Andrea Petitt – MEAM Co-Founder

Andrea is a researcher at the Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS) and also teaches multispecies relations, sensory anthropology and artistic methods at Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale et Culturelle (LASC) at Université de Liège, Belgium. After completing her PhD in Rural Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) she worked as a researcher at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, for eight years. Andrea is an editor for the Creative Section of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography and recently founded the MEAM network for Multispecies Ethnography and Artistic Methods, as well as the Bovine Scholarship Network.

Mail : Andrea.petitt@uliege.be

Véronique Servais – MEAM Co-Founder

Véronique Servais is psychologist with a training in anthropology. She is now Professor of anthropology of communication at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Liège. She did her PhD on the “therapeutic effect” of dolphins on autistic children and since then she has been teaching and researching human-animal and human-nature communication and interactions, with a special attention to healing settings. She is co-founder of a University Degree in « Animal Assisted Activities and Nature Relationships » at the University of Liège. She is currently engaged in a research project about the expérience of encountering « nature » among art and university students. 

Mail : v.servais@uliege.be

Catrien Notermans – MEAM Co-Founder

Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist working at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She has long-term expertise on religion and gender, and pilgrimage in particular, in South Asia and Europe.

Mail : catrien.notermans@ru.nl

Anke Tonnaer – MEAM Co-Founder

Anke Tonnaer is an anthropologist working at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University in the Netherlands. Her research interests include ‘new wilderness’ projects in Europe in the Anthropocene, and focuses especially on human-animal relations in The Netherlands.

Mail : anke.tonnaer@ru.nl

Natasha Fijn

Dr Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career ARC Future Fellowship to enable her to conduct research on ‘A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza’ (2022-2026), while also part of an ARC Discovery team, focussing on the transfer of Mongolian medicine and healing knowledge amongst the herding community. As an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker, she has conducted extensive field research in remote places, including the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia. She focusses particularly on observational filmmaking and multispecies ethnography, including more-thanhuman sociality and concepts of domestication.

Mail : Natasha.Fijn@anu.edu.au

Nolwen Vouiller

Nolwen Vouiller has a Psychomotrician State Diploma (Medicine Sorbonne University, Paris VI, France) as well as an Anthropology Master degree (University Catholique of Louvain, Belgium). She is actually doing research in southwest Nepal, in Bardiya district, for a PhD degree in anthropology (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris, France and University of Liège, Belgium).

Mail : nolwen.vouiller@doct.uliege.be

Chloé Vanden Berghe

Chloé Vanden Berghe is a doctoral student in social sciences at ULB. She holds a double master’s degree in French and Romance languages and literature as well as in environmental sciences and management (IGEAT). Her research focuses on the cohabitation with urban foxes (Vulpes vulpes) in the Brussels-Capital Region. Her methodology is at the crossroads of ethology and ethnography beyond humans and is based on the tracking of the animals’ traces in their living places as well as in the imagination of their human cohabitants. The objective is to shed light on the daily life of foxes in the city of Brussels and the political and territorial negotiations that their installation implies, in order to better understand the issues related to the relationship between humans and animals. It is thus a question of drawing the outline of shared worlds, in particular when these are superimposed on the large urban centers, with the idea of putting into perspective the relations that our Western societies maintain with the living worlds.

Mail : chloe.vanden.berghe@ulb.be

Julie Rodeyns

I work and research at the intersection of contemporary performing arts, art education, socially engaged and participatory art, arts and health, and care aesthetics/ethics. At the heart of my practice is always a focus on how to shape relationships between, on a micro level, artworks and humans and, on a macro level, the art world and other knowledge domains/realms in a ‘caring’ way. I obtained my master’s degree in Theatre Studies at Ghent University (Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies) and my Ph.D. at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Department of Educational Sciences, Belgium, 2022). My Ph.D. research focused on the integration of an art program in a palliative care setting, and the implications working in this ecology had on the (relational) aesthetics of the artists’ practices. I’m the founding member of Through Art We Care, a platform that aims at fostering collaboration between arts and (health) care (2023). Furthermore, I am active as a freelance art critic (among others <H>ART magazine, Rekto-Verso, E-tcetera,…), curator/mediator (among others New Patrons, IN/FINITY) and consultant and trainer in art education and mediation (among others Bozar, Brussels; KMSKB, Brussels; WIELS, Brussels; MuHKA, Antwerp; FOMU, Antwerp; Musea Brugge, Bruges; Rosas, Brussels; …). 

