As I walk through my college campus during the start of my final fall semester, I try to pause and pay attention to the things I see around me, and maybe make a new friend. 

The trees and how their leaves sway in the wind. 

The bumblebees who pollinate the blooming flowers.

The duckweed that floats on top of a pond as frogs swim through the water. 

The ways in which I interact with other beings, like the people, plants, animals, shapes life for me here at Wellesley College. It may seem to some that people, like students, faculty, and staff, are at the center of college life. Sure, if I see a friend walking to class, we might wave at each other. Still, there are other beings that also shape my human social world and sense of community as a Wellesley College student.

The tree leaves that sway in the wind provide a pleasant shade to me during the sunny afternoon.

The bumblebees who pollinate help make more flowers that I pick and give to my friends.

The duckweed movement helps me see that the frogs are still around the pond, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to make a frog friend.

These are just a few examples of relationships in my own life and how they affect me. It’s more than just people, but other species and beings. 

Relationships with other species can be investigated through a social science research approach called multispecies ethnography.  This is more than just a way of doing research for people who work in universities, though. It is about rethinking our place in the world and how we relate to the living beings in it, both human and more-than-human beings. It can even shift your mindset of living alongside so much more life than just the people you might speak to everyday. Everyone is capable of doing this kind of work because you start by thinking about yourself.

The multispecies framework decenters human-to-human interactions and demonstrates our connections with other beings within the physical world. Viewed through this lens, the world looks different. People become better community members to the other beings we live alongside as we try to understand what our relationships are to each other. 

Although my relationships with other non-human beings at Wellesley relate to how they help me, there are relationships that are not explicitly extractive or exploitative. I don’t want to take advantage of these relationships, for example, for financial gain. However, that would be an interesting component of a relationship that could be examined in a multispecies framework. Think about your relationship with your pets, the plants outside, the animals that may scurry on the sidewalk, that fungi on a dead tree stump, or what might live within a field of grass. Once you start to see more, you start to wonder more. Maybe you can even make your own frog friend!

As we start to view the world more holistically by taking these multispecies relationships into account, we can start to think and act on pressing issues. For example, if we reflect on a negative relationship with insects and where it comes from, we might start to appreciate their important role in an ecosystem more. This could be a way to start tackling the issue of biodiversity loss as we can see the value of the different species in the world.

I will continue to explore multispecies ethnographic work and themes in different contexts. How can interspecies relationships differ based on human cultures? How do multispecies ethnographers relate to their own research? How does the COVID-19 pandemic affect interspecies relationships? How is multispecies ethnography connected to conceptions of nature? How do these frameworks help us tackle the issue of climate change? I will attempt to answer these questions throughout the semester while continuing to reflect on my own interspecies relationships in order to create a broader understanding of community, nature, and culture within the context of multispecies ethnography.