Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non- Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining idioms of animacy in an age of planetary unmaking

Abstract

Life on Earth is sustained by interconnected more-than-human entanglements. In the era of the Anthropocene, many of these webs are unravelling due to climate change, biodiversity loss, toxicity and pollution, natural resource extraction, and water and soil depletion. In order to help address these challenges, The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human Writing Workshop Series, funded by the British Academy, brought together early career researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and knowledges. As part of The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series, Sophie Chao, presented her collaborative research project, The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Following this presentation, Catherine Price and Sophie Chao took the opportunity to discuss the terms multispecies, non-human, and more-than-human, amongst others. These terms are increasingly appearing in interdisciplinary scholarship in the space of multispecies studies, posthumanism, the environmental humanities and others. The epistemological assumptions and ethical stakes involved in using these terms are also considered. The conversation illustrates that in trying to define terms such as multispecies or the more-than-human, complexities are not explained away. Instead, these terms reveal how incredibly-and generatively-messy beyond-human worlds really are. The terms discussed are also fundamental to understanding and addressing the Anthropocene as an epoch of planetary unmaking.

Full text

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Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non-
Human, Other-Than-Human: Reimagining
idioms of animacy in an age of planetary
unmaking
Catherine Price1 & Sophie Chao2
1School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK; 2Department of
Anthropology, University of Sydney, Australia
Correspondence: 1catherine.price@nottingham.ac.uk;
2sophie.chao@sydney.edu.au
Twitter: 1@catherinejprice; 2@Sophie_MH_Chao
ORCID: 10000-0003-1846-5407; 20000-0002-5434-9238
Abstract
Life on Earth is sustained by interconnected more-than-human
entanglements. In the era of the Anthropocene, many of these webs are
unravelling due to climate change, biodiversity loss, toxicity and pollution,
natural resource extraction, and water and soil depletion. In order to help
address these challenges, The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human
Writing Workshop Series, funded by the British Academy, brought together
early career researchers from different disciplines to share ideas and
knowledges. As part of The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World
Writing Workshop Series, Sophie Chao, presented her collaborative
research project, The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Following this
presentation, Catherine Price and Sophie Chao took the opportunity to
discuss the terms multispecies, non-human, and more-than-human,
amongst others. These terms are increasingly appearing in
interdisciplinary scholarship in the space of multispecies studies,
posthumanism, the environmental humanities and others. The
epistemological assumptions and ethical stakes involved in using these
terms are also considered. The conversation illustrates that in trying to
define terms such as multispecies or the more-than-human, complexities
are not explained away. Instead, these terms reveal how incredibly – and
generatively – messy beyond-human worlds really are. The terms discussed
are also fundamental to understanding and addressing the Anthropocene
as an epoch of planetary unmaking.
Keywords: multispecies; more-than-human; non-human; other-than-
human; assemblages; posthuman; relationality
Funding: See
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Introduction
In the age of the Anthropocene, industrial processes are increasingly
uncoupling life from death, diminishing death’s capacity to channel vitality
back to the living. Colonial-capitalist logics continue to naturalize the
exploitation of natural resources for human ends and the subjection of
humans to racialized hierarchies of worth. Against this backdrop, emerging
posthumanist currents such as the environmental humanities,
multispecies studies, and new materialisms have foregrounded the
entanglements of humans with plants, animals, microbes, and fungi,
whose meaningful lives and deaths are thoroughly, if unevenly,
intertwined with human social worlds. In doing so, these currents invite us
to reframe other-than-human entities as matters of concern and care
within a broader epoch of eco-social unravelling.
In this conversation with , we problematize the empirical and conceptual
strengths and limitations of some key terms deployed within
posthumanist scholarship to characterize planetary lifeforms. These terms
include multispecies, more-than-human, other-than-human, and non-
human. We also offer alternative or complementary idioms of animacy
that can help us grapple with the ontology of planetary lifeforms as world-
dwellers and world-makers. In doing so, we seek to reflect critically upon,
and generatively expand, the ways in which we characterize, represent,
and relate to the diverse beings who together compose the more-than-
human world.
This conversation follows from a seminar delivered by Dr. Chao within The
Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series
(Price & Dennis, 2021), funded by the British Academy and bringing
together early career researchers from different disciplines to share ideas
and knowledges. In her seminar, Dr. Chao presented key findings from The
Promise of Multispecies Justice (Chao et al., 2022), a collaborative research
project that seeks to transform the scope and subject of justice beyond
the individual and the human. In the conversation that follows, Dr.
Catherine Price and Dr. Sophie Chao draw on their respective areas of
existing and emergent research to critically reassess central concepts
within posthumanist scholarship and their relative usefulness in
understanding humans’ situated embeddedness within more-than-human
landscapes.
Dr. Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and
Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Her
research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism,
health, and justice in the Pacific. Dr. Chao is author of In the Shadow of the
Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua (Duke University
Press, 2022), which received the Duke University Press Scholars of Color