Mail : rodeynsjulie@gmail.com

Ann Gollifer

Ann Gollifer is a permanent resident of Botswana. She has lived and worked in Gaborone since 1985. In 1983 she graduated from Edinburgh University with a Masters degree in History of Art. Ann worked as a Senior Technical Officer under the Directorship of its founder, Alec Campbell, at the National Museum and Art Gallery, Gaborone. During this period she also worked part-time at the Phuthadikobo Museum in Mochudi with Sandy Grant, the Museum’s founder and director. From 1991 to 2001 she was part of the committee, involved with the administration and facilitation of the Thapong Triangle International Artist’s workshops that took place in Botswana, as well as the many smaller off-shoot art workshops that were organized annually by the Thapong committee. An Artist member of the Thapong Visual Art Centre, Gaborone, Ann was part of the executive committee, responsible for the building of the centre. Ann currently works with the Art Residency Centre, the Village Gaborone, an artist led initiative that offers space to creatives in the community and with them develops new platforms for the dissemination of their work. As well as being a physical entity, the Art Residency Centre is also a flourishing virtual space where artistsfrom all fields, can meet to network and exchange ideas, nationally and internationally. Ann Gollifer is currently represented by ‘Guns and Rain’, Johannesburg.

Mail : annmarygollifer@yahoo.co.uk

Roseline Lambert

Roseline Lambert is a poet and an anthropologist born in Montreal in 1978. She published “Clinique” in 2016 and “Les couleurs accidentelles” in 2018 with Éditions Poètes de brousse. She did her doctoral research in Norway and teaches anthropology of art and poetry at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, where she is also a member of the Center for Sensory Studies. Her approach to writing in poetry is built through the integration of ethnographic and theoretical texts in her poems. She won the Quebec poetry prize Félix-Antoine-Savard in 2017.

Mail : lambert.roseline@gmail.com

Brenda Mathijssen

Dr Brenda Mathijssen is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, where she is also the director of the Centre for Religion, Health and Wellbeing. Her research focuses on death and bereavement in contemporary Europe, with a focus on ritual, livedreligion and spirituality, religious and ethnic diversity, and ecology. Recent publications include ‘Diverse teams researching diversity: Negotiating identity, place and embodiment in qualitative research’ (Qualitative Research 2021), ‘The human corpse as aesthetic-therapeutic’ (Mortality 2021) and ‘Funerary practices in the Netherlands’ (with Venhorst, Emerald 2019).

Mail : brenda.mathijssen@rug.nl

Marta Kucza

Marta Kucza is a documentary filmmaker interested in practices that explore relations of proximity with the filmed subjects. While facilitating film workshops she has been looking for experimental techniques that liberate perception from automatism, where camera and sound recording devices help to understand and engage with the worlds beyond the film frame. Marta Kucza is trained in African Studies (University of Warsaw) and Visual Anthropology (Sound/Image/Culture in Brussels). In her current research project, through an interdisciplinary perspective combining ecosemiotics, fieldwork-based ethnography and artbased methodology, she explores non-symbolic engagements between humans, plants and animals in a supported living facility for neurodivergent adults.

Mail : martakucza@gmail.com

Verena Kuni

Verena Kuni is a scholarin the field of art, cultural and media studies and professorfor visual culture studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt Main. She has been lecturing, researching and teaching at universities and art academies in Europe and beyond. Her curatorial work is dedicated to interdisciplinary projects and programs at the intersections of theory and practice. Her research focuses on transfers between material and media cultures; media of imagination and technologies of transformation; DIY, critical making and prosumer cultures; biotopes, biotopias and techno/nature/cultures; toys and/as tools; visual epistemology; information design and/as (con-)figurations of knowledge (in)visibilities; alternate realities and (trans)formations of time. She has published widely (print & online) on contemporary arts, culture and media.

Mail : verena@kuni.org

Ilja Geelen

From 2015-2019 I studied the bachelor of Dance in Education at ArtEZ Arnhem. During this programme I developed myself as a socially engaged choreographer, project organiser and educator. I expanded my curriculum with an Honours Programme for artistic research and several courses and projects in other artistic disciplines. After my bachelor I studied the pre-master and master of Cultural Anthropology at the Radboud University, from which I graduated last year. In my pre-master and master’s thesis, I focused on using my highly developed body awareness and artistic ways of thinking as tools for a type of research that looks beyond the verbal and the rational. After graduating from my master’s I dove back into the dance scene in the form of movement research. Since five months I have been living in the North of Morocco (for now) where I am developing social-artistic projects in which I combine my experiences in research, dance and education.

Mail : iljageelen@gmail.com

Leonie Cornips

Leonie Cornips is a senior researcher sociolinguistics affiliated at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and professor of Languageculture at Maastricht University. At present she explores nonhuman animal languages problematizing the a priori distinction between human and animal and/or culture and nature. She conceptualizes language as a multimodal, embodied and multisensorial phenomenon from a posthumanism perspective. She is conducting ethnographic field work among various intensive dairy farms in the Netherlands since 2018.

Mail : leonie.cornips@meertens.knaw.nl

Merlijn Huntjens

Merlijn Huntjens (1991) writes poetry. In 2016, 2017 and 2018 he participated in the final of the Dutch Poetry Slam Championships. In his poetry Merlijn portrays ordinary people in apparently ordinarysituations. The world is secretly special, magical and above all eternal, but the characters in the poems donot realize that. Merlijn’s work appeared online in Revisor and Tijdschrift Ei, and printed in Kluger Hans and Tirade. He is artistic director of Borderlines: Euregion Literature for Limburg, and maker at PANDA and VIA ZUID. Merlijn is currently working on his chapbook, which will be published in August 2022.

