On Friday, March 20 at 10.15,
Michelle Westerlaken, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, will hold her 90
percent PhD seminar. The title of the forthcoming thesis is Imagining
Multispecies Worlds. Alex Taylor, sociologist and associate professor in
the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University of London,
will function as discussant.
This will be an online seminar,
carried out through Zoom.
At the time of the meeting click
on: https://mau-se.zoom.us/my/michellewesterlaken. To be sure that everything works
smoothly, you could install the Zoom software beforehand but it should not be
necessary. Please join the meeting in time and turn off your audio and video
during the first part of the seminar. The chat will be open for questions (or
pointing out technical issues) throughout the seminar. We will try to have a
broader round of questions at the end where all listeners can turn on
their microphones.
Below you can find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to
read the manuscript before the seminar, contact Michelle (michelle.westerlaken@mau.se).
It can
be considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of
institutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and
exploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is
something completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets
of dominant culture. In the field of critical animal studies and political
theory, as well as certain branches of ecofeminism and posthumanism, the
normalization of speciesism has been thoroughly questioned and analysed, but
one topic is given little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to
speciesism actually look like, without saying what it is not?
This
thesis is concerned with the imagining of ‘multispecies worlds’, with the
objective to construct positive rather than negating aspects of such worlds.
What can worlds that abandons speciesism contain? How can we engage with one
another in such societies?
Rather
than approaching these questions in a search for singular answers, this thesis
argues that on a more contextual, local, and relational level, many people know
quite well what it means to have friendships with other animals, care for them
in many different ways, share our living spaces, respect our distances,
negotiate conflicts, or develop mutual understandings with each other.
Especially in alternative worldviews (such as indigenous cosmologies) and lived
experiences with other animals, these multispecies worlds already exist in
plenty. In this thesis, I will develop and further illustrate a framework to
imagine multispecies worlds. I will do this by connecting a more relational
understanding of our lives with other animals to the development of a
counter-concept to speciesism in which we recognize and engage with the ability
to respond to each other.Thereby, this thesis
answers to – and builds on – various scholarly and activist discourses,
including standpoints from ecofeminism, decolonialism, and critical animal
studies, and is theoretically grounded in feminist and postmodernist epistemologies.
With a focus on imagining worlds and negotiating possibilities, this
dissertation is also a work in (interaction) design. The design practice that I
undertake here is that of tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with
other animals, and expressing those narratives as a design research program.
These responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten
protagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of multispecies
stories. By framing design in this way, I argue that we are able to – together
with other animals – find possible meanings of multispecies worlds not as a
single (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions and more flexible
transformations that are able to permanently unsettle and unmake the established
speciesist order.