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First Book Award in 2021. She is also co-editor, with Karin Bolender and
Eben Kirksey, of The Promise of Multispecies Justice (Duke University Press,
2022). Dr. Chao previously worked for the human rights organization
Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of forest-
dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary lands, resources, and
livelihoods. For more information, please visit
www.morethanhumanworlds.com.
Dr. Price is a Research Fellow in the School of Geography, University of
Nottingham. Her research interests include climate change and just
transitions to low carbon societies, the social and ethical impacts of
agricultural technologies, and relationships between humans and more-
than-human worlds. She leads the British Academy funded project The
Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series.
Thinking with Different Terms
Catherine Price: Hello Sophie and thank you for joining me. First question,
are the terms multispecies, non-human and more-than-human useful in
grappling with matter and agency in beyond-human worlds?
Sophie Chao: Thank you for being in conversation with me, Catherine. The
terms you’ve invoked are prominent within interdisciplinary currents such
as multispecies studies, posthumanism, and the environmental
humanities, that attend to the situated relationships of humans to plants,
animals, microbes, fungi, and other kinds of lifeforms.
Before I share some thoughts on these idioms, allow me to offer a few
important caveats. First of all, I don’t think these terms are in any way
mutually exclusive, let alone exhaustive in characterizing beyond-human
worlds or processes. For this reason, I think it’s important to bear in mind
the context within, and the audiences for whom, we deploy these idioms
as scholars, as this can help us decide which might be more pertinent,
accurate, generative, or simply intelligible in any given setting.
Secondly, it’s worth bearing in mind that these terms each derive from
particular intellectual genealogies, disciplines, and theorists. In using one
idiom over another, one can sometime tether oneself to a particular
trajectory of thinking. There’s nothing wrong with that – but it’s important
to understand where and how the terms we use came into being.
And finally, while words and language certainly matter in the way they
inflect or direct attention to particular objects of inquiry, I think it’s
important not to get too caught up in terminology. What matters more is
the difference these differences make – in other words, what light they
shed on beyond-human realities, and what they might silence or obscure