Mail : merlijnhuntjens@gmail.com

Nina Willems

Nina Willems graduated as a performance artist at the Theatre Academy in Maastricht in 2011. In 2015, she founded the art collective PANDA, together with poet Merlijn Huntjens. Together, they create theatre performances and art installations and organize poetry slams.

Mail : Ninawillems@gmail.com

Hanna Charlotta Wernersson

Hanna Wernersson is a doctoral student at the School of Global Studies within the field of environmental social science. Her research interests is human-animal relations in Western culture, economy, politics, and practice. Her PhD project focuses on the human-animal relationship within the realm of food production and, more specifically, in cattle farming. Hanna Wernersson has a MSc in socio-ecological resilience from Stockholm Resilience Center. Her work experience include working as a Course Coordinator at the Center for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden, and as an Agricultural Marketing Specialist for the U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service in Canada. She recently took over 12 hectares of land and is exploring what regenerative farming might mean on the clay soils of western Sweden. She intends to work together with cows to bring the land back to life.

Mail : hanna.c.wernersson@gu.se
Website : https://www.gu.se/en/about/find-staff/hannacwernersson

Simone de Boer

Simone de Boer is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Gothenburg University. Her PhD research is focused on the development of sustainable agriculture and the making of ‘sustainable farmers’ in Kyrgyzstan. In her previous research in Kyrgyzstan, she studied (the transformation of) ‘traditional’ horse games and human-horse relationshipsin the context of increasing tourism, processes ofsportification, and the development of mega sporting events. Simone has a background in Cultural Anthropology and Film & Photographic Studies. Before starting her PhD, she worked as a lecturer at the institute of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. In 2018-2019, she was one of Leiden’s City Photographers, conducting research and creating ethnographic photo essays for the city newspaper in collaboration with fellow anthropologists. Her main academic interests are environmental
and media anthropology, multisensory, multispecies and audiovisual/multimodal ethnography, and Central Asia.

Mail : simone.de.boer@gu.se

Irina Frasin

Irina Frasin is a researcher in the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Romanian Academy, Iasi Branch. Her basic formation was in philosophy and history. For about 10 years she has taught classical Greek philosophy and intercultural communication in the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza University” of Iasi. Lately she began to focus her research on anthrozoology, moving from intercultural communication to inter species communication. Presently she is involved in a new master program on Ethology and Human Animal Interaction in the University of Agricultural Studies and Veterinary Medicine in Cluj-Napoca. Irina Frasin is co-editing the series of books Anthrozoology Studies (Human –Animal Interaction from a multidisciplinary perspective, Prouniversitaria 2019, Thinking beyond Borders, Prouniversitaria 2020, Ethics and the non human world, Presa Universitara Clujeana 2021, Animal Life and Human Culture, coming up in 2022).

Mail : irinaada@gmail.com

Lara Sabra

Lara Sabra is a graduate student studying anthropology at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She graduated with a BA in Sociology-Anthropology and a minor in Women and Gender Studies from AUB in 2020. Her research focuses on multispecies relationships, urban space, practices of care, and employs methods emerging from visual and sensory ethnography. She is a production assistant at What Took You So Long, a production company, where she co-manages a visual research project on heritage practices and multispecies interactions in Beirut. She has worked as a research intern at the Nature Conservation Center, where she contributed to research surrounding gender and the environment in the MENA region. She studies the interconnections between graffiti, affect, and agency after the August 4 Beirut port explosion in a paper to be published in 2022.

Mail : lrs12@mail.aub.edu

Jiska Hansen

Jiska Hansen is graduate from the Amsterdam University of Art in Fine art and Design in Education. During her studies she focused on healthcare, specifically art methods in mental healthcare. Besides educational internships with children, she worked for artist Laurence Aëgerter, and for a nonprofit organization that offers artistic day activitiesfor people with a diverse range of (cognitive) (dis)abilities. After her graduation she went to the University of Amsterdam to deepen her understanding on perspectives of healthcare. She did an internship at a Dutch University Hospital, regarding pre-operative anxiety. Yet she noticed that working in this environment triggered her own anxiety. Being diagnosed on the autism spectrum she recognizes a lot of the struggles of some of the people she has been working with. In her spare time she shifted attention to her relationship with a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy. Her curiosity to understand her canine partner and explore what it means to live with another species in a care context, led her to study assistance dogs.

Mail : jiskahansen@hotmail.com

Lee Deigaard

Lee Deigaard is an independent artist from New Orleans and rural Georgia. Responding to spontaneous voluntary interactions with generous, curious animal collaborators, her work explores multi-species empathy and animal cognition and personality in a variety of media. She has shown and presented her work nationally and internationally in numerous solo and group shows and was a 2017-18 Artist-inResidence at the Joan Mitchell Center. As a Southern Constellations Fellow and artist-in-residence at Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC, she invited horses to explore a museum housed in a former thrift store. She is a poet, writer, bookmaker, and curator, and was recently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Utah State University. She graduated with honors from Yale University and holds graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan School of Art and Design.

