-
cisely this in an autoethnographic experiment with his dog, Sabaka. In
reflecting on the way he holds himself throughout a shared game, Shapiro
writes: “It is an empathic posture in which I sense the bodily attitude,
stance, and incipient moves of the other. This kinesthetic empathy is a
possible investigatory posture” (p. 193). He argues that we need to remain
open to the experiences—the embodied experiences—of other animals:
“Invitations to move and bodily sensibility are the basis of meaning in
Sabaka’s experience. For him, meaning does not occur in or consist of a
semantic field of, say, differences, similarities, and associations. Rather,
meaning occurs in the contexts of possible moves; of possible ways of liv-
ing and maintaining space and, as the last reflection suggests, of forms of
relationship with others.”
The point Shapiro is making is that Sabaka does not rely upon lan-
guage for interaction. Meaning appears to consist of and become known
through a bodily experience of game-playing. For Shapiro, autoethnog-
raphy captures this well for it points to the “complex, intimate, and
wonderful choreographies of that world”—language becomes a vehicle
for describing empathy, play and shared space (p. 194). This has further
potential as a way of writing for animals. Taking key aspects of previous
work on feminist epistemology, embodiment and empathy, then, may
offer a new way for ethnographers to develop research projects open to
seeing, embodying space with and writing about other animals in their
own right, not simply as an extension of human culture. This helps those
of us who use our scholarship to advocate for other animals. But allowing
oneself to be open to the experience of other animals is not always easy,
intellectually or emotionally.
Intellectually, it is difficult because we are socialised into a human-
ist worldview which eschews (and, rightly questions) anthropomor-
phism. Our care to avoid humanising animals, however, can make us
reticent to commit our opinions to paper. It suggests such differences
between humans and all other species that we feel we cannot, indeed
dare not, assume we can know anything about them. And emotionally
it is difficult as witnessing other animals, unless your research proj-
187
ect is with “good” companion animal owners, will invariably involve

facing a degree of the institutionalised and normalised abuse of non-
human animal species. This emotional discomfort is something that
vets have to develop coping mechanisms for in their everyday working
lives (Hamilton, 2007). But being exposed to abuse (whether through
malice or misunderstanding) while deliberately cultivating empathy for
other animals is emotionally trying. Such is the danger and allure of
allowing empathy to figure in and guide research and writing: you often
see things you cannot unsee. And, in so doing, your orientation to the
world changes.
In conclusion, the perspectival shift inherent in fieldwork opens up
the question of what to do with knowledge gained through seeing and
witnessing. This is complicated by our very humanity: our sights and
emotions are filtered through human registers of thought and action.
And, further to this, it is “us” who hold the privilege to research. Unlike
the animals who we work with whose lives we see, we get to return to our
“ivory towers” and reflect: part of this needs to be a reflection about how
our knowledge might be used and what its limits are. After all, animals
cannot and do not research our worlds, and occasionally all we are able to
do is imagine theirs. If we use feminist theory and epistemology to guide
our posthuman methods, however, we are helpfully propelled towards
thinking about praxis and the pragmatic means of writing to advocate for
change. First-person, realist prose as well as autoethnography have real
value in this endeavour.
Helpfully, activism and ethnography have a relatively long history
together although it is only more recently that terminology like activist-
ethnography, engaged anthropology, ethnography-as-activism, and
advocacy-ethnography (Smyth & McInerney, 2013) have been com-
mon currency. And as Kirsch (2010) points out, approaching research
planning with advocacy in mind is a relatively novel concept. While
anthropologists and other ethnographers have engaged in critical ethnog-
raphy, taking the next step to advocate for Others has been less common
(Checker, Davis, & Schuller, 2014). In highlighting the complexities
involved in doing this, Checker et al. rightly argue that “the realities
of real-world engagement are messy, and our roles are rarely clear-cut”
(p. 408). Interestingly, however, it is becoming more common to see
overt statements regarding the intertwined nature of ethnography and

