Multispecies Mutualisms

This project offers a transformative reimagining of ‘multispecies mutualism’: the conviction that partnerships between humans and animals can underpin mental, physical and material health for all. Despite being associated with reciprocal benefits, lack of critical attention to the way that multispecies mutuality is represented, practised and theorised risks masking harms and inequalities that can emerge from these relations. There is thus an urgent need for fresh interdisciplinary thinking to avoid deepening problematic relationships, and to promote genuinely mutualistic ones. This project meets this need by: 1) examining how multispecies mutualisms are currently conceived, defined and contested in public representations of a healthy life. 2) analysing how competing priorities and understandings of multispecies health are negotiated in practice. 3) developing new theoretical trajectories to identify and overcome potential harms and inequalities. Multispecies Mutualisms is a curiosity-driven project that interrogates representations, practices, and theories of mutualism across four case studies:—nature-cures, ethical dairy production, equine therapy, and hypoallergenic dog breeding—to understand mutualistic relations across individual, social and ecosystemic scales. Bringing together an internationally-renowned research team, and via an innovative combination of social-scientific, humanities-based and creative more-than-human storytelling methods, the project pioneers a bold vision of what multispecies mutualism could be in the future.