Why Multispecies?

As ecological and social challenges intensify, the need for new ways of thinking, acting, and relating to one another has never been more urgent. In launching the Multispecies Collective, we propose multispecies ways of thinking, acting and relating as a promising way forward. The Multispecies Collective's members have created a space for reimagining futures grounded in care, flourishing, and mutual interdependence and, in so doing, we thoroughly considered our decision to focus on multispecies flourishing.

Multispecies Ways of Doing Things

The term "multispecies" encapsulates the vision and ambitions of our collective, bridging disciplines, areas of research and practice, and concerns surrounding animals, nature, and society. Rooted in interdisciplinarity, it offers a transformative approach to understanding justice, care, and flourishing that goes beyond human-centered frameworks. This shift in perspective is central to the work of the Multispecies Collective and reflects our commitment to reimagining relationships within and between living and non-living worlds.

‘Multispecies’ represents the subjects indicated by our former name (the Animals, Nature & Society Research Group) in a single word. The word speaks to the critical theorists and environmental humanities scholars that inform our conceptual work. The word is also intended to be accessible to practitioners and researchers not engaged with such work thanks to a growing awareness of the flourishing field of multispecies studies.

Multispecies Studies

The ‘multispecies’ term originated in the work of environmental humanities scholar Donna Haraway (When Species Meet, 2008). The field of multispecies studies—sharing features with critical animal studies and critical plant studies—is frequently situated within the environmental humanities and it is deeply interdisciplinary with the natural sciences and the arts (Chao and Celermajer (2023) 4-5). It is also considered to be inseparable from the study of ethics (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 16). This disciplinary breadth closely traces the Multispecies Collective’s roots and growth.

Multispecies thinking fundamentally transforms the ‘telos’ of thinking on ethical questions concerning justice, care, flourishing and the like through ontological and epistemological innovation (Chao and Celermajer 2023). Essentially, it rethinks the very foundations of our thinking on such questions as an alternative to simply expanding upon existing frameworks for such thinking, like human rights. This reimagining entails three significant moves that closely reflect our objectives and values.

The Three Multispecies Moves

First, multispecies thinking questions the centrality of human perspectives and concerns in the design and execution of intellectual and practical projects, problematising anthropocentrism. Multispecies thinking takes as its starting point that, in our world, human perspectives and concerns are connected to perspectives and concerns of other species. Human perspectives are significant, but they are not the only significant perspectives and they are not significant in isolation. So, multispecies thought acknowledges the place of humankind within nature, together with ‘other-than-human organisms’ (Chao and Celermajer 5). To be clear, this does not mean human perspectives and concerns are neglected or deprioritised in multispecies thinking. Rather, they are put into conversation with other perspectives and concerns that are afforded appropriate weight (Webster 2023).

This requires a second move; that other-than-human species be regarded in a “thick” or meaningful sense. Other species are regarded as having ‘distinctive experiential worlds, modes of being, and biocultural attachments’ (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 6) as well as being ‘(co)makers of meaning’ (Chao and Celermajer 5). Essentially, multispecies thinking attaches significance to the knowledge, frames, experience and being of various species which are considered in relation to other species.

This relationality speaks to the third move whereby multispecies thinking favours relational contemplation over individual or species contemplation. Its focus is upon a ‘larger multispecies ecological frame’ (Broglio 132-133) that senses, values and explores ‘material-semiotic relationships, ecologies, assemblages, processes, and so forth’ (Chao and Celermajer 5). For the multispecies thinker, ‘entangled relations’ with ‘multitudes of lively agents … bring one another into being’ together with their environments and non-living beings. This deep relationality means that, for multispecies thinkers, boundary-categories such as the human (and our microbes), rivers (flowing, changing with time) and cities (sprawling) are ‘fuzzy’ or ‘leaky’ (Broglio 131). Not only do individuals and species relate, but reflection upon that relating allows us to see that the strict notion of the bounded individual or the taxonomic species is not all that conclusive or foreclosed. This move links to the first of two important critiques of multispecies thinking that warrant reflection.

Considering Critiques of Multispecies Studies

First, some scholars argue that multispecies thinking pays attention to living things organised by species, but is ineffective for framing the consideration of the ‘non-living’ in nature (‘soil, rivers or water’), technology (‘algorithms and artificial intelligence’) and environments or place (Price and Chao 181). ‘More-than-human’ has been considered more apt by such critics and has been successfully engaged by, for example, the More-Than-Human Life Project. Yet, this view of multispecies thinking is not the only view available to us. Indeed, Haraway’s conception of multispecies thinking indicates that ‘species … gestures to particular ways of life and to any relevant gathering together of kin and/or kind’, connecting to a historically broader notion of species than the taxonomic understanding that is critiqued (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 5).

In practice, many multispecies thinkers effectively consider and populate their stringy, networked worlds with the non-living. Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster note that the multispecies approach is ‘increasingly being applied to forms of liveliness’ often considered ‘nonliving: form stones and weather systems to artificial intelligences and chemical species’ (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 4). They consider that multispecies thinking regards environments and non-living beings as more than ‘mere environments in the sense of a homogenous, static background for a focal subject’ but instead as ‘ecologies of selves’ (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster (3-4) citing Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press 2013) 134) forming ‘ecological assemblage’ together with the living (Webster 2023). This view finds support from other thinkers that argue that the non-living and environments are a ‘deeply entwined and intrinsic part of the whole’ and, in fact, one cannot do multispecies thinking for biological beings or species ‘in isolation from their relations’ with the non-living (Webster 2023). Such a view sees the living and non-living as collaborative partners in ‘ecological assemblage’.

