Multispecies Intellectual History Future Exploration Workshop – Autumn 2025
A two-day interdisciplinary workshop
1-2 October 2025: Physics Department, University of Oxford
Supported by the Aarhus University Research Foundation
The Workshop Aim
The workshop evaluated the network’s project results to illuminate future developmental avenues—both as a collective of an interdisciplinary team and individuals of disciplinary experts.
To do so, the PI prepared a common paper that theorised multispecies intellectual history’s limits, possibilities, methods, and implications based on case studies we gathered through our collaboration with the journal Arcadia and its Call for Papers. Each participant—coming from varieties of disciplines from physics, geography, archaeology to anthropology, art, and history—responded by addressing what the paper provokes as the most urgent question they think they should be asking right now in their home discipline theoretically, methodologically, empirically, and ethically. The artist Toshiaki Hicosaka facilitate our interdisciplinary discussions further through a ‘bird call’ workshop at the Oxford University park, and the physicist Sonia Contera provided us with an insight into the history and infrastructure of physics research at the Physics Department as an interlude. We concluded the workshop by reflecting on key takeaways, setting concrete steps of publication plans, and clarifying potential future paths.
Participants
Diego Molina (Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London); Jeremy Farr (Anthropology, CSIRO); Rithma Kreie EngelBreth Larsen (Intellectual History, Aarhus University); Sonia Contera (Physics, University of Oxford); Ryan Mealiffe (History, University of Oxford); Hatib Kadir (KITLV, Universiteit Leiden); Amanda Power (History, University of Oxford); Jonatan Palmblad (Rachel Carson Center); Toshiaki Hicosaka; Eiko Honda (Global Studies, Aarhus University)
The workshop was organised by Eiko Honda, Steffen Kloster Poulsen, and Nicolai Lerche in collaboration with Ryan Meallife and Amanda Power.
Ideas behind the aim and process of the workshop were inspired by Helle Strandgaard Jensen, Vladimir Douglas Pacheco, and Ilia Utekhin who advised the PI.