activism, and to see it form part of the initial research planning. In other
words, activist-ethnography has become more deliberate (Kirsch, 2010)
as part of “a commitment to ethnographically informed activist practices
that will enhance or lead to social justice” (p. 75). By extension, Gillespie
(2016) argues that the act of ethnographic writing (particularly if it
involves witnessing “uncomfortable realities”) can be advocacy research,
or research-as-protest.
Perhaps then, ethnographic writing as advocacy can best be cast as
(in) formational politics, a process of “compiling and packaging infor-
mation in order to access and influence national public spheres” (Davis
& Craven, 2011, p. 195). While contributing to academic debates
about issues is important and can itself lead to paradigm shifts, how-
ever, it is unlikely that this alone will achieve much in the way of social
change. One practical suggestion is that we remain attentive to how we
share and present information outside ethnographic and social science
circles. An important part of this is drawing from and contributing to
knowledge outside our own disciplines. It also calls for us to think fur-
ther about the ways we write and question who we write for. Presenting
accessible information in a variety of outlets and mediums is important
if the information is to be used by others. We should consider turn-
ing our ethnographic craft to writing for activist newsletters, sharing
unpublished results particularly with those in the activist community,
blogging on issues and/or about research findings, and being willing
to talk about research and its findings in nontraditional outlets. This is
an important act of public scholarship even if this receives little or no
recognition from our own institutions.
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10
Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into
the Field?
In this book, we have argued that social scientists interested in the rela-
tional ties that connect humans and animals must attempt to include
other species in their work. We have noted that capturing animals’ per-
spectives can, and probably will, be difficult and sometimes impossible,
but that this should not be taken as reason enough to simply omit them.
To omit other creatures from social science is to silence them. We have
argued against this silencing on theoretical, political and methodological
grounds while remaining mindful that our project is shot through with
indeterminacy and risk—the equivalent of being on a trapeze without a
safety net (Barthes, quoted in Wood, 2016). We have considered what a
posthuman or multi-species methodology might be and discussed how
ethnography and its adaptations, particularly creative and arts-based
techniques, help us adopt a less reductive, humanist positioning that bet-
ter accounts for animal perspectives or “voices” in our research. We are
cautiously optimistic about the potential of our project.
The optimism is strengthened by posthumanism’s acknowledgement
that other species matter and need to be included in research that purports
to be about them. According to Helena Pedersen (2011), for example,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5_10
posthumanism is “a deconstruction of symbolic, discursive, institutional

and material arrangements that produce the category ‘human’ as some-
thing unique, distinct, and at the centre of the world” (p. 67). Its starting
point is one that disavows human exceptionalism. In doing so, it opens
up the idea that humans are just one species on earth and that we live
our lives entangled with other species. The methods we have explored in
this book aim to support precisely this agenda, challenging the implicit
hierarchies of authorial power embedded within human ways of under-
standing and account-creating. Although we embrace the inclusivity of
posthumanism with enthusiasm, we are also cautious. The caution is two-
fold: it arises, first, from a concern that multi-species research approaches
may develop into little more than novel ways to interrogate the human
condition, and thus reinscribe the very humanism we wish to distance
ourselves from. Second, we are concerned that with a broad “other-than-
human” focus, which necessitates the inclusion of non-animals (and
other agencies such as technology, buildings and space), multi-species
methods will be in a difficult position to address the political nature of
human relationships with other species.
We are also aware that heralding the arrival of the bold new method
of “multi-species ethnography” carries the risk of replacing one imperfect
methodology with another. In order to mitigate this, we have tried to
move beyond narrow conceptions (and labels) to broader ideas of post-
human ethnography. We have underlined that posthuman ethnography
needs to maintain a focus on human–animal relationships specifically,
and not simply use animals as a way of understanding the process of
“becoming human”. For us, this has necessitated some unusual meth-
odological considerations: from art and audio-visual techniques to craft,
poetry and drama. We have raised some radical possibilities for engaging
with a broader range of senses in our work, appreciating the intertwined
nature of social life with objects and other creatures through sound, visu-
als and smells. In our assessment of these novel possibilities, we have
maintained that ethnography can (and should) adapt to suit the range
of agencies and actors that populate our social lives and that it can and
should evolve and be done differently. In this, we have suggested negotiat-
ing the almost impossible task of bringing animals—and their agencies—
into research through these different approaches. We have also argued
10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field?
195
that we need to think, and keep thinking, about how methods work (or
do not work) for us, for, as Haraway puts it:
It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what
stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots,
what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe description,
what ties tie ties.
(Haraway, 2016, p. 12)
In considering what knots knot knots, we have located our argument within
a broadly posthumanist, critical, framework that points to the problems
inherent in a binary worldview for those who want to include animals
in social science research. We have emphasised that reductive, human-
ist claims that differentiate between the species and, indeed, between
academic disciplines, have limiting consequences for our research into
social spaces. We have (often implicitly) drawn on (eco-) feminism, actor
network theory (and STS approaches) to deconstruct both binary and
hierarchical paradigms in order to decentre the human and, at a seem-
ingly basic level, make space for other animals (seemingly basic because
the ramifications of this are, in fact, considerable). We have also tack-
led another binary that pervades research—and is, arguably, more pro-
nounced in traditional ethnographic fieldwork—the idea that emotions
are inimical to rationality. One extension of this is the suspicion and deri-
sion directed at research that has an overt political and/or advocacy/activ-
ist agenda.
We have challenged the view that research needs to be neutral, value-
free and objective if it is to be taken seriously: charges that—interestingly
enough, when aimed specifically at activist-research—are often reiterated
by those who otherwise eschew and/or problematise positivism (Kirsch,
2010). We have stressed that research itself is a political act, one that cre-
ates social worlds at the same time as studying them and that taking the
side of the “underdog” (Becker, 1967) (usually animals) is an extension
of ethnography’s basic liberal ethos, something that has been important
within this community of researchers for many decades. Taking this stance
has led us to question not only what ethnography can become, but also who
research is for. We have proposed that advocacy has a valuable part to play
in extending our emancipatory, posthuman agenda and offers a way of