Mail : lee.deigaard@gmail.com
Website : www.leedeigaard.com

Iona Walker

Iona Walker is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. Iona is currently conducting fieldwork with scientists at the Centre for Inflammation Research for her doctoral project Reimagining AMR and COVID-19: Microbial Worlds, Military Metaphors and Beyond Resistance. Iona’s work is concerned with language, interdisciplinarity, more-than-human ecologies and knowledge production.

Mail : iona.walker@ed.ac.uk

Ritti Zachmann

I came to academia as a filmmaker working on puppet-documentaries in Germany and have since longed to bring artistic methods back into my work. I graduated from the Bachelors of Arts in Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen where my thesis explored aerial arts (silks, trapeze, rope), embodiment, and identity. My work on Lyme disease began during my Masters in Science in Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. During the MSc, my focus was on how the rendering of landscapes in art, film, and literature as spaces of beauty and safety made the possibility of danger and disease in the Lyme disease epidemic invisible. During my PhD, I developed guest lectures (in collaboration with Iona Walker) on the overlap between art and contagion, which I gave on an annual basis at Professor Ian Harper’s Contagion course. I hope to continue exploring and learning about possible artistic collaborations in the
future and am very inspired to hear about the work others are doing on this.

Mail : Ritti.Soncco@ed.ac.uk

Hilal Alkan

Hilal Alkan is a researcher at Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. Her research centers around care and gift practices in various realms of social life. Her recent research is about the caring relations migrants form with the plants they grow and the plants that accompany them in the cities they settled. Her inspiration comes from feminist ethics of care and multi species studies. Her articles appeared in the American Ethnologist, Citizenship Studies, Migration Letters and in other collections. She has also co-edited Urban Neighbourhood Formations: Boundaries, Narrations, Intimacies (Routledge, 2020) and The Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary Turkey: Reproduction, Maternity, Sexuality (IB Tauris 2021).

Mail : hilal.alkan.zeybek@zmo.de

Lisa Jean Moore

Lisa Jean Moore is a medicalsociologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies in the School of Natural and Social Sciences at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her books include an ethnography of honeybees, Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee (NYUP) coauthored with Mary Kosut. Catch and Release: The Enduring, yet Vulnerable, Horseshoe Crab (NYUP) examines the interspecies relationships between humans and Limulus polyphemus (Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs). And most recently, she has published Our Transgenic Future: Spider Goats, Genetic Modification and the Will to Change Nature based on three years of fieldwork studying goats genetically modified with spider DNA. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her family.

Mail : lisajean.moore@gmail.com

Raj Sekhar Aich

Raj Sekhar Aich has two PhDs in marine anthropology, and applied psychology, his work is the holistic study of cultural and naturalscapes shaped by physical and symbolic interactions of humans with the marine environment and life forms. He expertises encompass Anthrozoology, Multispecies Ethnography, Marine Social Science, and is currently working on a new methodology of Transdisciplinary Human- Shark research. To his knowledge, he is the first scientist to conduct white shark cage diving ethnography (New Zealand); written the first narrative shark book from India. He is now creating a citizen science initiative about Western Australian Great White sharks. His work is not only about creating knowledge butsynergizing, and disseminating it through various mediumslike painting, documentary, and public speaking.

Mail : rajsekhar.aich@gmail.com

Ute Hörner

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are Professors of “Transmedial Spaces/Media Art” at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with the relationship between humans, animals and machines and provide both: critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of fair terms of interaction between these parties. Together with the grey parrots Clara and Karl they have carried out the interspecies collaboration CMUK since 2014. Their works have been shown at international exhibitions and festivals including, CCA Tbilisi, ZKM Karlsruhe, Shedhalle Zuerich, NMFA Taiwan, Ars Electronica Linz, Werkleitz Biennale Halle, Museum Ludwig Cologne, KAC Istanbul, Transmediale Berlin. Since 2016 they are members of the Minding Animals International Network.

Mail : hoerner@khm.de
Website :  http://h–a.org/en/

Cédric Sueur

Cédric Sueur is an Assistant Professor and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. Cédric Sueur is an ethologist and primatologist, in charge of the Master in Animal Ethics and co-responsible for the Master in Ecology, Ecophysiology and Ethology. Cédric Sueur is working on collective decision-making and social networking, human and non-human. He is a member of the scientific council of the La Fondation Droit Animal (LFDA), appointed member of the national committee for the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. He has received several prizes for his research (2013 Young Researcher Prize from the French Society for the Study of Animal Behavior; Thesis Prize from the Strasbourg Biological Society; Le Monde Prize for University Research). He is also a member of the Institut des Études Avancées at the University of Strasbourg and winner of the Wetrems Prize from the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences.

