Sensing Multispecies Encounters: Art, Affect, and Ontology in Other-Than-Human Worlds

"Sensing Multispecies Encounters is wonderful in its scope in terms of thinking across species, cultures, landscapes and temporalities. This volume also pushes disciplinary boundaries to include archaeology, anthropology and art, while allowing for different sensorial and multispecies conceptual and methodological approaches". Natsha Fijn, Associate Professor, The Australian National University “This volume re-evaluates long-standing debates on aesthetics from a post-humanist and multispecies standpoint, to offer a powerful and necessary intervention for scholars seeking to move beyond anthropocentric models. The collection senses out the groundwork for acknowledging the agency of non-human beings and shifting paradigms for knowledge production, a worlding characterized by generative relationships, alive with camelids, silver-fish and kangaroos. The book's strength lies in its diverse, intra-active, situated explorations, bridging disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, art, history, and environmental humanities.” Louisa Minkin, Reader Senior Lecturer in Visual Art Practices – University of the Arts London, UK “In the growing movement to extend ways of knowing other-than-humans within various modes of relationality, this theoretically grounded collection brings art, materiality, and performance into clear focus. Its interdisciplinary case studies provide fresh means of conceptualizing how aesthetics can be seen within unfolding relationships across species and among humans, landscapes, and materials. Extending models of (human) cross-cultural aesthetics to include multispecies interactions offers a welcomed and decisive way forward for scholars, educators, and students to explore sensing multispecies encounters.” Gala Argent, Psychology/Animal Studies Faculty Emerita - Eastern Kentucky University, USA “This interdisciplinary collection dismantles nature/culture dichotomies, offering powerful arguments that beauty and aesthetics are not just the purview of human cultural production but generative and relational inter-species contact zones. Complex webs of human-animal relations, art, archeology and storytelling are braided into culturally diverse and transtemporal case studies. From ancient rock art to contemporary artistic practices, these essays are your thinking companions in moving away from the anthropocentric and towards the ecocentric.” Tessa Laird, Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the School of Art -Victorian College of the Arts, Australia