resisting humanist hegemony by subverting “people writing” into “people
writing for animals”. This explicitly pro-animal stance aims to defend the
place and status of animals as social actors with unique agencies.
We have taken this approach to deconstruct simple dualisms in ways
of seeing the world and to propose that ethnography’s tradition of par-
ticipation and observation can be reformulated to help us understand
more about the richness of our entangled lives, specifically with other
species. We have been inspired by scholars from a very wide range of
disciplines and have offered up some ideas about the possible interdisci-
plinary connections between them. As Haraway has phrased it (2008):
“In layers of history, layers of biology, layers of naturecultures, complex-
ity is the name of our game” (p. 97). For us, how we constitute others
in our ethnographic writing, particularly, is foundational to how we as
humans treat them, and so deconstructing the binary purisms that situate
“us” as better than “them” in many colonialist and imperial accounts has
been of tantamount importance. Beyond being solely a political—and
feminist—aim, for us, this has been a process of righting (even writing)
previous wrongs, of including those excluded and written out by earlier
practices of pure binary thinking. Of course, many of our examples have
referred to companion animals (dogs, in particular) but we are aware that
our argument applies just as well to those species traditionally well out-
side ethnography’s reach for, as Haraway puts it, our work (to be properly
posthuman) “must include such organic beings as rice, bees, tulips and
intestinal flora, all of whom make life for humans what it is—and vice
versa” (2003, p. 15). To be clear, our thesis should not be read as the era-
sure of difference, merely of the erasure of the presumption of power that
so often accompanies and excuses domination.
Instead of pursuing a belief in post-Enlightenment claims of human
exceptionalism and superiority, it is both politically necessary and meth-
odologically more rigorous to theorise entanglements, or if preferred,
assemblages where “all the actors become who they are in the dance of
relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their
sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral
to this encounter” (Haraway, 2008, p. 25). The task, then, is how to
capture the dance, how to reveal and make known the interactions, the
197
meanings, the messy hybrids, “contact zones” (Haraway, 2008, p. 9) and
spaces where humans and animals collide. Our aim is to continue to
develop, as Haraway puts it, “ethnographies of connection, which employ
ethnographic techniques to examine life as it happens at the intersections
of multiple beings and things” and to do so without rendering the ani-
mals involved further invisible. We have narrated just a few of the stories
that contact zones “ignite” (Haraway, 2008, p. 11).
Moving Slowly through the Stuff of Life

At the same time, we have been mindful to avoid labelling ourselves
clearly as multi-species ethnographers for fear of fetishising our project as
something exotic and different. As well as acknowledging that our meth-
ods matter (in how we think about matter), it is also necessary to keep
in mind what brought us to this research in the first place. For us, it was,
and remains, a desire to make a material difference to animal lives and
well-being and we should not lose this focus just because multi-species
work is currently intellectually exciting. There is a need to move slowly—
to give ourselves the time to think—as we puzzle out the consequences of
power and representation while developing posthuman methods.
The interconnectedness of social life decentres the human because, for
us, other “stuff of life” matters. Yet we need to be wary about getting car-
ried away with the (albeit delightful) intellectualism of the project such
that we play a part in obscuring the politics and power endemic to any
attempts to (re)present “reality”. Moving away from positivist notions
of empirical data collection (as we have very firmly in this book) calls
us to find new ways of capturing, illuminating and evoking aspects of
our shifting definitions and perceptions of the social. Precisely because
of a theoretical and conceptual approach that stresses the messiness of
interpreting and representing social life, those who are passionate about
ethnography often seem happy to live with a degree of partiality and frag-
mentation rather than aiming to tidy up the world to better understand
it. We embrace this spirit of complexity wholeheartedly.
A large part of this complexity is embedded within the researcher’s own
lived experiences. Ethnographers carry inherent, if unconscious, cultural
biases which often (maybe always) impact on the observations and narra-
tives attached to them. Mose Brown and Dreby (2013) see this as a jug-
gling of bias and something that is central to ethnography’s uniqueness.
They ask how researchers can possibly consider the Otherness of their
research subjects/participants if they have not interrogated what makes
them appear so different in the first instance. One can only do this, they
argue, if there is a degree of understanding about the perspective with
which the researcher approaches the field and there is a need for the very
“language of reflexivity to evolve” if ethnographers are to consider how
“social roles shape methods” (p. 9). There is sometimes a need, then,
to venture into the deeply personal, confessional (Van Maanen, 1988)
and—at times—emotive spaces between self, domestic and intimate life
and methods to approach the field.
There is considerable reward to be gained by softening the supposed
boundaries between ethnography as work and as a part of life. We advo-
cate close attention to the emotions of fieldwork and do not seek to shut
these away. By suggesting ethnographers experiment with approaches
such as cultural animation, art and advocacy, for example, we are also
setting up the case for reflexive, participatory and “bottom up” forms of
public engagement to rethink the very notion of academic expertise—
what counts as legitimate ethnography—and the tethering of knowledge
to limited institutional locations and actors. The kinds of alternatives
we have outlined in this book offer much promise for those wishing to
resist traditional distinctions; distinctions that are often upheld within
the academy through the use of traditional methods into “appropriate”
topics and techniques of analysis. Challenging and resisting established
hierarchical and binary definitions through the use of unconventional
methods thus becomes an end in itself as well as (hopefully) leading to
the improvement of animal lives.
Our work is necessarily speculative and tentative as we seek to chal-
lenge and sometimes dismantle existing paradigms to make room for
such creativity. And, at many points throughout the writing process, we
have had to stop and consider if what we are suggesting is at all feasible.
A positive reading of this is that we are actively embracing complexity by
pushing boundaries and, indeed, pushing ourselves to think about our
own discomfort and concerns that what we are suggesting is beyond the
199
realms of possibility. It is through discomfort, however, that knowledge

