Intuitive communication as a key to dialogic multispecies methods (ANICOM)
The project ANICOM, funded by an ERC Consolidator grant, has commenced September 2024 at the University of Liège Laboratory of Social and Cultural Anthropology (LASC). It has a duration of 5 years and involve fieldwork on four continents, the team including prof. Vanessa Wijngaarden, a postdoc, 3 PhD students, 8 animal communicators and 36 individuals from 12 animal species. For more information, see the four minute video to introduce the project, a description of the logo, and the project rationale on the dedicated ANICOM website.
Abstract: As the ‘social’ in social sciences is rethought beyond the human, multispecies research across disciplines increasingly asks how to speak with and for non-human others. I pose that intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), a strategy practiced by successful animal communicators to engage in explicit, detailed, two-way communication with non-human animals, holds uncharted resources for doing research with rather than on animals.
Research on IIC has been curtailed to specific domains and mythologized, while the worldwide boom in professional animal communicators has been ignored. ANICOM’s unique engagement with animal communicators’ practical strategies for relating across nature/culture and mind/body dichotomies is ground-breaking in the often largely theoretical discussions of the ontological and species turns. It simultaneously unsettles continued divides between humans and animals as well as dominant and subjugated ways of knowing.
The project triangulates participant observation, Q method, interviews and audio-visual methods (including video-diaries and video-elicitations) with natural science approaches, to collaboratively work with six expert animal communicators and a variety of animals in Europe and Africa. It addresses unexplored possibilities for cross-fertilization between new materialism and posthumanism on the one hand, and Indigenous studies and knowledge systems on the other, while relying on the latest insights in biosemiotics and animal cognition. It thus develops transdisciplinary innovations that include non-human animals as full research participants, while achieving a deeper reflexivity on the limitations of humans thinking animals outside the human-animal relationship.
It’s ultimate objective is to establish the resources and foundation for dialogic multispecies methods (DMM), a dynamic set of conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches and tools to engage with the views, experiences and knowledges of non-human animals in academia.
Website of Vanessa Wijngaarden 