The Reclaiming “Turtles All the Way Down” Working Group is hosting a monthly reading group that explores past, present, and emergent methodologies for studying human:species encounters. Building on interdisciplinary engagements with non-humans in history, anthropology, and allied disciplines, we will discuss readings that direct a focus upon interactions among humans, plants, animals, and other facets of the ecological world and how these are constitutive of cosmological understandings. We want to understand how historians and other scholars have described the endurance of these relationships over time, and how people have navigated uneasy relationships through articulation of human:animal relations in particular. The readings will explore themes like indigenous science, conservation biology, and pluriversal thinking, and methods to study these such as oral history, story-telling, visual, and material culture.

Our special guest will be Peichao Qin, a doctoral student in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, who will chat to us about turtles used as oracle bones in Late Shang China. We are excited for this opportunity to exchange about our research projects! Background reading on the Jingyuan Digital Platform is here.

Our reading selection for this session is Vandecasteele, Marieke, Inge G. E. Blockmans, and Elisabeth De Schauwer. “Taking Turtle Time: About Entanglements of Thinking, Making and Doing in Research-Creation Practices.” Critical Arts 36, no. 1–2 (March 4, 2022): 81–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2022.2117834.