Anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and allied culture workers concerned with more-than-human worlds are adding new tactics to the tool kit of ethnography. Elusive facets of life and emergent dynamics of power demand that we approach multispecies contact zones with new techniques and dispositions. This talk will describe insights gleaned
from microscopy alongside taxonomic experts who bring “species” of microbes into being. Venturing into the social world of wild monkeys in Florida, it will also explore the promise of ethological methods for studying human interactions with animals.

Eben Kirksey is a senior lecturer in the Environmental Humanities program at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Professor Kirksey studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history.  Writing in collaboration with Stefan Helmreich he coined the term "multispecies ethnography" to describe new approaches for studying contact zones where the lines separating nature and culture have broken down.  His latest book, an edited collection called The Multispecies Salon is in the Fall 2014 catalog of Duke University Press. He also holds a three-year DECRA fellowship from the Australian Research Council which is enabling his work in Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific.