Uncertain Methods, Elusive Lives – EASA 2024 Barcelona – Call for Papers

Members of our team with Kymberley Chu from Princeton Uni. are announcing a Call for Papers for the panel, ‘Uncertain Methods, Elusive Lives: Exploring the methodological and relational horizons of doing research with more-than-humans’ at EASA (European Association of Social anthropologists) 2024 Doing and Undoing in Anthropology to be held in Barcelona, 23-26 July, 2024. Please find the panel abstract below and on the conference website: EASA2024 (easaonline.org) The panel will be in-person, with no hybrid option, unfortunately.

The deadline for abstract submission is 22 January 2024. We encourage papers that not only critically address methodological and empirical challenges, but see them as affordances for interdisciplinary collaboration, political intervention, and ethical revaluation.

Submissions can be made only via the online forms on the conference website (not via email). For more details about the Call for Papers, see EASA2024: Call for Papers (easaonline.org)

If there are any questions, feel free to contact any one of the convenors – Paul, Kieran, Kymberley 

We look forward to receiving your paper proposals.

Uncertain Methods, Elusive Lives: Exploring the methodological and relational horizons of doing research with more-than-humans

Paul G. Keil, Kieran O’Mahony, Kymberley Chu

Short Abstract

This panel explores more-than-human ethnographic research that is engaged with lifeforms and worlds that seem elusive, evasive, and illusive. We critically examine how these qualities emerge and are co-produced methodologically through (multi)disciplinary modes of relating/knowing.

Abstract

Not all lifeforms equally cooperate with researchers, either as subjects or co-producers of knowledge. In this panel, we are curious about the uneven ways organisms and multispecies assemblages become available to different modes of observation, engagement, and conceptualisation. And how researchers, including anthropologists, apply methodological and epistemological approaches that enact, apprehend, and stabilise certain more-than-human affects and realities at the inevitable expense of others.

We invite papers that encounter, are confronted with, or even enchanted by nonhuman subjects who are perplexing, shapeshifting, lack obvious centres of call, or exist through uncanny spatial-temporal scales. Ethnographers engaged with beings and worlds that seem elusive, atmospheric, evasive, feral, or illusive, whether they be amphibious, subterranean, woody, or aerial; nocturnal or crepuscular; microscopic or gargantuan. And questions that analyse how these qualities are relationally produced during research through different bodies, scientific tools, disciplinary techniques and practices.

We encourage papers that not only critically address methodological and empirical challenges, but see them as affordances for interdisciplinary collaboration, political intervention, and ethical revaluation. Presentations that question how multispecies ethnography (over/under) privileges particular lifeworlds, interactions, and assemblages; explore the ways co-produced knowledges open-up risky, harmful, benign, convivial, or caring futures; or reflect on the value of being vulnerable to and staying with uncertainty and messiness, instead of necessarily seeking to improve apprehension. Such questions are prescient, since they grapple with the limits of disciplinary modes of relating/knowing, the indeterminacy of more-than-human horizons, and our embroilment in Others’ lives during unstable political and ecological conditions.