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in the process. With that, let’s start by thinking about the term
multispecies.
The term multispecies was coined by feminist theorist and Science and
Technology Studies scholar Donna Haraway in her seminal book, When
Species Meet (2008). Multispecies is helpful in that it does not centre or
take the human as its primary referent in the way ‘non-human’ or ‘more-
than-human' do. In that regard, the term could be said to push against
notions of human exceptionalism or anthropocentrism that are central
within many dominant Western epistemologies. Instead, and as the term
implies, multispecies draws attention to the ‘species’ as a potentially more
generative unit of analysis – including the human as a species. It
foregrounds the diversity or multiplicity of organisms that humans
become-with and, who also themselves have biological, cultural, historical,
and political lives (Van Dooren et al., 2016). We're talking animals, plants,
microbes, viruses, and fungi – the diverse array of critters that humans
unevenly share the planet with.
The term more-than-human has a rather different point of origin – namely,
a science fiction novel by American writer Theodore Sturgeon (1953),
titled More Than Human. It has since been widely picked up by scholars in
the social sciences and humanities. For me, more-than-human is
generative in the way it engages with the idea of ‘more than’. Why is that
generative? Well, because one of the central drives of multispecies or
posthumanist literature is to move away from the paradigm of human
exceptionalism, or the idea that humans are somehow superior to or more
worthy than other kinds of lifeforms. More-than-human, on the other
hand, invokes a counter-ethos of humility – one that challenged the
primacy of superior human worth or value. Rather, it acknowledges the
existence of a diversity of beings that together participate in the making
of our multiplicitous and ongoingly transforming worlds (Tsing, 2014). In
other words, there are always more than (just) human actors and agencies
involved in the production of landscapes and communities. The term
more-than-human thus invites an ethical or reflexive reckoning with our
relative positionality within a broader spectrum of life that I've always
found quite attractive as a theoretical stance, and also as a philosophy of
life and co-existence (Chao & Enari, 2021).
The term non-human is still widely used in the social sciences and
humanities, as a kind of blanket term for all organismic lifeforms situated
outside the human category. But I think many scholars are turning away
from this framing and towards multispecies or more-than-human because
of the problematic dichotomy at the heart of non-human. To describe
someone as non-human is a bit like describing a woman as non-man, or
black as non-white, or nature as non-culture. We’re creating a binary that

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replicates precisely the kind of dichotomies of nature/culture, body/mind
etc., that posthumanist scholarship is trying to push against. Binaries are
problematic in that they often tend to flatten the multiplicity or the
diversity internal to any particular construct or category. The human, for
instance, is a diverse composite of cultures, societies, bodies, relations
norms and practices. And the non-human encompasses a whole array of
different plants, animals and other kinds of organisms. Each of these
beings are equipped with their own specific affordances, attributes and
agencies. It is often these specific differences that matter most – and a
blanket term like ‘non-human’ struggles to capture such complexities.
Price: I completely agree with you on all counts. The difficulty I have with
the term multispecies is how to consider the non-living. For example, soil
consists of minerals as well as living organisms. I struggle with the idea of
multispecies for soil, rivers or water. If you bring in technologies,
algorithms and artificial intelligence into the mix as I have with my work,
you’ve got additional non-biological connections to consider. For me, I find
more-than-human easier to think with.
Chao: Although the titles of some my recent publications might suggest
otherwise, I too am very much shifting away from multispecies to more-
than-human idioms in part for precisely the reason that you've invoked.
Even as a multispecies framing seeks to expand the scope of subjects
beyond the human, it still restricts itself to what dominant secular
scientific frameworks consider as bios or the biological. More-than-human
invites us to think beyond bios and to incorporate and accommodate
exactly the sort of range of actors that you're describing – actors that don't
fit within the boxes and boundaries of bios per se, but that are nonetheless
animate, agentive, and consequential in their own kinds of ways. These
entities include soils, water, fire, mountains, glaciers, technologies and
data, but also all kinds of transcendent entities, who also matter in
Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies, including spirits,
ancestors, ghosts, ghouls and the deceased. All of these other entities are
also co-shapers of our situated worlds. When approached from this angle,
the range of actors who participate in making worldly stories and storied
worlds multiplies. I'm totally on the same page as you on this point.
Another thing to be aware of in using multispecies – and part of the reason
why I myself don't use the term much anymore – is the notion of ‘species’
inherent to this framing. The construct of species draws from a very
particular genealogy and epistemology – that of dominant secular
scientific traditions and frameworks. Linnean taxonomies and systems of
classification are themselves very much tethered to colonial and imperial
practices of ordering the world, that were driven by a desire to better
understand this world in order to better exploit it. I think it’s really

