What comes to mind when you think of research? 

Do you think of test tubes in a lab? Collecting water samples from a lake? Maybe conducting a survey? What about creating and sharing knowledge through story-telling?

Telling stories is exactly what The Creature Collective does within academia.

The Creatures Collective is a group of scholar-activists founded in 2016 who are concerned with earth violence*. They create knowledge through manifesting, or story-telling. They are especially concerned with the impacts of colonialism, which has created a lot of the institutions that we operate within today, such as the universities that these scholars work within. 

Nowadays, you might hear the word, manifesting, as a way to speak your future into existence. Personally, I’m manifesting a smooth and successful senior year of college. Or, you might even think of that new TV show — Manifest — on NBC.

A recent article in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space makes clear why the manifestings of Collective members are so important. Their manifestings are narratives that describe their connections to the world around them. 

These manifestings serve the purpose of documenting information about the human experience in relation to other beings referred to as creatures. The Creatures Collective take a broad and flexible approach to non-humans , which can take the form of “spirits, energies, places, dreams, and most importantly in the entanglements that make it impossible to say definitively where one creature ends and another begins.” Instead of reducing these beings to plants or animals, they see them as more-than-human beings.

The ultimate purpose of all of these manifestings? To interrogate what is commonly known as extinction.

*Extinction, referred to by the Collective as earth violence, has been caused primarily by Euro-Americans as a result of capitalism and the exploitation of the environment due to colonialism. 

The authors define earth violence as “the destruction of more-than-human beings through forms of violence such as colonization, extractive capitalism, and global patterns of racism.” They push back against using the term extinction because those conversations focus on saving a species, which dismisses the complex more-than-human relationships that shape the world.  Words matter, and as we start to understand the root of the issue, we allow for a less Eurocentric telling of earth violence.

For example, one of the manifestings within the article is by Collective member, June Mary Rubis, an environmental conservationist whose work is based in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, and unceded Gadigal territories that are also referred to as Sydney, Australia.

Rubis’ manifesting, titled “transformations”, focuses on her own experiences growing up and the way that a stream and her home has changed over time. Her family would take her to this stream as a child, one her father was connected to in his childhood with many plants and animals. There was a transformation of the green, lush home that Rubis once knew into a semi-industrial area.

I think that change is simultaneously one of the best and scariest aspects of life — either way, it is unavoidable. The way a special place for Rubis ‘transformed’ over time demonstrates how change can be potentially harmful, as the creatures like turtles and fish that she once treasured disappeared with her neighbors blocking drains, and the overall industrialization of her home.

I call Queens, NY home, unceded Rockaway and Munsee Lenape land. I have noticed the ways that people’s attitudes and actions towards other creatures has also transformed the place I used to know. One of my neighbors paved over their yard.  Now there are much fewer insects… I don’t miss all the mosquitoes, but who is pollinating our garden?

The changes and transformation that both Rubis and I have noticed in our own experiences reflect the relationships we have with the world around us. These changes in this case have been detrimental to the ecosystems and creatures around us, tying back to the Collective’s concern with earth violence.

Personal experience is not traditionally incorporated as valid in academic research, but these manifestings demonstrate the power of story-telling in speaking about relationships to creatures within academia. All of the manifestings in the article speak to the authors’ positionalities, which is how their identities and lived experiences affect the observations they make and the knowledge they create. 

Manifestings, as a means of research, allow for an accessible and inclusive way to speak about relationships with beings other than people, especially in light of earth violence. They show how people are connected to the world they live in, combatting typical narratives of the world. The Creatures Collective sees storytelling as a crucial tool in the fight against earth violence.