Mail : cedric.sueur@iphc.cnrs.fr

Marie Pelé

Marie Pelé is a researcher in ethology, with a specialization in primatology. After obtaining a doctoral thesis on economic-type behaviors of several species of primates at the University of Strasbourg and postdoctoral experiences abroad, Marie Pelé created the Ethobiosciences expertise firm which allows her to carry out various scientific and educational missions, as well as conselling for animal professionals. In 2015, she supported the creation of the “Animal ethics” programm of the Master in “Bioethics, Ethics of life” at the University of Strasbourg. In 2018, Marie Pelé returned to academia as a teacher at the University of Strasbourg. In 2020, she became a research fellow in ethology at the Anthropo-Lab of the ETHICS laboratory of the Institut Catholique de Lille. She is developing a line of research dealing with human-animal relationships and behavioral strategies that could be implemented to improve them.

Mail : marie.pele@univ-catholille.fr

Christopher Weatherly

Chris Weatherly is a 5th year doctoral candidate in social work at the Brown School in Washington University in St. Louis. For his dissertation, he is using participatory and systems-based approaches to elucidate the intersections of climate change, environmental degradation, and population mental health. Specifically, he is looking at how recent flooding and acute windstorms impacted rural farmer mental health. He received a joint master’s in social work and public health in 2012 at Tulane University in New Orleans. Before entering a PhD program, he worked as a mental health clinician in acute psychiatric settings. He’s also currently in private practice. Within his field, he is eager to use transdisciplinary and ethnographic approaches to reveal critical connections between the mental health of humans, animals, and ecosystems. He’d also love to integrate his personal passion of painting and dreamwork within his
academic life.

Mail : weatherly@wustl.edu
Academic website : sites.wustl.edu/cweatherly/ – Artistic Website : https://www.teammanfred.art/

Nanna Sandager Kisby

Currently, Nanna Sandager Kisby is about to enter into the last week of fieldwork for her Master’s thesis in ‘Cultural Anthropology: Sustainable Citizenship’ at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The fieldwork has been conducted over three months in Ilulissat, where she has been researching human- snow relations and the networksin which these relations partake. She previously has a Bachelor’s degree in anthropology, with a minor in philosophy, from Aarhus University in Denmark – as well as a background in art and movement studies. Throughout her fieldwork, she has experimented with data collection through a combination of art and anthropology. She has made use of ethnographic photography, video and soundscapes, as well as sensory ethnography, in order to capture aspects of human-snow relations that escape the written word. She has been using these methods as fieldnotes – although primarily as ways of
inquiring into the materiality of snow and the ways in which human and other-than-human life in Ilulissat and in the surrounding landscape produces effect over time.

Mail : nanna_kisby@hotmail.com

Florence Ménez

Florence Ménez, anthropologist, devotes her research since 1999 to relational modes in situations of environmental crisis when appears proliferation of algae and clams, or oil spills. His research fields are multi-sited : Italy (Venice lagoon), Brittany (France) and the French West Indies (Lesser Antilles). She coordinates the SaRiMed project on the risks associated with sargassum on the Caribbean coast (AMURE UMR 6308, UBO – LC2S – UMR 8053, UA – Fondation de France) . Involved in the diffusion of culture in all its forms, I have carried out a project on theater, with a large part devoted to Caribbean theater. Complementary to these scientific and cultural activities, her artistic practices are photography and theater. These interests are reflected in her current scientific research, particularly in terms of alternative research writing, methodology and restitution.

Mail : florence.menez@univ-brest.fr

Renate Schelwald

Renate is a visual ethnographer interested in sustainability issues, human-environment relations and oceanic practices. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project concerning sustainability policy for local municipalities. This project forms the basis of her PhD research that focusses specifically on the food system. Using visual ethnographic methods, she explores food practices through fieldwork with households and food (related) organizations. Renate uses a New Materialist lens to focus on entanglement of food practices with social, institutional, and ecological structures. This research draws upon audio-visual media’s distinct ability to explore the multiple registers of experience to explore tangible as well as non-representational elements of food practices.

Mail : schelwald@essb.eur.nl

Isabelle Borsus

Isabelle Borsus, is an assistant and PhD student in University of Liege (Lasc/FASS), Belgium. She holds master’s degrees in communication, in anthropology and a bachelor’s degree in psychomotricity. She also teaches at the Haute Ecole Helmo (Liège, Belgium). Her research borrows the detours of taxidermy, herbariums and phylogenetic to dwell on the one hand on the modeling practices of the living, human or non-human, and on the other hand on the technical gestures and the dispositive logics which inscribe and animate the body engaged in an activity. At a methodological level, she is interested in the place of drawing as a tool in the social sciences.

Mail : iborsus@uliege.be

Miriam Adelman

Miriam Adelman is a senior professor in the graduate programs in Sociology and Literary Studies of the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, equestrian studies scholar, translator, poet and photographer. Her current projects include work on an edited volume on Brazilian equestrian cultures, practices and economies (with Ana Lucia Camphora and Ester Liberato Pereira) and a visual ethnography of a southern Brazilian rural equestrian milieu.