moves forward, and for every one of our suggestions ignored or consid-
ered “out there” (perhaps more likely termed “unscientific”), there will
be some that are taken on board by other thinkers as seeds, as starting
points for the next round of discussions. At this stage in the development
of posthuman methods, we will be happy with that. But, before we con-
clude, we need to lay bare two of the more contentious issues raised and
discussed between us while writing this book: contentious because we are
not convinced we have resolved them.
The first is that we recognise all too well the paradoxical nature of
our work and that it often includes contradictory statements, ideas
and positions. We fully realise how paradoxical it is to call for de-
anthropomorphised methods as a way of understanding human–animal
relations or understanding what animals mean to humans and the roles
they play in human society which are, in truth profoundly anthropocentric
concerns. And in recognising this paradox, we acknowledge and support
Pedersen and Stanescu’s (2012, p. x) arguments about “negative space” in
(critical) animal studies:
It is indeed a mild irony that so much of animal studies is invested in

human/animal intersubjectivities and “encounters”, when most nonhu-
man animals, at least those we have not yet tamed, coerced, or domesti-
cated into docility and dependence, are likely to flee as far away from us as
possible if they had a chance. We wish to render problematic the assump-
tion of relationality and sociality as unquestioned and dominant markers
of animal studies research and bring forth the idea of a “negative space” in
critical animal studies constituted by an abolitionist, hands-off approach to
animals …
The implication of this position is potentially damaging to our case: it

questions whether relationality is, in itself, good for animals, or whether
we should simply let them be. As Pedersen and Stanescu continue:
To craft a negative space in critical animal studies would mean, for instance,
questioning the taken-for-granted validity of the encounter between
humans and animals as the central unit of analysis, and explore what impact
an absence of encounters with humans may have on animals’ lives. Such a

negative space may not only be more beneficial to a great number of ani-
mals, but may also bring us closer to the animals’ perspective. Negative
space, understood in this way, would require that we let go of our pervasive
obsession with controlling animals’ lives, deaths and representations and
just let them be. Quite simply, to leave them alone. This might be one of
the least investigated perspectives in animal studies generally, and also per-
haps the most radical since it subverts the very idea that human–animal
relationships can be studied at all in any meaningful manner when the
component of animal liberation is missing. (pp. x–xi)
This is the elephant in the room: a contradiction we have not resolved.

