Who We Are

Liana Chua is a social anthropologist and Tunku Abdul Rahman Associate Professor in Malay World Studies at the University of Cambridge. She has long-term interests in indigeneity, religion, displacement, environmental change, and more-than-human relations in Malaysian Borneo. More recently, she led the Global Lives of the Orangutan project (ERC), which explored the social, political and affective dimensions of orangutan conservation in the age of the Anthropocene. She and her colleagues have since continued engaging with conservationists, especially through a set of ethnographic resources designed for community engagement teams looking to build their skills in social research and analysis. She is currently developing further research on the politics and imaginaries of indigeneity in the Global South, as well as on the connections between religious conversion and environmental transformations.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

1. Its commitment to critically interrogating ideas and politics of ‘multispecies mutualism’;
2. The fact that its case studies are situated in the UK – we don’t hear enough about mutualisms in our own backyard;
3. Its ambition to radically transform our understandings of mutualism – I can’t wait to see what comes out of it!

Amelia DeFalco is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds. Her research concerns representations of aging, care, technology and the posthuman in contemporary cultural narratives. She is author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State University Press 2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press 2016) and Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (Oxford University Press; winner of the 2023 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize), and co-editor of Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (Palgrave 2018).

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I am especially interested in the project’s commitment to developing frameworks that centre animals in multispecies interactions.

Dr Richard Gorman is Assistant Professor in Ethics and Social Science at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, part of the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton. Rich completed his PhD in human geography at Cardiff University in 2017. This research investigated the social and ethical implications of incorporating animals within various caring and health-promoting practices, exploring how these initiatives might be practiced in ways that could be less demanding of the animals involved and perhaps even ‘mutually’ beneficial. Following this, he moved to the University of Exeter, as a postdoctoral research fellow working with Professor Gail Davies on the Wellcome Trust Animal Research Nexus project exploring practices of patient involvement around animal research. Building on this, Rich’s research has also examined the ethical, regulatory, and social dimensions of animal use within pharmaceutical production and testing, focussing specifically on horseshoe crabs and how myths of mutualism constrict opportunities for replacement with non-animal methods.

What aspect of the project interests you the most? 

The Multispecies Mutualisms project makes an important case for why it is increasingly necessary to pay attention to how claims are made about mutually beneficial relationships. I’m excited by the project’s potential to critically interrogate representations of mutualism and explore asking who gets to decide what is mutually beneficial, and from what vantage point, but also help us to understand how we might challenge these ideas when they become locked in to both popular and scientific imaginations.

Dr Robert G W Kirk is a Reader in Medical History and Humanities based in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester (UK). Rob’s research examines the role of animals in human cultures, particularly science, medicine, and health, with a focus on the animal welfare and the care and use of animals in scientific research. Rob also works on the history of the therapeutic use of animals.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I’m interested in how the project may develop new ways to critically think about how the human-animal relationship, or bond, is understood and aligned with sustaining health and wellbeing. I’m hoping to see connections with my own work on the history of therapeutic uses of animals and excited to see how the interdisciplinary ambition of the project evolves in unanticipated ways and is transformed in practice.

Professor Krithika Srinivasan 

Krithika Srinivasan is Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, degrowth, and human-animal studies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations. A key focus of her scholarship is on decolonising and reconfiguring approaches to multispecies justice. Her research and teaching are deeply rooted in long-term field engagement and praxis in India. Krithika’s most recent project, ROH-Indies, examines people-street dog relationships in India to investigate the conditions for multispecies cohabitation, and to conceptualise the meaning and implications of multispecies health.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I really like the project’s approach of investigating human-animal relationships in four different contexts to explore multispecies mutualism. The breadth of this approach is sure to generate insights through the examination of convergences and divergences across the case studies.

Dinesh Wadiwel is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies at the School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Sydney. Dinesh is an active critical animal studies scholar, and also has extensive research experience in disability rights. He is author of The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and Animals and Capital (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Dinesh is also co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew, of Foucault and Animals (Brill, 2016). Dinesh was also a part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Australian Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I am very excited about the promise of the project in moving beyond current framings – such as One Health and One Welfare – towards forms of reciprocity and understandings of health that prioritise animal interests and rights.