Doing More-Than-Human Research: Developing Qualitative Research Methods for a Multispecies World

Increasingly, qualitative researchers are considering the more-than-humans that Euro-Western social science largely has ignored. But if social science research methods were made for humans, how does one include everything else? In this article, five scholars describe the methodological steps they each have developed. We explore the role of onto-epistemology as an analytical tool to understand relationships between people and food-producing plants in Toronto migrant gardens; the technique of multimodal noticing used to account for animal agency in fieldwork with women who raise small livestock in Egypt; the use of time as a methodological tool to study human-plant relations in German commercial orchards; a methodological praxis that works with posthuman disability studies to become-with a disability event-assemblage; and how to operationalize the notion of ontological multiplicity in ethnographic fieldwork in a case study of a river in Mexico. These ways of conducting research may lead to innovative responses to complex global challenges.