Multi-Species Encounters in Our Everyday Lives Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speaker Series

The University Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speaker Series presents ‘Multi-Species Encounters in Our Everyday Lives' on Wednesday 21 October from 5pm to 6.30pm (BST); 9am to 10.30am (PST).

What do you think about when you hear birds singing in the early morning or dogs barking on busy streets? This first webinar in the Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speakers Series considers some of the multitude of interactions humans may have with other species in their everyday life -- from potted plants to conspicuous rats. Join us for this exciting event as we dive into the complex multispecies relationships and networks that are formed.

Speakers:

Maythe S W Han
Maythe is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Her current doctoral project is about the economies and ecologies of multispecies kinship between dogs and their humans. Working with the central question ‘how are the relationships between dogs and their humans created, negotiated and maintained?', the project aims to address the experiences and implications of human-canine bond vis-à-vis economies of things, values and work, as well as affective ecologies.

Nathanael Johnson
Nathanael is a journalist who lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two daughters. He is the senior writer for Grist and author of the book Unseen City: The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness. He's written pieces for a bunch of fancy magazines and radio shows which, he says, have won some awards that sound more important than they really are.

Darya Tsymbalyuk
Darya is a PhD student with the School of Modern Languages and School of International Relations and she studies displacement from the Donbas region, Ukraine as a multispecies event by focusing on stories about plants in interviews with internally displaced persons. Her research explores how displacement ruptured human-plant networks of care and how some of these networks were reconfigured in new places. The examples she is working with include practices of community gardening performed by internally displaced persons, stories of evacuating and transporting plants, and memories about plants that remained in the abandoned homes. In addition to oral history and literary analysis, Darya engages critical-creative methods as part of her research.

Dr Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva
Matheus holds a PhD in history of science from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris/France) after defending the thesis ‘Quand la peste connectait le monde: production et circulation de savoirs microbiologiques entre Bresil, Inde et France (1894-1922)'. He is now a postdoctoral research assistant at the St Andrews within the project ‘The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis' and investigates the social history of rat-catching practices. His main interests are on the Global History of Science; connected histories between Brazil, France and India; the History of Microbiology; and the History of Tropical Medicine.

If you have any concerns about accessibility or have any questions about the event, please don't hesitate to contact us via email on [email protected] or on Facebook @anthrosoc, Instagram @anthsocstandrews, or Twitter @anthsocsta.

If you would like to submit questions for the Q&A beforehand, please submit your questions online via this form.