We have, in wrestling with this difficult problem, taken a pragmatic
approach, however. We know that most (domesticated) animals live their
lives in some kind of human organisation/human-controlled environ-
ment and that their lives and their deaths are often literally in our hands.
In order to make those lives better, or at the very least to prevent unneces-
sary deaths, we (humans) need to understand the nature of those social
institutions and the social rules and ideological constructions that demar-
cate animals as disposable at worst, and loveable but inferior to humans
at best. The effects of social norms like these are best countered by new
thinking. New thinking needs new knowledge: new ontologies. This
returns us to practical method. Without a methodological corollary to
the emancipatory aims of animal studies and posthumanism, we remain
stuck in a humanist trap: “talking the talk without walking the walk”. By
arguing that we need to consider other animals but not actually including
them, we remain inattentive to marginal “voices” and alternate agencies.
We know the importance of including the marginalised in research
processes and design; we have learned this from our feminist and post-
colonialist predecessors. We know that excluding agents from research
silences them and underlines the dominant view that they do not matter.
But we realise that this can be read as a call to continue objectifying them
as units of study, or as a call to find better methods to understand what
animals mean to humans. And, being totally frank, we are not sure we
have resolved this dilemma because we are not sure there is a solution.
Animals do need to be made more visible so we can effectively advocate
201
on their behalf by challenging the way they are viewed but achieving
that without considering the importance of animals to humans seems an
impossible task unless we adopt a laissez-faire approach. While we are
swayed by that argument, we do not believe that simply leaving them
be will change their status and position at the current time. That, ironi-
cally, in order to get to the point where we realise we might well need
to “leave them be”, we need to have more intrinsic respect for them as
opposed to concerns about them when they matter to us. And so, we
remain in a humanist trap—we need to make them visible in research
that has anthropocentric concerns, in order to understand that we should
not only look at them anthropocentrically. It may just be that at the time
we are writing, we have to live with the contradictions inherent to our
own species and thus to our argument—no matter how uncomfortable
they may leave us. Perhaps this book—and other work calling for more
animal inclusive methods—can be a starting point for a discussion about
these issues.
A second, and related, problem is that we may never see animal lib-
eration under current forms of social organisation. Our belief is that by
making animals more visible, and by understanding how hegemonic
institutions and discourses work to silence, marginalise and oppress
them, we can make their lives better. But, this may not be the case. We
may simply be adding our voices to those who have advocated change
within a system when it is a change of the system that is needed. From
our perspective, we do not actually think these are mutually exclusive
endeavours and we think it is possible to use scholarship in the name of
advocacy so long as you accept that—as with all attempts to effect social
change—your outcomes may be slow and modest. Again, there are very
different perspectives on this within the academic community and it is
certainly something we have not been able to agree on as colleagues, or
to resolve with complete comfort in our own minds. We highlight this
point with a hope that readers will also start to consider some of the more
“unanswerable” questions raised by both our narrow call for methodolog-
ical inclusion of animals in our scholarship, and our broader call that as
methodological innovators we need to ask questions that are uncomfort-
able, difficult, and impossible to resolve.
In conclusion, and with these two points now out in the open, let us
return to the main difficulty that we have encountered in seeking out
new directions in posthuman methods. Including animals as social actors
is politically, epistemologically and methodologically exciting within the
social sciences as it forces us to rethink our disciplinary restrictions and
underpinnings. The results of this rethinking are not restricted to any one
discipline, or to any one way of knowing because, as Lestel (2006) points
out, such an approach “sets out to integrate the analysis and understand-
ing of our knowledge of the living world, its organisation as well as its
application, in an approach to the interactive relational system that links
humans and non-humans”. This confers all living beings with the status
of “relational beings, that is, agents interacting on the phenomenon of
‘culture’ that was hitherto reserved for human beings” (p. 235).
If, as Foucault argues, the demarcation of the modern human being is
best envisaged within settings where power is practised, why not (at the
very least) extend the ethnographic gaze to those specific scenarios where
we find humans and other species? Why not the zoo, the veterinary sur-
gery, the slaughterhouse or the farm? While often overlooked, all these
contexts provide us with the grounds to trouble the ontological purity of
the categories human and “other-than-human”, even if (as yet) we have
fairly few practical field methods to “get to the bottom” of these social
settings and their multiple meanings. To do this, and do it well, we have
argued for the need to challenge the legacy of our own discipline, one
which has traditionally prioritised the human through reliance upon lan-
guage and text and by seeing fundamental and irreconcilable differences
between “cultured” humans and objectified animals.
Documenting some of the ways in which attitudes towards animals as
objects and/or subjects are changing is important and stands in stark con-
trast to the paradigms that have dominated Western thought for hundreds
of years. Labouring under post-Enlightenment confines, social scientists
of many disciplines have been (for the most part) content to believe in—
and be a part of—the construction of the social realm as distinct from
the natural. Coupled to this has been the traditional assumption that the
human was the social and that our legitimate focus should only and ever
be on society and its human players. For example, when anthropolo-
gist Clifford Geertz (1973) raised the profile of chickens within Balinese
203
c ulture by discussing the centrality of cock-fighting to masculinity, at the

same time, he erased (at worst), or marginalised (at best), the presence
of the animals involved. The literal “fight to the death” that was pain-
fully real, and of extreme existential import to the cockerel, became meat
for the anthropologist’s sandwich. The Balinese cockerel serves as a cipher
of the norms of gender and social interaction within this human com-
munity. The “reality”, the method, the knowledge all work together to
impress the human (in fact, Geertz’s own anthropological interpretation)
over that of the other species involved. Meanwhile, the cockerel’s real-
ity, experience, subjectivity and knowledge are ignored. This is but one
example of the way in which epistemology and ontology are politicised
through methodology and its expression in text.
Species difference and species interaction provide us with rich resources
to question everyday human processes of knowledge-making, but as we
can see in countless examples from traditional research, we always run
the risk of erasing other species through humanist paradigms and ways of
knowing. We have used our exploration of methods in the previous chap-
ters to point to a more optimistic future: one where the material and the
symbolic are intertwined in the creation of culture, structure and mean-
ing and ethnographers embrace the puzzles and contradictions of mul-
tiple agencies in creative alternatives to mainstream fieldwork. In this, we
go beyond traditional humanism and its assumptions of human agency
and power and flatten new, albeit sinuous, paths through the long grass
in search of posthuman ethnography: liberal, emancipatory and radical
ethnography for a hybrid world of beings.
References
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otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kirsch, S. (2010). Experiments in engaged anthropology. Collaborative
Anthropologies, 3, 69–80.
Lestel, D. (2006). Etho-ethnology and ethno-ethology. Social Science Information,
45(2), 155–177.
Mose Brown, T., & Dreby, J. (2013). Family and work in everyday ethnography.
Pedersen, H. (2011). Release the moths: Critical animal studies and the posthu-
manist impulse. Culture, Theory and Critique, 52(1), 65–81.
Pedersen, H., & Stanescu, V. (2012). Series editors introduction: What is ‘criti-
cal’ about animal studies? From the animal ‘question’ to the animal ‘condi-
tion’. In K. Socha (Ed.), Women, destruction and the avant-garde: A paradigm
for animal liberation. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.
Wood, M. (2016, November 17). On his Trapeze. London Review of Books,
pp. 17–19.
Index
A as others, 2, 3, 6, 10, 12–14, 17,

