Equally, the notion of a ‘thick contact zone’ is resonant with the dense meanings and feelings that arose from the encounters with wild more-than-human beings. As multispecies research does more broadly, such ‘thick contact zones’ in contained local places open up much broader and more complex questions. These include how we live well with our more than human kin in the Anthropocene, in an increasingly urbanised world and in one where human actions continue to ravage their habitats and means to survive. Donna Haraway describes this as ‘a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present’, which requires ‘staying with the trouble … as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’ (2016, P.1). Though the ‘trouble’ embodied in the sporadic encounters addressed here is small in scale, the feelings and meanings reach out into much wider and more distributed questions about multispecies existence in cities and how we can live well together in such places.
As this outline of some of the key conceptual framings and spurs for this research reveals, it arises from an engagement with and attentiveness to wild nature in city places, particularly local places that I know through repeated and quotidian engagement. It sees value in natural environments and spaces in the city that are not managed and controlled by humans and for humans. More broadly, it views nature in cities as a valuable end point in and of itself, rather than always needing to qualify the value of such spaces in relation to human wellbeing. In paying attention to the wild more than human lives in these local places, I adopt a multispecies approach to our entanglings in moments of ‘thick’ contact and co-presence. This also leads the engagement with these deeply felt but complex, contradictory and ambivalent encounters through creative digital practices. Before exploring the ways of inquiring through practice that have characterised the research, I offer some practical and creative contexts for this project in the next section.
In its affective and longitudinal engagement with wild nature and wild animals in urban spaces, this research draws much from the ‘passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants’ (Van Dooren et. al 2016, p.1) advocated by multispecies scholars and practitioners. A multispecies approach advocates cultivating “arts of attentiveness” in relation to the more than human world, ‘paying attention to others and crafting meaningful response’ (p.1). It also involves attentiveness ‘to the complex ways that we, all of us, become in consequential relationship with others’ (p.3). As outlined in the Key Methods section, my slow but continuous engagement with local urban spaces became ‘enlivened’ through developing ‘attentiveness’ to the happenings of the more than human world. The growth of attentiveness was documented through writing that noted strongly felt encounters with other species over this time and was the starting point of crafting a response to what I experienced.
According to a multispecies approach, these ‘attentive interactions with diverse lifeways’ should involve ‘careful attention to what matters to them’. However, this does not mean adopting ‘an unqualified enthusiasm or support for another’s flourishing’ and can mean immersion in ‘the lives of the awkward, the unloved, or even the loathed’. This process may not result in ‘comfortable and life affirming’ accounts, but it does mean ‘“learning to be affected” and so perhaps to understand and care a little differently’ (p.6). These elements of multispecies studies are particularly significant in this research. As outlined above, I became interested in the ambivalence, complexity and contradictory qualities of my encounters with urban wild nature. They seemed to offer an unsettling sense of the ’distinctive experiential worlds’ we, as humans and more than humans, inhabit within the confines of the human-built city environment.
In addition, and in aligning myself with a multispecies approach, it became important not to try to collapse or ‘flatten’ differences between us, as varied species existing in city spaces. Rather this approach prompted me ‘to pay attention to differences of all kinds as well as to the powerful work that various modes of differentiating and distinguishing do in shaping worlds’. This allows focus on the ‘specificity of lived natural-cultural entanglements in thick contact zones’ (p.13). In this formulation, attentiveness to our different needs and wants allows the asymmetrical power relationships between humans and more-than-humans to be revealed and heightened. These asymmetries or inequalities are particularly stark in the human-made spaces of the city, where the focus is on easing and enabling the passage through the city of humans and vehicles, often to the detriment of other species.