Composting methods in multispecies research

Stories produce bodies that produce stories in an endless intra-active metabolic continuum. Stories do not only represent material worlds but also shape and make and remake worlds. Starting from these premises, and drawing from “composting storytelling,” this workshop opens up how feminist storytelling can be used as a critical method to approach multispecies worlds. We will pay attention to the polyphony of voices and temporalities and the potentials of intra-active transformations emergent within multispecies research settings. We will also ponder what kind of knowledge and what kinds of research positions are available for the human protagonist in more than human methodologies.

Suggested pre-reading

Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2024). Composting storytelling: An approach for critical (multispecies) ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 30(7), 595-606.

In addition:

We invite participants to all bring something to share in relation to methodology, compost, wonder or storytelling. This could be an image, an object, a story or a data snippet. The second part of the session we will invite everyone to informally share and expand the discussion rhizomatically to explore theory and methodology across our work.

Biography

Dr. Riikka Hohti works as Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics in the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include child-animal relations, feminist methodologies and post-anthropocentric education. Currently, she leads the Children of the Anthropocene research project focusing on the affective atmospheres and multispecies relations in the lives of children and young people, in the context of multiple environmental crises. She also leads the Academy Research Fellow project MoreChild, and the KETSU network, both at the University of Helsinki. Hohti’s research often combines methodological thinking with topical interests, and she has developed posthumanist feminist and multispecies ethnographic methods and theorized more than human childhoods.