Human-Animal collectives assisting the biosphere (HACAB)

The HACAB project investigates if it is possible to establish a joint inter-species voice in order to draw the outlines of a political and ecological collective able to hold a project shared in common in the public space? The project aims at articulating animal studies and human-animal communication studies together with intersectionality and former critical theories of domination, in order to build an interspecies critical theory and methodology as well as exploring empiric points of departures that could contribute to resisting the global subjection (and destruction) of earth. To do this we engage an interdisciplinary methodology drawing from sociology, anthropology and the arts. With an extensive literature review in the sociological tradition where we critically examine the binary conceptual history around multispecies relations, we also look for trends and hidden treasures of concepts, theories and methods that disrupt such binary thinking and that take individuals of divergent species seriously as (political) actors in their own right. Acknowledging the capitalist, industrial, and western societies from which binary sociological conceptualizations stem, we take up long term, ethnographic field work in the anthropological tradition, focusing on two fields where different logics drive the multispecies relations: farm animal sanctuaries in Europe and horseback nomad pastoralism in Mongolia. The ethnographic studies include artful research methods, such as poetry and drawing, as tools for both data collection and analysis, as well as dissemination of research results. This talk will address our logic behind our overall interdisciplinary methodology.