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important to be conscious of this colonial past and its legacies, as they
manifest in the classificatory schemes we have inherited and that we often
take for granted rather than question. For me, the move away from
‘multispecies’ is in large part driven by the fact that I work with Indigenous
Peoples in Papua who do not speak of, or story, lifeforms through the
notion of species as categories, but rather through lifeforms’ distinctive
relations to other kinds of lifeforms, as well as with elements and
ecosystems (Chao, 2022a). These Indigenous epistemologies, for me, offer
far more capacious and relational ways of thinking about life than a
species-specific, taxonomic framing. I’m not suggesting that these two
ways of understanding other-than-human beings are necessarily mutually
exclusive or incompatible. But I think it matters that we reflect critically on
the premises, assumptions, and histories that undergird the systems of
classification and identification we choose to rely upon and deploy in our
analyses.
Price: What other terms do you think we could use instead?
Chao: That’s a great question. It reminds me of Anna Tsing, Marisol de la
Cadena, and others’ invitation to play with unruly grammars in this epoch
of planetary undoing – to creatively use words in the wrong context in
order to generate surprise and the unexpected. Anna Tsing (2013)
describes this as catachresis. While I don’t think all of our intellectual
energies should be invested in debates over terminology or the coining of
neologisms, experimenting with language can play an important part in
generating alternative ways of understanding our identities and
relationships to beyond-human lifeforms in this age of ‘self-devouring
growth’.
One term I increasingly use myself is other-than-human – including,
notably, in lieu of more-than-human. As critical race scholars have pointed
out, to invoke the hierarchizing idiom of more-than-human when talking
about plants and animals can problematically obscure the fact that many
human communities across the world, historically and in the present,
continue to be treated as sub-human, less-than-human, or even non-
human under entrenched racializing assemblages (Weheliye, 2014). I use
other-than-human rather than more-than-human to avoid replicating
these hierarchies of worth – hierarchies that find root in imperial-colonial
logics and that operate not just across species lines, but also within the
very construct of the human, determining who is deemed killable,
disposable, or non-grievable (Butler, 2010; Wynter, 2003).
Another term that is good to think with is multi-being. This term was
coined by my colleague Sue Reid at the University of Sydney (Celermajer
et al., 2020). The reasons I find it useful hark back to your earlier comment
about the exclusions of certain kinds of actors, animacies and agencies in

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the multispecies framing. Multi-being is a more encompassing way of
thinking about elements, infrastructure and technologies as things that
are, that become and that belong, in different ways across space and time.
Multi-being, as such, expands ontology and epistemology beyond a
biocentric angle and makes space for all these other kinds of protagonists.
The term multi-world, articulated by my collaborator Michael Marder – a
philosopher of plants at the University of the Basque Country, Vitoria-
Gasteiz – offers another generative pathway for grappling with beyond-
human realities (Chao, Bolender, and Kirksey, 2022). Thinking with worlds
invites us to think not just with entities, but with relations. This includes
relations within worlds, but also relations across worlds and the plurality
of worlds that humans and other-than-human beings inhabit. The world
angle is really fascinating because it brings up all kinds of questions about
whose world counts, or who counts in the world (Chao, 2022b). Where do
different worlds rub up against each other, and what kinds of frictions arise
between these different worlds? Can we ever really claim to be able to
enter the perceptual lifeworld of a plant or an animal? All kinds of
interesting ethical, methodological, and political questions come into the
mix when we start to think with worlds and worldings, and more broadly,
with this spatio-temporal epoch of planetary unworlding that has come to
be known as the Anthropocene.
As for other terms, a lot of my research has centred on understanding the
idioms, perspectives and experiences of the people who are themselves
living at the very heart of ecological devastation. Over the course of long-
term immersive participant-observation and ethnographic fieldwork on
the West Papuan plantation frontier, I’ve had the privilege to think with
and learn from the Indigenous Marind Peoples, who have their own,
incredibly rich, grammars for describing or storying what we might call a
plant, an animal, a species, or an ecosystem. Marind talk about shared skin
or wetness. They speak about a shared vitality or animacy or energy that
binds different lifeforms across their different skins and bodies. One of my
go-to moves as an anthropologist has been to stick to emic terms, or terms
that are used by people themselves in the field and in everyday life. I try
to bring those terms into conversation with conceptual or theoretical
idioms that are used in the scholarly space. Bringing these diversely
situated terminologies and grammars into the mix can help push against
the colonial and extractive approach to knowledge production that
continues to dominate in much of the academic world – by this I mean an
approach that assumes that theory is produced by and for the Global
North, based on realities that somehow just ‘happen’ in the Global South
(Stewart-Harawira, 2013). It’s also an approach that speaks to my own
sense of accountability and responsibility towards the people whose
worlds I’m trying to understand and whom I’ve had the gift to learn from.