Mail : miriamad2008@gmail.com

Charlotte Dorn

Charlotte Dorn (1996, German) studied Fine Arts at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts Nantes Métropole ESBANM (France), the Universidad de Sevilla – Facultad de Bellas Artes (Spain) and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli (Italy). Currently she is working on a doctoral research project called Compassion for the animal in contemporary Art, hosted by the LUCA Art School in Belgium and lives and works in Brussels. Situated in the movement Animal turn in Contemporary Art, her practice investigates the human- animal relationship and roots human existence in natural processes. The used artistic techniques are print making and installations with ecological materials to create immersive artworks that trigger the viewer on various sensorial levels.

Mail : Charlottdorn@gmail.com
Website : https://charlottedorn.de 

Hermione Spriggs

Hermione Spriggs is an artist and researcher exploring ways to access and empathise with other species’ worlds. Hermione is currently doing practice-based PhD research with a focus on rural pest control in North Yorkshire, asking how hunters communicate with animals and exploring the relevance of a hunting attitude to environmental art practice. She hosts the collaborative project the Anthropology of OtherAnimals (“AoOA”), which attempts to elicit extraordinary effects from unpromising materials and explores the hidden links between ‘craft’ and ‘being crafty’. Hermione splits her time between London and Yorkshire. From 2010-2014 she lived in California whilst studying for an MFA in Visual Art at UC San Diego. Spriggs has recently worked with Arts Catalyst, Tate Exchange, The Showroom and greengrassi (London). Her edited volume Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol-Futurism is published by Sternberg Press. Current projects include a public art commission for Kings Hedges Cambridge, a film commission for Sheffield Doc Fest, a text for Cabinet Magazine and a nomadic series of animal tracking workshops with collaborator Tamara Colchester.

Mail : h.spriggs@ucl.ac.uk

Ana Lucia Camphora

Ana Lucia Camphora is born and worksin Brazil where she concluded her academic degreesin Psychology, Master Degree in Psycho-sociology of Communities and Social Ecology, and PhD in Social Sciences. From 2013, as an independent scholar, she moved to the field of inter-species studies. The outcomes of her research are presented in the book, ‘Animals and society in Brazil from the 16th to the 19th century’, launched in Brazil (2017) and in the UK, by The White Horse Press (2021). She has kept close her academic interdisciplinary approach and her activities in the field of contemporary art, which are been developed since 2015. Currently, as assistant of the artist and professor Marcos Duarte, in the 3D Atelier of the Visual Arts School (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), she is also examining the potential of objects, textures and space, amplifying potential dialogues and significance through contemporary art.

Mail : alcamphora@gmail.com
Website : https://anacamphora.wixsite.com/portfolio

Lucile Wittersheim

As a doctoral student in environmental anthropology, Lucile Wittersheim is specialized in the study of human’s relationships with his natural environment in the context of organic agriculture. After studying ecology and anthropology,she had the opportunity to study different urban, insular and rural areas. These experiences were the occasion to explore approachesstemming from ethnography, action-research as well as approaches combining art and science. This has enriched her current reflections on the relationship that organic market gardeners have with the agricultural soils, the growth environment of their crops. She is interested in the materiality of this relationship, in the embodied knowledge that underlies it, and in the way that market gardeners work with the living in their soils.

Mail : lucile.wittersheim@edu.mnhn.fr

Harry Wels

Harry Wels is Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and African Studies Centre Leiden. His research focuses on multispecies organisational ethnography in the context of (private) wildlife conservation in South and southern Africa, in which drawing is increasingly used as a method to record observations. As Editor of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography (JOE), Harry has encouraged starting a separate section on Creative Formats for Organizational Ethnography. In his personal life, playing the alttrombone keeps Harry going.

Mail : h.wels@vu.nl

Lucie Nayak

As a sociologist, initially specialised in the fields of health, disability and sexuality, I have recently turned my attention to the study of relations between animals and humans. My doctoral thesis, obtained at the University of Paris Nanterre (France) and the University of Geneva (Switzerland), was devoted to the analysis of the social treatment of the sexuality of people labelled as “intellectually disable” in France and Switzerland. I then carried out post-doctoral research (Inserm, Paris, France) dedicated to the access to health care of trans people. Currently, I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Liege (Belgium). My research project is entitled “An ethnography of “farm animal” sanctuaries in France and Belgium. Interactions and communication between species outside the context of exploitation”. I am also conducting a qualitative research on the theme of “gender and veganism”.

Mail : lucie.nayak@uliege.be

Juan Rivera

Juan Rivera’s research examines cosmologies among indigenous groups of the Andes, particularly Quechua-speaking peoples of the Peruvian highlands. Among his publications is the book La vaquerita y su canto: Una antropología de las emociones (2016); the articles “Beyond the “dismal imagery”: Amerindian abdication, repulsion, and ritual opacity in extractivist South America” (HAU, 2019), “Warriors and caimans surrounding the Andes” (Social Anthropology, 2017) and “Recent methodological approaches in ethnographies of human and non-human Amerindian collectives” (Reviews in
Anthropology, 2019); and the edited volumes Non-humans in Amerindian South America (2018) and Indigenous life projects and extractivism (coedited with Cecilie Ødegaard, 2019). He also coproduced a video installation and film series entitled The owners of the land: Culture and the spectre of mining in the Andes (2013).