academic work, the academy, 6, 10, 23, 25, 51, 59, 63, 65, 75,
16, 23, 35, 65, 71, 72, 76–8, 78, 83, 96, 97, 100, 104,
82, 96, 133, 134, 141, 143, 105, 112, 113, 115, 126,
144, 153, 154, 157, 158, 127, 137, 179–81, 184–7,
164, 166, 178, 179, 195, 195, 200
198, 201 voices of, 5, 14, 51–66
activist ethnography, 184, 187, 188 anthropomorphism, 51, 186, 199
actor network theory, 11, 24, 41, 43, artefacts, 25, 30, 31, 34, 39, 42, 57,
46, 121, 123, 164, 195 91, 114, 116, 123, 136
advocacy, 13, 17, 18, 104, 157, arts-based data collection, 93
177–80, 182, 183, 187, 188, arts-based dissemination, 91, 136
195, 198, 201 aural narrative, 71, 116
agriculture, 102 Australia, 76, 95
analysis, 14, 27, 28, 34, 39, 41–3, autoethnography, 70, 124, 186, 187
45, 52, 60, 61, 69–72, 91, 98,
105, 116, 122, 135, 160, 162,
165, 183, 198, 199, 202 B
animals binaries, 7, 82, 126, 166, 181
as actors, 138 biography, 97, 167, 177

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53933-5
206 Index
boundaries gathered by head-mounted

