Entangled Worlds: The Art of the More-Than-Human Ethnography

Catalog description

Multispecies ethnography has become an increasingly influential subfield within anthropology, examining how humans interact with and relate to the more-than-human world. This course builds upon and expands these frameworks by de-centering the human actor and approaching interspecies relationships through a more ecological lens. Rather than positioning humans as the primary subjects, we will explore how all beings—plants, fungi, animals, landscapes, and humans—are co-constituted through their entanglements. Through interdisciplinary readings spanning anthropology, ecology, philosophy, and environmental humanities, students will develop theoretical frameworks for understanding human/more-than-human relationships. We will then put these frameworks into practice through fieldwork, observational studies, and creative visualization projects. Students will learn to document, interpret, and represent these entanglements across ecological, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions, experimenting with multimedia storytelling to capture relationships that often exceed conventional representation.