On reflection, the methods for considering the non-living and environments presented by various multispecies thinkers appear sufficiently aligned to this collective’s objectives and values. While the ‘species’ referent may indicate the living as a starting point, this need not necessarily enact a hierarchy or exclude the non-living. The objectives and values of the collective consider all living things, have a particular interest in sentient life (though not hierarchical, exclusionary, or uncritically), and grew out of our coral roots (as a Community of Researchers in Animal Law). Our objectives and values also recognise the non-living is inseparable from the living and is necessarily significant for our work.

A second critique made of multispecies thinking is that its reliance upon species centres a ‘dominant secular scientific framework’ of the ‘biological’ which may embed coloniality by reference to systems of taxonomic ordering practices (Price and Chao 181). This is concerning when one notes that ‘colonial-capitalist-racist assemblages and their afterlives undermine the flourishing of multispecies communities of life and continue to relegate certain human populations to the status of subhuman, nonhuman, and killable before the law’ (Chao and Celermajer 5). Noting that it is next to impossible to identify intellectual traditions that have not facilitated ‘violence against the more-than-human’ (Chao and Celermajer 3-4), an alternative approach adopted by some scholars has been to rely upon Indigenous communities’ storying of lifeforms through consideration of relations rather than fixed species categorisations (Price and Chao 182). Yet, as with the first critique discussed above, multispecies thinkers have provided thoughtful engagements with this critique that carves out a feasible path for multispecies studies that stays with the trouble and which is decolonial and critical of taxonomic ordering.

In Response to Critique

Multispecies thinkers have noted that ‘humans are not exceptional in our ability to classify and categorize’, such as through species categories (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 5). So, the multispecies lens can be applied to consider, for example, how ‘entangled agents torque one another with their own practices of classification, recognition, and differentiation’ (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Munster 5). Additionally, concepts with roots in the ‘human’ (eg more-than-human or other-than-human) or ‘species’ (eg multispecies) have been described as valuable for ‘explicitly signposting these foundations’ and ‘the challenges being posed to them’ as a move toward situatedness (Webster?). For this pathway to be followed, two considerations ought to be borne in mind.

First, we ought to engage in ‘reflexive consideration of the ways in which colonial-capitalist-racist assemblages and their afterlives undermine the flourishing of multispecies communities of life and continue to relegate certain human populations to the status of subhuman, nonhuman, and killable before the law’ (Chao and Celermajer 5). Chao and Celermajer call for vigilance against ‘eliding the strategies of dehumanization that have organized systematic intrahuman injustice and violence’ by, for example, ‘attending to the morally laden and racialized instrumentalization of “species” categories and hierarchies by dominant human groups in order to legitimate the exploitation of peoples as fungible bodies, extractible labor, dangerous vermin, and disposable property’ (5). The critical theories we frequently engage with including feminist, queer, disability, and postcolonial studies are informative in this regard.

Second, we ought to attend carefully to historically shaped imbalances and injustices amongst human subjects and between human and other-than-human beings by, for example, attending to ‘uneven power dynamics shaping assemblages of beings and things’, avoiding and critiquing ‘exclusion or unacknowledged appropriation of Indigenous knowledges within Western theoretical currents’, countering the frequent ‘neglect of questions of race, gender, and (dis)ability in shaping human and other-than-human lifeworlds’, and resisting the ‘erasure of colonialism and its afterlives in the constitution of what counts as knowledge, science, philosophy, and theory, and who gets to produce and use it’ (Chao and Celermajer 5).

Launching a Multispecies Collective

The collective adapts to these potential limitations to multispecies thinking also because they appear more manageable than the limitations associated with the alternative terms available to us. ‘More-than-human’ too heavily weighs and references the ‘human’ or ‘society’ to the demerit of the animal and ecological focuses within our community. Though, as mentioned above, other groups are transcending this limitation of the more-than-human term in practice, as evidenced by the More Than Human Life Project’s work. ‘Other-than-human’, ‘multi-being’, ‘multi-world’, and various Indigenous notions of animacy are incredibly valuable, expansive tools to think with (Price and Chao 181-183). However, they would be less effective at this time at reaching the network and connecting the community we wish to grow owing to their recent emergence from the environmental humanities tradition and their, as yet, narrow recognition.

In any case, Wester makes an encouraging point on these questions. Wester argues that one need not enact a competition between such terminology and, having appropriately investigated and reflected upon language, we can move beyond such questions to work with what they each ‘bring to our repertoire’ (Webster 2023). One might then consider those who slip from one frame to another (Leap 2023) to be engaging productively with the insights of each rather than falling into the trap of conflation.

By embracing multispecies thinking, the collective challenges the traditional boundaries that separate species from environments and living nature from non-living nature. This entangled approach encourages deeper connections and more inclusive ethical frameworks for addressing animal, environmental, and social problems. The Multispecies Collective applies multispecies approaches to generate new pathways for collaboration and social change, supporting a future where all beings can thrive together.

We invite you to be a part of this journey, whether through research, collaboration, or shared action. Together we can imagine and build futures rooted in care, justice, and flourishing for all.