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Who or what we see ourselves as responsible towards, of course, will differ
according to one’s field site, interlocutors, and objects of inquiry. But I
think it’s an important question to ask ourselves in deciding which idioms
we deploy in our analyses.
Price: Yes, that’s very important. We should be using terms that are used
by our interlocutors – including in your case, by Indigenous peoples.
The other term I’ve used is assemblage. In my article, Covid-19: When
Species and Data Meet (Price, 2020), I examined human-virus-data
relations. I used the example of contact-tracing apps to examine how
species meet and intra-act. In this article, I argued that when we have
intra-actions between humans, other biological entities, and the digital,
the concept, postdigital hybrid assemblage could be usefully adopted. I
wanted to show that technologies are becoming more prevalent in society,
and this often occurs before debates and conversations have taken place
concerning their introduction. I discussed how these debates and
conversations are needed in order to ensure social justice and multispecies
ecojustice are implemented. This enables a fair and just world for all.
Chao: Yes, assemblages are really good to think-with because they open
space for analyzing constellations of persons, practices, ideas, movements,
things, commodities, and affects. For me, the question of assemblages has
always been following Marilyn Strathern (1996), where do you cut the
network? There is a rhizomatic tendency with assemblage-thinking to
travel down countless capillaries of connections, in ways that can end up
making you feel somewhat overwhelmed. In a world where everything is
entangled, where do you stop with the connections and with the
connecting, and why? These are all important questions to ask ourselves.
Price: Yes, that's something I have trouble with. As you’re discussing
connections, this brings me on to the next question. Can we actually define
multispecies, non-human, more-than-human, or any other terms that we
wish to use, or is the world just too entangled and complex?
Chao: For many of us working in the posthumanist space, the ethical drive
to centre multispecies, non-human, or more-than-human idioms stems
from the fact that countless lifeforms are deeply and interestingly
vulnerable to and threatened by anthropogenic industrial activities across
the planet. There’s an ethical urgency to attend to the situated lifeways
and deathways of these diverse beings and the implications of our actions
on their flourishing and continuity, both in the present and in the future.
That's one side of the story.
For me, uncovering and understanding the complex entanglements of
humans and other-than-humans is not an attempt to explain those
complexities away. Instead, it is an invitation to stay with the trouble of

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living and dying in incredibly messy worlds – worlds of unevenly
distributed justice and injustice and worlds that continue to be profoundly
governed by the dominant logic of anthropocentricism and human
exceptionalism. One way I've tried to work around the issues of complexity
and entanglement is to think with situatedness. This is a concept that
Donna Haraway (1988) and many other feminist theorists have brought to
the conversation. Situatedness draws attention to the specificity of ways
in which different people become-with and understand other-than-human
beings in particular places, at particular times, in the context of particular
material and ideological assemblages. Situatedness is therefore a
wonderful optic for an anthropologist and ethnographer like myself who
is interested in the nitty gritty and the granularity of the field, within
specific locales, where relations of interspecies care and violence are
integral to everyday life.
Another concept that is good to think with is relationality – although I
should say that relationality is by no means a way out of the complexity
we’re discussing! If anything, it's an invitation to dig deeper into that
complexity. Alongside the work of many influential Indigenous scholars
who continue to inspire my thinking (Kimmerer 2013; Todd 2017; Winter
2022), I find science and technology studies expert Karen Barad's (2007)
concept of intra-action is helpful in working through questions of
relationality. Barad offers the concept of intra-action to examine relations
between space, time and matter. Intra-action differs from interaction in
the sense that it assumes that things or entities don't exist before they
come into relation with one another. We're very much pushing against a
static, objectifying logic here. Instead, we're fully delving into the relation
itself as what matters, and as what needs to be healed or transformed in
some way to counter assumptions of human individuality and autonomy
from the more-than-human world. That’s why thinking through relations
is also a great place to start – even if one never knows where exactly one
will end up!
Another way of working through the complexity is to follow the life of
beings or commodities across time and space. This is something I've done
a lot with palm oil, which is a plant, a cash crop, and also a global
commodity (Chao, 2022b). What I try to do in my research is to trace how
this entity transforms from seed to plant to product to commodity, to
trace the imaginaries and discourses that surround it, and to identify the
ethical, environmental, and economic stakes involved in its cultivation and
commodification. Thinking through dispersion as much as through
diffraction and refraction helps me approach this complexity from
different angles. Often, the results can be inconclusive - and by necessity,
in the sense that they refuse to reduce complex, situated processes to any
single reality. This way of thinking can be very useful in staying with the

