{"id":1222,"date":"2020-03-18T14:57:47","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T14:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogg.mah.se\/k3researchblog\/?p=1222"},"modified":"2020-03-18T14:57:49","modified_gmt":"2020-03-18T14:57:49","slug":"online-seminar-michelle-westerlaken-imagining-multispecies-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogg.mah.se\/k3researchblog\/2020\/03\/18\/online-seminar-michelle-westerlaken-imagining-multispecies-worlds\/","title":{"rendered":"Online seminar: Michelle Westerlaken: Imagining Multispecies Worlds"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On Friday, March 20 at 10.15,\nMichelle Westerlaken, PhD candidate in Interaction Design, will hold her 90\npercent PhD seminar. The title of the forthcoming thesis is Imagining\nMultispecies Worlds<\/em>. Alex Taylor, sociologist and associate professor in\nthe Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design at City University of London,\nwill function as discussant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will be an online seminar,\ncarried out through Zoom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the meeting click\non: https:\/\/mau-se.zoom.us\/my\/michellewesterlaken<\/a>. To be sure that everything works\nsmoothly, you could install the Zoom software beforehand but it should not be\nnecessary. Please join the meeting in time and turn off your audio and video\nduring the first part of the seminar. The chat will be open for questions (or\npointing out technical issues) throughout the seminar. We will try to have a\nbroader round of questions at the end where all listeners can turn on\ntheir microphones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below you can find an abstract for the seminar. If you would like to\nread the manuscript before the seminar, contact Michelle (michelle.westerlaken@mau.se<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It can\nbe considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of\ninstitutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and\nexploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is\nsomething completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets\nof dominant culture. In the field of critical animal studies and political\ntheory, as well as certain branches of ecofeminism and posthumanism, the\nnormalization of speciesism has been thoroughly questioned and analysed, but\none topic is given little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to\nspeciesism actually look like, without saying what it is not?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This\nthesis is concerned with the imagining of \u2018multispecies worlds\u2019, with the\nobjective to construct positive rather than negating aspects of such worlds.\nWhat can worlds that abandons speciesism contain? How can we engage with one\nanother in such societies?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather\nthan approaching these questions in a search for singular answers, this thesis\nargues that on a more contextual, local, and relational level, many people know\nquite well what it means to have friendships with other animals, care for them\nin many different ways, share our living spaces, respect our distances,\nnegotiate conflicts, or develop mutual understandings with each other.\nEspecially in alternative worldviews (such as indigenous cosmologies) and lived\nexperiences with other animals, these multispecies worlds already exist in\nplenty. In this thesis, I will develop and further illustrate a framework to\nimagine multispecies worlds. I will do this by connecting a more relational\nunderstanding of our lives with other animals to the development of a\ncounter-concept to speciesism in which we recognize and engage with the ability\nto respond to each other.<\/em>Thereby, this thesis\nanswers to \u2013 and builds on \u2013 various scholarly and activist discourses,\nincluding standpoints from ecofeminism, decolonialism, and critical animal\nstudies, and is theoretically grounded in feminist and postmodernist epistemologies.\nWith a focus on imagining worlds and negotiating possibilities, this\ndissertation is also a work in (interaction) design. The design practice that I\nundertake here is that of tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with\nother animals, and expressing those narratives as a design research program.\nThese responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten\nprotagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of multispecies\nstories. By framing design in this way, I argue that we are able to \u2013 together\nwith other animals \u2013 find possible meanings of multispecies worlds not as a\nsingle (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions and more flexible\ntransformations that are able to permanently unsettle and unmake the established\nspeciesist order.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"