Mail : jjriveraandia@gmail.com

Juliette Salme

Juliette Salme is a Ph.D student at the University of Liège (Belgium). Her research focuses on practices harnessing (micro)organisms, such as fungi, to produce eco-friendly goods and she is interested in processes of « making », perception, and creative human and nonhuman entanglements. She does fieldwork in do-it-yourself biology labsin collaboration with designers, architects, and scientists-amateurs and professionals.

Mail : j.salme@uliege.be

Cédric Audoan

After a Bachelor’s degree in European and International Law at the University of Maastricht (UM), I achieved a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Liège (Uliège). I am currently pursuing a PhD in Anthropology at the Uliège about dreaming among the Eibela of Papua New Guinea. More specifically, I am working on the impact of dreamlike and other “transpersonal” practices on ecology and interspecific relationships. My research intends to intersect two fields of research too rarely combined, that is ontological/ecological anthropology and aesthetic/experiential anthropology. To that end, I will collaborate with a photographer, Lindsay Soszna, whose artistic interests, notably gender relations and psycho-genealogy, will complement mine. In addition to my doctoral research, I am a member of JACKS, an ethno-artistic collaboration focused on materiality and marginality. Its goals is to explore and revisit
ethnography while producing data to a wider audience in multimodal ways and outside the academic spectrum.

Mail : cedric.audoan@uliege.be

Susan Wardell

Susan Wardell is a social anthropologist from Aotearoa New Zealand. Some of her research interests include wellbeing, care, moral emotion, empathy, digital embodiment, and mental health in the anthropocene. She is the current Poetry Editor of Anthropology and Humanism, working with ethnographic poetry and flash fiction in her own work, and dabbling with sensory and visual methods.

Mail : susan.wardell@otago.ac.nz

Roxane Gabet

Roxane Gabet is a PhD student currently pursuing her doctoral thesis as part of the ERC project « The Body Societal » led by François Thoreau. Following a BA in graphic design as well as in political science, she obtained a master’s degree in anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Roxane wrote her MA thesis under the co-supervision of Vinciane Despret and Maïté Maskens: she conducted an ethnography of a voice hearers’ group, articulating an anthropology of mind, relationsto invisible entities, medical anthropology and Mad studies. Her research interests are situated at the intersection of pragmatic sociology and Indigenous studies, as she had the opportunity to study at the faculty of Native studies at the University of Alberta (Canada). There, she deepened her taste for experimental, visual and decolonial methodologies while reflecting on how stories can unfold social sciences’ problematics in the realm of the senses. She is now extending these reflections to animal genomics, particularly bovine selection and reproduction, in a context of continued ecological damage. In an approach borrowing from critical animal studies, feminist STS and environmental humanities, she will be following scientists in their laboratory practices and trying to understand how their knowledge transform the bodies of cows, as well as those who care about them.

Mail : roxane.gabet@uliege.be

Layla Durrani

Born and raised in San Francisco, United States, Layla Durrani works and lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her practice consists of publications, paintings, installations, and workshops that invite and invoke an awareness of the multispecies. With attention to material, sensory, and somatic practices, as well as folklore and storytelling, her work explores how humans are entangled and engaged with the non-human around us—such as plants, fungi, and animals. In 2020, she graduated cum laude from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she created a visual (painting) and written thesis focused on multispecies relationships between San Francisco herbalists and the plants with which they work. She now works at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as a Research & Teaching Assistant, in addition to maintaining her artistic practice.

Mail : l.durrani@vu.nl

Kristen Livera

Kristen Livera is an Anthropologist who investigates the intersubjective experiences of interspecies entanglements that transversally connect beings in a network of meanings. She develops a multi-constructivist ethology to cultivate an attention towards the interdependent relations woven between species. Within these shared milieux, her research attends to the reconfigurations and rearticulations of human and animal bodies, of shared sociality amongst our non-human co-conspirators. She implements a paralinguistic approach to take head on how forms of resemiotisation are coevolutive, affective forces that coconstruct spaces of becoming. 

Mail : lekaviar@gmail.com

Gian Luigi Biagini

I am an art researcher but have an interdisciplinary nomadic background: master in Political Science (University of Florence), master in Communication and Media (University of Florence), professional master in Creative Writing (EU-Lazio County), PhD in Art Research ( Aalto University Finland). I have also many years of work in applied art in international companies: ADV, Design, Concept. I have a long background as an experimental artist in many fields but in the last 10 years, since I lived in Finland, I dedicated myself to antagonist urban interventions in many metropolises of the world thanks to some foundation grants. My practice was mainly inspired by Deleuze and Guattari in trying to create, through a critical-disruptive event, a “becoming-animal” to subtract from an abstract urban space characterized by a disembodied consensus. In 2022, I launched the Humanimal Community Art Project  which wants to re-establish a community bond in contemporary atomized societies through the human-animal “contact zone”. I have published a dozen papers on my practice of urban interventions, and in 2022 I presented a paper as a speaker at the Human-Animal Conference 2022 at the University of Turku (Finland).

