On 25th April 2025, one of our PAWWS members, Linda Tallberg was invited to participate and share her throughs in a panel at the ‘Transdisciplinary approaches to multispecies justice research workshop’ at Oulu University (Finland) organized as part of the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program 2025 Thematic Semester “Research and Learning Paths in the Anthropocene” and hosted by researchers from the AniMate Research Collective who work in different multispecies research projects: MUST: Enabling Multispecies Transitions in Cities and Regions, (Maria Saari), Fellow Feelings (Marina Pliushchik) and HOMINGS (Kristina Vitek).
The panel included Kristian Brevik (University of Vermont in environmental humanities, ecology, arts-based approaches), Verónica Policarpo (Human-Animal Studies Hub, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon in sociology, animals in disasters, HAS), Kimberley Graham (IUCN & Co-creating Art with Nature an environment specialist in policy, law, arts), Pauliina Rautio (University of Oulu in multispecies education and transdisciplinary approaches) and PAWWS member, Linda Tallberg (University of Lapland, The Multidimensional Tourism Institute in the Faculty of Social Science).
The panellists discussed how they understand multispecies justice research and what sparked their interest in the field of multispecies research, the themes or questions that their diverse research focuses on, the frameworks and methods they use with a particular weight on art-based practices or alternative framings how to include animals more, and what potential real-world implications / impacts they hope their research to have.
The panellists shared their diverse work such as Kimberly, an interdisciplinary scientist, environment and climate-ocean law specialist who has created ‘Co-Creating Art with Nature’, an initiative to inspire and empower partnerships with water through a blend of science, mindfulness, and art, while improving individual, multi-species and planetary health and wellbeing; Verónica who leads projects on crisis and disaster management in Australia, Brazil and Portugal particularly in relation to fires, entangled risks to humans and animals in disasters and what we can learn from animals in terms of resilience and healing; Pauliina who leads multiple projects as well such as the Research Council of Finland funded AniMate project explores everyday life processes of becoming and being human with other animals, combining ecological citizen science with multispecies education, utilising multispecies methodologies including collaborations with artists working on science fiction literature, dance or fine arts; Kristian who works in ecological and evolutionary science and focuses on building kinship with other species (including human-insect relations), creating large installation artworks, such as “ghost lanterns” as an interactive memorial for species who have been lost or are in decline due to human activity; and Linda who works at the intersection of organization and tourism studies focusing on creating multispecies inclusivity in business, management and organizational theorizing, practice and teaching, particularly through Animal Organization Studies, arts-based methods and understanding the entangled nature of human-animal suffering in organizations such as animal shelters.
After the panel there was a learning lab where the audience both online and onsite participated in groups to discuss human-animal relational dilemmas and issues. The discussions were lively and engaging with many core learnings such as cultural differences in recognizing animal suffering (we had individuals from diverse countries such as the Philippines and Morocco in addition to Finland), field specific differences (our specialisations ranged from palaeontology, organization and tourism studies, education to bioenvironmental studies), how to speak to animals and think about them – especially those considered ‘pests’ or caged animals, how there is basically no pure wilderness anymore as humans effect virtually every space on the planet, and many more insights.
Image: Linda Tallberg
The afternoon session included an interesting keynote presentation by Krithika Srinivasan, who works in political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies at the University of Edinburgh. Krithika spoke about conservation beyond biopolitics specifically developmentality and animals using a thought experiment from her studies with free-roaming dogs in India as part of the Remaking One Health India initiative where they create decolonial approaches to how humans co-exist with animals. The session, which was organized by the Eudaimonia Institute at the University of Oulu (who focuses on supporting research across human and other sciences) attracted the biggest audience in the Institute’s history showing how interest in human-animal relations and multispecies justice has become popular across a wide range of disciplines.
The conversations and learnings were profound, requiring time to digest properly. The key take-away for Linda was hope because of the energy and passion of the diverse scholars interested in working for a more just multispecies world that includes humans and other species (or ‘other beings’ as was pointed out is perhaps a better phrase). As Martha Nussbaum (2022, p. 314) writes in Justice for Animals, ‘ours is a time of great awakening: to our kinship with a world of remarkable intelligent creatures and to real accountability for our treatment of them’.
Author
Linda Tallberg, Senior Lecturer, University of Lapland