Who We Are

Camille Bellet is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), University of Manchester, and a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Science (2020-2023). Trained as a veterinarian and epidemiologist, she now works at the intersection of sensory studies, STS, and the medical humanities, investigating how sensing practices — seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, moving — constitute knowledge, care, and well-being in human-animal relations. Her research challenges the textual and visual biases that have long dominated more-than-human scholarship, treating the sensorium as a relational field in which humans and non-human animals attune to one another and in which knowledge is made through embodied, situated encounter. She is co-founder and coordinator of the Non-Human Animals in the Medical Humanities Network (NAMHN, 2022), co-investigator on a major SSHRC Partnership Grant on human-animal research and health collaborations (2026-2031), and author of a chapter in An Introduction to Veterinary Humanities (Routledge, 2026). Her current research develops a relational, sensory, and more-than-human approach to the study of human-animal relations and wellbeing, extending critical One Health scholarship and multispecies studies into new empirical, theoretical, and methodological territory.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

What excites me most is the project’s critical interrogation of what counts as evidence of mutualism — and from whose vantage point. I am particularly drawn to the question of how human-animal attunement is perceived, interpreted, and validated across the four case studies: which sensory registers are mobilised to claim mutual benefit, which are dismissed as unreliable or merely subjective, and what those hierarchies reveal about the power relations embedded in claims of mutuality.

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.

Lori Gruen is a leading scholar in Animal Studies and Feminist Philosophy.  She works primarily in ethics and social and poitical philosophy and is a prolific scholar. She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011, second edition 2021), Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015), Animal Crisis (Polity, 2022) co-authored with Alice Crary., Carceral Logics (Cambridge, 2022) co-edited with Justin Marceau, Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), Ecofeminism:  Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury 2014, second edition 2022, co-edited with Carol J. Adams), Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), and others.  Gruen’s work focuses on ethical and political issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional philosophical investigations, e.g. women and other marginalized genders, people of color, incarcerated people, and non-human animals. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics, was a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, is a fellow of the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and was the first and founding chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. Gruen has documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US and has an evolving website that documents the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000.

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I am very excited about thinking more precisely about the nature of human relations with other animals. There is a lot of misunderstanding that has led people to think that these relationships are simple, or one dimensional, but of course relations are complex and our relations with animals particularly so. I think the specific case studies the project will develop allows for a deeper understanding of some of these complexities.

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.

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.

Maisie Tomlinson is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, where she teaches environmental sociology and human-animal relations. Her research explores, through ethnographic engagement, the epistemologies and ontologies of professional animal behaviour experts, and the implications of that knowledge for animal agency, subjectivity, and the human-animal relationship. She is interested in “anthropomorphism”, relationality, the epistemology of science and the role of the “felt sense” in knowledge production, methodologically exploring somatic-emotional experience with techniques taken from performance training. Fascinated by the possibilities of, and problems with, multi-species ethnography, Maisie also developed and leads Adventures in Multi-Species Ethnography, a three-day summer programme in how the experience of nonhuman animals might be more closely attended to.

Her research and teaching interests are informed by professional backgrounds: in theatre and in NGO management and campaigning. Her play, What a Mouse Knows, based on her doctoral research, was produced and performed as part of a 2022 SeNSS ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship; and she is the co-founder and ex-director of animal welfare NGO Crustacean Compassion, which campaigns for the legal protection of decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, prawns, etc)

What aspect of the project interests you the most?

I’m intrigued to see to how narratives of mutual benefits for humans, animals and ecologies play out in such different research sites, with such different inherent objectives. I am also interested in how anthropocentric and nonhuman narratives are negotiated with each other on the ground, and where the tensions are. I’m also looking forward to seeing what methods the team use to explore those negotiations.

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.