Mail : gigibiagini@gmail.com
Website : https://gigibiagini.tumblr.com/

Marlies Bockstal

Marlies Bockstal obtained her Master of Science in Sociology at the University of Ghent in Belgium in 2019. She is currently a PhD candidate at the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Her PhD project focuses on purebred dog breeding practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. By drawing from key components of intersectional (eco)feminist, posthumanist and critical animal studies approaches, her research will critically examine purebred dog breeding. Her study will engage with a species-inclusive sensory ethnographic methodology. In particular, she will use sensory narrative interviews and photos to examine the discourse of ‘responsible breeding’ and explore the complexity of the relations between breeders and their dogs used for breeding purposes in the context of these ‘responsible dog breeding’ practices.

Mail : marlies.bockstal@pg.canterbury.ac.nz

Vanessa Wijngaarden

Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden has a background in social anthropology and political science. She works on ‘othering’, multivocality in academia, and human-animal relationships. With a passion for reflexive approaches, extensive fieldwork and creative research dissemination, she has made several award winning documentaries. She has been researching intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) since 2019 with professional and indigenous animal communicators from Europe and Africa. She convenes the human-animal communication network, which brings together academic researchers, artists, practioners and other interessants of IIC worldwide.

Mail : vanessa.wijngaarden@gmail.com

Laura Boffi

As an interaction designer and researcher, Laura works in the field of participatory designand new technologies. Her focus is on designing experiences to bring people of differentages, cultures, and places together – and has also been broadening her interest beyondhumans, embracing the interactions between species for the sake of biodiversity conservation. Starting from late 2022 and continuing up to september 2023, she holds a research fellowship from the University Ca’ Foscari Venice, Italy. She questions how participatory design can forster biodiversity conservation through the engagement of local communities and stakeholders. Her project is entitled “Entanglements between biodiversity and rural traditions in Italy: how could we enhance them through the design of new technologies and participatory interventions?”. She is focusing on Abruzzo region, conducting fieldwork with farmers/sheperds, involving biologists and other experts, conducting co-creation sessions and prototyping in the context.

Mail : boffilaura@gmail.com

Nathaniel Hendrickson

I conduct collaborative research using documentary and video art as a vehicle for tracing perceptions and impressions of the environment and the chronicling languages of non-human species. Inspired by the theoretical work of Anais Nony, and the practical work of Jerzy Grotowski, I collaborate with and document different communities in forests, rural and urban areas often for weeks at a time. Previous collaborators include the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski, Pietro Varrasso and Gianluigi Biagini. Composed of collective and individual actions, these immersions highlight the conditioning and deconditioning of perception in the body in relation to the more than human world.

Mail : nathanielhendrickson@gmail.com

Isabella Guabello

Isabella is a MA student in Gender Studies at Uppsala University, where she is focusing her studies on animals-environments-humans relationships. Her current focus is the concept of donkeys’ welfare in sanctuaries and the idea of intersectionality that can be applied in rescue contexts for “working” animals. She is also working as an activist to mitigate the effect of climate change and for the recognition in International Political fora of the role of biodiversity in the web of life and of the Indigenous knowledge systems. Her background is a MA in Gender Studies at SOAS (2016) and a MA in Modern Languages and Literature (major in Hindi and Chinese) at the University of Torino (2006). She also holds a BA in Political Science from the University of Torino (2012)

Mail : guabello.isabella@gmail.com

Johann Detilleux

Johann Detilleux is a doctor in veterinary medicine with a PhD in animal breeding (Iowa state university) and a post-doctorate in veterinary epidemiology (Cornell university). She is currently retired from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Liège and involved in artistic activities at the Académie des Beaux Arts where she focuses on depicting links between humans and non-humans through textile creations. She is also involved in the Walloon Animal Welfare Committee and is particularly interested in the effects of genetic selection on living organisms.

Mail : jdetilleux@uliege.be

Liaki Kimina

Chercheur anthropologue à l'Université de Kinshasa (République Démocratique du Congo).

Liaki Kimina est licencié en Anthropologie sociale et culturelle à l’Université de Kinshasa, RDC. Ses recherches portent sur le rapport entre les humains, animaux et environnements. Pour collecter les données dans le cadre de ses travaux, il recourt à l’approche de l’ethnographie multi espèce et multisite.

Dans le cadre de son mémoire de mon master de spécialisation en gestion intégrée des risques sanitaires à l’Université de Liège, il a mené une étude portant sur les perceptions de la rage à Bouaké en Côte d’Ivoire.  J’avais tenté de comprendre , les différentes pratiques favorisant les interactions entre chien et humain , dans la perspective de construire un modèle participatif favorisant l’implication des membres de cette  communauté aux actions de lutte contre la rage en Côte d’ivoire.

Pour la collecte de données, il a mené des entretiens approfondis et des observations dans les rues et marchés de la cote d’ivoire afin de décrire les différentes formes d’interactions que les humains entretiennent avec les chiens dans cette région confrontée par la problématique de la rage.

Mail : Henrikimina@gmail.com