between species, 9, 63, 118, 185 camera, 16, 102
between subjects and disciplines, hybrid methods of, 164
9, 11, 17, 63, 65, 71, 77, 169, interdisciplinary, 17, 103, 104,
180, 198 154, 155, 157, 161, 163,
buildings, 14, 16, 33, 51, 93, 133, 181, 196
174, 194 interview, 27, 30, 52, 72, 92, 93,
99, 125, 135, 136, 156, 160,
162
C quantitative vs. qualitative, 99,
care 159–62, 166
of animals, 94, 158 video and photographic, 71, 91,
work, 74, 82, 93, 95, 186 93, 97, 99, 104
colonialism, 33, 35, 113. See also visual methods of, 72, 91–106
postcolonialism deviancy and delinquency, 33
context, 10, 23, 29–33, 40, 58, 70, discourse analysis, 52, 160
91, 104, 112, 115, 132, 134, disease(s), 41–3, 65, 103, 159, 162,
137, 153, 154, 162, 175, 186, 164
202 documents, 5, 14, 23, 25, 27, 29,
co-production, 10, 40 30, 32–4, 36, 37, 42, 46, 80,
creativity, 76, 77, 136, 143, 153, 81, 116, 133, 184, 202
198 drawing(s), 15, 42, 60, 71, 92, 96,
culture, 4, 16, 25–7, 30–3, 36, 37, 99, 115, 135, 141, 162, 174,
39, 40, 43, 55–7, 76, 80, 82, 180, 184, 188
91, 94, 111–13, 116, 122,
126, 127, 141, 165, 167, 168,
186, 202, 203 E
ecology
and habitat, 26
D of method, 1–18
data emancipation, 143
analysis, 27, 28, 52, 71, 72, 91, embodied methods, 27, 39, 122
98, 105, 135, 160, 162 emotion(s), 28, 61, 79, 93, 97, 105,
collection, 52, 92, 93, 103, 162, 113, 134, 184, 187, 198
197 enactment(s), 41–3, 45, 46, 58, 80,
dissemination, 17, 52, 59, 78, 91, 165
136, 178 ethics, 4, 23, 26, 57, 60, 65, 74,
ethnographic field, 52, 72 147
Index
207
ethnographic H
authority, 59, 82 health
fieldnotes, 27, 45, 72, 94, 135 of animals, 102, 103, 125, 158,
film, 91, 99, 116, 123, 155 159, 161
writing, 28, 29, 38, 43, 45, 174, and emotions/wellbeing, 36
175, 188, 196 hermeneutics, 71
hyper-humanism, 43
F
facts, 12, 31, 42, 45, 56, 60, 62, 81, I
91, 114, 123–5, 168, 177, images, 8, 62, 90–4, 96–8, 100, 104,
185 105, 123, 135, 143
farming, 4, 64, 94, 105, 162 imperialism, 196. See also
feminism, 10, 17, 29, 44, 63, 100, postcolonialism
166, 182 interdisciplinarity
fields of enquiry, 6 and funding, 76, 79
fieldwork, 1, 5, 9, 13–16, 25, 30, and hybrids of research, 17, 155
32, 33, 35–9, 43, 44, 52, 59, interpretation, 4, 13, 30, 38–41, 64,
69, 71, 72, 81, 83, 99, 113, 71, 79, 93, 97, 98, 101, 106,
118, 120–2, 124, 127, 154, 114, 115, 122, 137, 138, 183,
184, 187, 195, 198, 203 203
food(s), 56, 61, 64, 65, 94, 100,
105, 118, 145, 158, 165, 167,
169, 174 J
jargon, 77
journals, 61, 62, 78, 79, 91, 136,
G 164
Geertz, Clifford, 35, 38, 44, 55, 56,
175, 202, 203
gender K
and animals, 11, 25, 166, 203 knowledge, 4, 7, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17,
and emotion, 25 18, 24, 31, 35, 42, 44, 45, 51,
and feminism, 166, 180 52, 59–61, 63, 64, 70–3,
geographic literature, 9, 155 77–9, 81, 82, 89, 100, 120,
good data vs. bad data, 78, 82, 125, 122, 127, 133, 134, 141, 154,
180 155, 159, 160, 164–169,
good methods vs. bad methods, 178–81, 184, 187, 188,
177 198–200, 202, 203
208 Index
L N
labels (resistance of ), 26 narrative, 32, 39, 40, 43, 70, 71, 75,
Law, John, 12, 41, 52, 53, 61, 65, 91, 116, 119, 122, 124, 135,
132, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 173, 175, 177, 198
173, 175 netnography, 72
learning, 2, 11, 24, 30, 104, 123,
124, 134, 136, 140, 144, 147,
148, 155, 158 O
listening objectivity (myth of ), 134, 185
to animals, 51–66 ocular, 100
and voice, 51–66, 116 online exhibitions, 96, 145
organisations, 4, 5, 18, 24, 30, 32,
33, 58, 64, 70, 74, 76, 93,
M 102, 114, 115, 136, 141, 155,
media, 71, 72, 91, 104, 111, 116, 182, 200–2
125, 136, 155
methods
arts based, 16, 83, 131–48, 160 P
auditory, 116, 117, 122, 131 participatory action research, 140
ethnographic participant people, 1, 3, 27, 28, 30–3, 36, 41,
observation, 119, 156 44, 46, 56, 58, 59, 76, 81, 93,
hybrids of, 83, 153–69 94, 96–9, 112, 113, 116, 121,
mixed, 17, 83, 154, 156 122, 126, 132–4, 137, 139,
as modest, 65, 101 143, 144, 164, 167, 173–88,
participatory, 16, 71, 91, 132, 196. See also personhood
153 personhood, 3
as resistance, 79–83 photo elicitation, 93
visual, 16, 72, 89–106, 111, 115 photography, 94, 95, 97, 156
walking and movement as, 123, Photovoice, 92
125 poetry, 40, 94, 131, 141, 143, 145,
writing as, 17, 28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 194
43, 45, 62, 70, 83, 126, 134, postcolonialism, 11, 29, 44, 174
141, 173–88, 196, posthumanism, 11, 15, 17, 24, 29,
198 42–6, 52, 55, 59, 63, 64, 78,
Mol, Annemarie, 12, 41, 44, 45, 80, 82, 117, 137, 147, 166–8,
54, 164 185, 193, 194, 200
monsters and monstrosity, 120, 121 Powdermaker, Hortense, 32, 33, 44
Index
209
power, 3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 15, 23, 29, 30, space, 4, 8, 24, 37, 45, 71–3, 94, 99,
32, 33, 36–8, 41, 43, 45, 51, 100, 102, 105, 111, 116, 121–4,
52, 55, 57–66, 74, 82, 89, 90, 127, 132, 141, 145, 166, 169,
98, 101, 122, 132, 158, 165, 184–6, 194, 195, 197–9, 200
167–9, 173, 175, 176, 178, species
180, 184, 194, 196, 197, 202, difference, 2–4, 135, 203
203 politics, 64, 158, 160, 161
public sociology, 98, 179 statistics, 159
storytelling, 40, 175, 177, 178, 182
Q
qualitative methods, 162 T
questionnaires, 2, 72 technology
for analysis of data, 27, 28, 52, 71,
72, 91, 98, 105, 135, 160, 162
R of data collection, 103
race, 11, 55, 112 ethical dilemmas of, 163
radical/radix, 40, 43, 57, 77, 80, 83, theatre, 136–41, 145
102, 103, 113, 119, 120, 122, theory
147, 156, 157, 163, 166, 180, importance of, 10
194, 200, 203 and philosophy of methods, 134
reflective writing, 79 posthuman, 10, 11, 15, 17, 24,
researcher, 3, 9, 10, 14–18, 27–9, 46, 57
33, 34, 40, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, transcription, 61, 94, 125
63, 70–3, 75–80, 91, 93, translation, 33, 183
96–8, 102, 105, 111, 113–16,
119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 127,
132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 142, U
145, 148, 153, 154, 157–61, unexpected discoveries, 29
163, 165, 168, 177, 178, 182, unlearning, 8
185, 195, 197, 198
V
S Van Maanen, John, 38–40, 71, 75,
sociology of science and technology 133, 175, 198
(STS), 41, 43, 44, 61, 154, victorian anthropology, 34
164, 166, 195 vignettes, 1, 34, 116, 137, 177
210 Index
visual data, 91, 92, 98, 102–6 for reporting, 168