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messiness of what it means to live well with others, both human and other-
than-human.
Price: Yes, I’m trying to use Karen Barad’s work currently to think through
connections with my research on biochar. Biochar looks a lot like charcoal
although it is very different. Biochar is produced by heating organic
material such as wood or straw to a very high temperature with limited
oxygen. The material produced (biochar) locks away any carbon that was
present in the organic material it was produced from. Biochar can be
applied to soil where it is stores carbon for hundreds, possibly thousands
of years. There are lots of intra-actions between the biochar, minerals
present in soils, micro-organisms, earthworms, bacteria, and viruses. I find
Barad’s work very helpful for thinking through intra-actions but it can
become very entangled and messy. And it can be difficult to decide where
and when to stop following the intra-actions.
Chao: It’s exhilarating to start a new project and follow all these different
connections. In part it’s exciting because you discover unexpected links
between your research and your own everyday life and consumer
practices, all of which are important to reckon with and part of the story.
The question of where to cut the network is, to some extent, a practical
decision in that it depends on the time and resources available to you. But
it’s also a political and ethical question. Where one draws the boundaries
and why also merits discussion and critical reflection. On a related note,
whilst Karen Barad’s work on intra-actions was very helpful for me in
thinking with relations, I also had to constantly remind myself that even as
everything might come into being through relations, not all relations are
good (Govindrajan, 2018; TallBear, 2022). This fact can sometimes get a
little bit lost in multispecies scholarship that shrouds intra-species
emergence in a warming aura of generativity, love, or care. Whilst love and
care are certainly part of the picture, they are often not the whole story.
We have to remind ourselves that not all relations are life-sustaining for
everyone involved. Instead, we might follow Susan Leigh Star (1991) and
ask ourselves: who benefits from more-than-human entanglements?
Price: Yes, I definitely agree with you. Who benefits or loses from more-
than-human entanglements is vitally important. This leads on to my next
question. How can we talk or write about multispecies, the non-human, or
more-than-human without favouring humans?
Chao: There are multiple ways I could answer this question. The first thing
I want to say is that when we talk about favouring humans it’s important
to distinguish between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. These
two terms often get glossed over, and there's a lot of slippage between
them in the literature. Anthropocentrism comes with an assumption of

