🐾 Multispecies Ethnography as a Practice of Attention 👁️

Author: Filippo Vegezzi

At a time when environmental crises, biodiversity loss, and urban expansion increasingly shape everyday life, questions of how we live alongside other species have become unavoidable. Multispecies ethnography matters now because it offers a way to slow down, pay attention, and reconsider whose lives are recognised in the spaces we inhabit. It asks not only how humans shape the world, but how the world is continuously shaped through entangled human and non-human lives.

Cities and neighbourhoods are often understood as human domains. Streets, buildings, and infrastructures are designed around human needs and routines, reinforcing the idea that urban life belongs primarily to people. Yet when attention shifts to sounds, traces, movements, and absences, a more complex landscape begins to emerge. Other species are already present, shaping everyday environments in ways that are invisible, indirect, and often overlooked.

Multispecies ethnography is an approach that challenges the separation between nature and culture by placing human and non-human lives within the same field of attention. Emerging from broader ecological concerns in anthropology, it extends ethnographic practice beyond human experience to include animals, plants, fungi, microbes, and landscapes (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). From this perspective, neighbourhoods and cities are not only social spaces, but shared environments shaped through ongoing, co-evolving relationships.

Central to multispecies ethnography is the practice of attentiveness. Van Dooren et al. (2016) describe the arts of attentiveness as ways of noticing and responding that recognise knowing and living as deeply entangled. Paying attention becomes an ethical act. It means learning to notice what usually fades into the background, and to consider how everyday actions, materials, and infrastructures affect other forms of life.

Rather than focusing only on direct encounters between humans and animals, multispecies ethnography also attends to traces, infrastructures, stories, and imaginaries. Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) describe this work as taking place in contact zones, spaces where human and non-human worlds meet and co-produce shared ecologies and niches. In urban contexts, these zones might include parks, gardens, building edges, drainage systems, vacant lots, or soundscapes shaped by birds, insects, and weather.

Ogden et al. (2013) emphasise that multispecies ethnography does not rely on a single method. It can take many forms, from observation and mapping to storytelling, sensory practices, and speculative approaches. What connects these methods is a commitment to recognising ways of knowing life beyond human experience. Presence is not always visible, and absence, mediation, and imagination can be just as revealing as direct encounters.

As a method, multispecies ethnography invites a rethinking of everyday environments. It shifts attention away from human activity alone toward the layered, relational worlds that humans are already part of. In doing so, it opens space for alternative narratives of coexistence, where cities are understood not as exclusively human achievements, but as shared, negotiated, and more-than-human spaces.

This raises a series of open questions:

• What forms of life do we notice, and which remain unseen or unacknowledged?

• How do our methods of observation shape what becomes visible, meaningful, or valuable?

• What kinds of relationships are enabled or constrained by the spaces we inhabit?

• And how might learning to pay attention differently alter how we imagine living together in shared environments?

by Filippo Vegezzi

References

Kirksey, E., & Helmreich, S. (2010). The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 25(4), 545–576.

Ogden, L. A., Hall, B., & Tanita, K. (2013). Animals, plants, people, and things: A review of multispecies ethnography. Environment and Society: Advances in Research, 4(1), 5–24.

Van Dooren, T., Kirksey, E., & Münster, U. (2016). Multispecies studies: Cultivating arts of attentiveness. Environmental Humanities, 8(1), 1–23.