Are we really listening to the animal’s point of view? Zoo-ethnographies started out with keynote Lynda Birke

2011-10-18

Yesterday the ongoing humanimal conference Zoo-ethnographies started out with renown professor Lynda Birke who questioned the animal presence in our use of methods.

Lynda Birke, professor in Anthro-zoology at the Department of Biological Science at the University of Chester in UK, talked about the need of rethinking our choice of methods in a way that bring in the animal. She meant that the very use of the word animal, that we talk about humans and animals as a divide, is the first sign of our anthropomorphism.

She also talked about the difficulty of bringing qualitative and quantitative methods into the same study. We often end up using one of them and one of the reasons is that they just don’t fit together. Another reason is the difficulty of publishing a paper using both methods. But, in her own studies of familiar partnerships in human-horses relationships she tries to bring together the qualitative and the quantitative.

Familiar partnerships in horse-human relationships

Through video-observations, observation by participation and measuring the horses’s heart rates and shifts in attention, among other things, she wants to find out if the quality of horse and human working together depends on whether the human is familiar with the horse. By observing both participants, their co-regulation and body languages, she tries to get at the quality of the relationship between horse and human, and to include the horse’s responses.

Despites her attempt to work both quantitatively and qualitatively, she ends up with questioning the presence of animals, in this case horses, in all of this. How much attention is really paid to the horse, as a minded individual? Or to the horse’s relationships? Are we following only human social processes? How much are we really listening to the animal’s point of view?

Methodological challenges

She continues with some current methodological challenges in humanimal studies: How easy is it to bring other animal kinds into zoo-sensitive research? How do we do it multidisciplinarily? Can we really integrate methods? How do we study relationality – or does the observation fix the relationship? Can numbers and words really go together? Where is the researcher in all of this?

Lynda Birke’s inspiring talk pleads us to rethink the use of methods in order to better integrate the animals as present subjects in our research.

Zoo-ethnographies conference

The Zoo-ethnographies conference started yesterday, Monday 17th of October, with keynote speeches by Lynda Birke, Steve Hinchliffe and Eva Hayward, and continues today with Morten Tonnessen and Pär Segerdahl. Zoo-ethnographies examine the challenges and possibilities of methods which work with animal presence and is a pre-conference to the big international conference Minding Animals held in Utrecht, Netherlands, in July next year.

The conference, arranged by the HumAnimal group at the Centre for Gender Research, is held in lecture hall 13:028 at Blåsenhus between 10-12.30. During the afternoon there will be workshops for registered participants.

Read more about the HumAnimal group (Länk borttagen)