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hierarchies of worth and value, wherein everything is calculated with the
human as the central and primordial reference point. Anthropomorphism
is different as it speaks to a projection or identification of sameness with
other-than-human beings. This can be in morphological terms or in terms
of agencies or desires and so forth. Many Indigenous and other non-
Western cultures do engage in anthropomorphization in the sense that
there is often an identification of shared traits across humans, animals,
and plants, but, importantly, without the hierarchies of consequent worth
or value that tend to accompany anthropocentrism. I think it’s important
to start by figuring out which dynamic is at play in the settings we are
researching, and to avoid the dangerous equation of anthropocentrism
with anthropomorphization.
The second question for me is whether it is even possible – or desirable –
to attempt to write about other-than-humans without favouring human
perspectives from the outset. How, for instance, can we every really know
other-than-human lifeworlds given our particular affordances and
capacities as human beings? Can we even begin to imagine empathy with
animals when their perceptual bubbles are often beyond our sensory and
cognitive grasp? These questions become even more tricky in the context
of plants as beings who embody a really quite radical alterity when
compared to humans and animals. Embracing humility, relinquishing
epistemic mastery, and accepting the unknowability of other-than-human
beings is thus a central dimension of storying more-than-human
entanglements. By this I mean we need to acknowledge the limits of our
capacity to know our other others. This constitutes a form of respect for
alterity and for differences that can sometimes be insurmountable or
incommensurable (Chatterjee & Neimanis 2020).
The third thing I'd say is that this question of how to write without
favouring humans cannot be dissociated from the question of which
humans we are favouring. Here, we're going back to the question of race,
of cultural difference, of the sorts of entrenched regimes of discrimination
that continue to plague our world. In exploring more-than-human worlds,
we need to ask ourselves: which human stories are we backgrounding or
foregrounding in our narratives? Whose voices get obscured or silenced in
the process? What kinds of hierarchies of power are our stories either
pushing against, or unwittingly replicating? And how do we position
ourselves reflexively as scholars within these existing power dynamics?
Another important thing to bear in mind is to avoid reducing or flattening
any particular human society or culture or groups’ understanding of the
more-than-human world. For instance, to essentialize Indigenous
epistemologies as singular and static is to do immense violence to the
complex heterogeneity and internal differences that operate within these

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societies across gender divides, across class divides, across rural and urban
divides, and more. These internal differences may profoundly shape the
ways in which particular individuals and groups within any community
understand and engage with more-than-human worlds and relations.
The final thing I want to offer here goes back to the question of
connections and relations. One productive way to avoid recreating
hierarchies of favouritism in the stories we tell is to adopt more-than-
human, multi-sited and multi-actor approaches to whatever entity or
relation we are studying. But of course, that's also a political decision. The
stories I've told, for instance, primarily centre Indigenous perspectives and
experiences, and there are political and ethical reasons why I do that.
Donna Haraway (2016) talks about stories storying stories and worlds
worlding worlds. She reminds us that storying is always an ethical and
political choice. Choices are shaped by all kinds of different factors –
personal, intellectual, institutional, and political. To engage with that
question of the choices we make in the stories we tell is of fundamental
importance. It shouldn’t take the form of a tokenistic paragraph on
positionality, buried somewhere in a footnote. Rather, it should be a
recurring motif or tenet that runs across and throughout our analysis. This
allows the reader to stay with the kind of troubles and questions that the
answers one offers often inevitably – and generatively – raise.
Price: What you’ve just been discussing makes me think about objects.
Noortje Marres work on material participation examines engagement with
everyday objects. In Material Participation: Technology, the Environment
and Everyday Publics, Marres (2015) discusses carbon accounting devices,
and eco-homes. This work shows how everyday items, devices, and
environments have the capacity to engage and to mediate involvement
with public affairs. I think centring on the object being investigated is a
useful approach to think through connections, and to bring those
connections into discussions.
Chao: Yes, absolutely. Jane Bennett's (2010) work on vibrant matter has
certainly been influential to my own thinking with and about everyday
objects. The everydayness you’re invoking really matters for those of us
working on questions of climate change or the planetary crisis – both of
which constitute what Timothy Morton (2013) calls hyperobjects. In many
ways, climate change and planetary unravelling exceed the scales of
human perception and understanding. How, then, do we avoid the
paralysing politics of despair that can arise in these times of seemingly
insurmountable crisis? One way is to take as one’s starting point the
everyday and the seemingly mundane. Doing so opens space for tracing
the roots or the rhizomes of our situated connections to seemingly out-of-
the-way places, and to plants, animals, and ecosystems inhabiting these

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seemingly remote places, whose fates and futures we are all more or less
implicated in through our everyday practices as consumers and as dwellers
of an increasingly vulnerable planet.
Alongside everyday objects and practices, one can take as one’s starting
point one’s own body. This is something I was enskilled in through the
mentorship of my Indigenous companions in West Papua, who taught me
how to harness my senses to become aware of, to attune to, or to simply
notice everything that's going on around us in this richly diverse more-
than-human world. Cultivating this kind of bodily and kinesthetic
attunement or engagement is central to the ethos of passionate
immersion invoked by Anna Tsing (2011) and others (e.g., Manulani Aluli-
Meyer, 2001). It is also something that Karen Barad has articulated in
describing justice as something ‘one must ask over and over again with
one's body’ (Barad, 2017: 85). I love the idea of starting from the everyday
– including from one’s own corporeality and the multiple, entangled
realities that this corporeality is always already part of and ongoingly
producing.
Price: Yes, I think if we all thought with our bodies more maybe we would
be in a better position than we are now with the climate crisis and the
biodiversity crisis. We should all be paying more attention to the worlds
around us.
Chao: Absolutely. As my Papuan friends would consistently exhort me,
stop writing, start walking, stop thinking, start listening!
Price: Good advice! My final question is how can we take our work forward
with the terms multispecies, more-than-human, or other-than-human?
Chao: I think we urgently need interdisciplinary approaches to better
grapple with the kinds of complex linguistic, epistemological, ontological,
ethical, methodological, and representational questions that we’ve
discussed today. More specifically, I think we need an interdisciplinary
approach that is synthetic and transformative, rather than purely additive
or complementary. By this I mean a kind of interdisciplinarity that engages
with other fields in order to rethink the premises and assumptions
underlying the diverse ways we ourselves approach, understand, and act
upon the more-than-human world based on our own disciplinary trainings.
Such an interdisciplinary practice might encourage us to reconsider the
questions we believe matter – why, in whose interests, and with what
intended or contingent effects. In addition, I think interdisciplinary
conversations can be further enriched through iterative dialogue beyond
the realm of academia – for instance, with activists, practitioners, and
artists. For me, these kinds of engagements are key to imagining and
enacting a different commons – or rather, to commoning otherwise. This

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is exactly what I've been trying to do with my More-Than-Human World
website which showcases the voices, knowledges, stories, and practices of
activists, artists, and academics who are all trying to work in one way or
another in reimagining more-than-human relations on this wounded
planet.
i
Participating in and creating space for these kinds of
interdisciplinary conversations is immensely rewarding because it fosters
a vital sense of community and companionship in the midst of increasingly
troubled times.
Acknowledgements
The Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing Workshop Series
was generously funded by the British Academy (Grant number
KFSSFKNAW\100008). Thank you to Dr Gareth Johnson, Editor-in-Chief at
Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, for his insightful and
helpful comments.
Catherine Price is a Research Fellow in the School of
Geography, University of Nottingham. Her research
interests include climate change and just transitions
to low carbon societies, the social and ethical impacts
of agricultural technologies, and relationships
between humans and more-than-human worlds. She
leads the British Academy funded project The
Anthropocene and More-Than-Human World Writing
Workshop Series.
Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher
Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at
the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the
intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism,
health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie is author of In
the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human
Becomings in West Papua (Duke University Press,
2022) and co-editor of The Promise of Multispecies
Justice (Duke University Press, 2022) with Karin
Bolender and Eben Kirksey. Sophie previously worked
for the human rights organization Forest Peoples
Programme in Indonesia, supporting the rights of
forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their customary
lands, resources, and livelihoods. For more
information, visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com.

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Endnotes
i
See Dr Chao’s website here: https://www.morethanhumanworlds.com/
To cite this article:
Price, C., & Chao, S., 2023. Multispecies, More-Than-Human, Non-Human,
Other-Than-Human: Reimagining idioms of animacy in an age of planetary
unmaking. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 10(2), 177-
193. Available at: https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v10i2.1166.