Animal Communicators: Intuitive communication as a key to dialogic multispecies methods

Introduction

As the ‘social’ in social sciences is rethought beyond the human, multispecies research across disciplines increasingly asks how to speak with and for non-human others. I pose that intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), a strategy practiced by successful animal communicators to engage in explicit, detailed, two-way communication with non-human animals, holds uncharted resources for doing research with rather than on animals.

Background

Research on IIC has been curtailed to specific domains and mythologized, while the worldwide boom in professional animal communicators has been ignored. ANICOM’s unique engagement with animal communicators’ practical strategies for relating across nature/culture and mind/body dichotomies is groundbreaking in the often largely theoretical discussions of the ontological and species turns.

Objectives

It simultaneously unsettles continued divides between humans and animals as well as dominant and subjugated ways of knowing. The project triangulates:

1. Participant observation
2. Q method
3. Interviews
4. Audio-visual methods (including video-diaries and video-elicitations)

with natural science approaches, to collaboratively work with six expert animal communicators and a variety of animals in Europe and Africa.

Exploration of Concepts

It addresses unexplored possibilities for cross-fertilization between:

• New materialism
• Posthumanism
• Indigenous studies
• Knowledge systems

while relying on the latest insights in biosemiotics and animal cognition.

Innovations

It thus develops transdisciplinary innovations that include non-human animals as full research participants, while achieving a deeper reflexivity on the limitations of humans thinking animals outside the human-animal relationship.

Ultimate Objective

Its ultimate objective is to establish the resources and foundation for dialogic multispecies methods (DMM), a dynamic set of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological approaches and tools to engage with the views, experiences, and knowledges of non-human animals in academia.