visual elicitation, 92, 93, 111 as power-laden method of
inscription, 40, 53
W
welfare, 65, 104, 145, 146, 159, 161, Y
163 young people, 173
Western culture, 33
Willis, Paul, 33, 36–8, 44, 58, 113, 118
writing Z
for advocacy, 177–80, 188 zoos, 4, 26, 101, 185, 202

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Power, Politi

ISBN 978-1-137-53932-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53933-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017933303

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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Printed on acid-free paper

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Lindsay acknowledges the support and critical comments of Barry

1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods 1

3 Listening for the Voices of Animals 51

4 What Can Ethnography Be? 69

Part II Field-work 87

9 People Writing for Animals 173

10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field? 193

© The Author(s) 2017 1

in our day-to-day activities as ethnographers, were often absent from our

Species Difference as a “Research Problem”

It is understandable, then, that most social science focuses on the

in our ethnographic endeavours? To be clear, we are not dismissive of

Including Animals in Our Research

for knowledge and meaning-making, rather than formations of genuinely

 hallenging Human Superiority in Research

frustrate those who want a straightforward answer to the question: How

dimensional picture of interactions in their subtle, nuanced and often

sophical supports. Our own theoretical standpoint is a heterodox blend

Doing Ethnography Differently

for example, would vets be without animal patients? Or shepherds with-

This is somewhat ironic given the stress on materiality that multi-­

say ecological) nature of knowledge, representational power and field

our Fieldwork part is to look at examples from classic and contemporary

try and include them. Instead, we suggest embracing this discomfort as a

© The Author(s) 2017 23

by outlining its history as an approach; a necessary retrospective that pro-

Can We Go beyond Humanism?

of agency; a horizontal rather than a vertical one, which is inclusive of

The strength of ethnography is the concern with process.… It enables us to

The appeal of this to those of us who study human entanglements with

is to establish insights into human cultures and meanings (and we accept

descriptive longitudinal analysis. Differentiating this modus operandi

in currents, a particular joke, saying or object in use. With a sudden

An anthropologist’s materials of study are the behaviours of living peoples

are primarily primitive societies, small isolated groups of people who

One of the core aspects of the approach outlined by Malinowski,

Towards a Sociology of the Everyday

ing. They questioned whether documenting and analysing tribal cultures

organisational anthropology (in Baba, 2006, p. 87; Garsten & Nvquist,

live and work in discrete places, to have memberships to a variety of other

there was renewed passion for democratising the fieldwork process; or

Soon it became fashionable to conflate or confuse anthropologists with

the working-class culture he was able to observe worked against and

Opposition to the school is principally manifested in the struggle to win

The power of Learning to Labour arguably lies in its ability to capture

The Linguistic Turn to Interpretation

in particular contexts, but also writing up a meaningful theory of what

If ‘culture’ is not an object to be described, neither is it a unified corpus of

Those working within postmodern templates discount the possibil-

tions continue to infuse methodological debates in ethnography but one

The Turn to Enactment

feelings, meanings, or perspectives’ but as ‘someone who tells how living

Her text focuses on minute and seemingly inconsequential details through

The Turn to Posthumanism

is a cross-disciplinary theoretical orientation that brings together many

This broad family of techniques, at its heart, emphasises a need to listen

1 Introduction: An Ecology of Ethnographic Methods 1

3 Listening for the Voices of Animals 51

4 What Can Ethnography Be? 69

Part II Field-work 87

9 People Writing for Animals 173

10 Conclusion: Beyond Humanism and into the Field? 193

Species Difference as a “Research Problem”

Including Animals in Our Research

hallenging Human Superiority in Research

Doing Ethnography Differently

This is somewhat ironic given the stress on materiality that multi-

Can We Go beyond Humanism?

Towards a Sociology of the Everyday

The Linguistic Turn to Interpretation

The Turn to Enactment

The Turn to Posthumanism

owards Ethnography for Human–Animal

A Return to Questions of Power

Techniques That Cross Borderlines

Do Research Bureaucracies Help or Hinder?

Methods as Resistance: The Species Turn

Visual Methods for Naturalistic Enquiry

Visual Methods to See Animals

Visual Data for “Beastly Places”

Multisensory Ethnography with Other Species