Welcome!
Multispecies Belongings is an online commons of knowledge and practices, sharing ‘recipes’ for more-than-human belonging. It is a collaborative scrapbook featuring recipes from practitioners across the world.
This online publication is a legacy from the Imagining Multispecies Belonging zine developed as part of the Collective Imagination Practice Community in 2023/24.
Why Multispecies Belongings?
We find ourselves caught within an epoch characterised by an anthropocentric worldview: prevailing myths and practices of individualism amount to little other than a disconnection that threatens us all. Our world can only start healing when we (humankind) begin to unlearn this worldview of human exceptionalism and reclaim our position of interdependency with(in) an agentic, lively and wise more-than-human world.
This publication emerges as an offering to rectify this gap: a collective ‘recipe book’ full of practices for imagining and therefore materialising deeper more-than-human belonging whilst simultaneously recognising the multiplicitious nature of this practice - hence belongings. Collaborators have shared their vital, deep and embodied work towards restoring more-than-human-ness through practices of collective imagination.
How to use the Recipes
Recipes are provided by practitioners as part of an open commons. Each entry invites you, the ‘reader’ to take it out into the world. Use it to develop a practice for yourself and the place-community you are situated within.
You may like to follow the directions precisely on your first go, and then feel free to develop the practice to suit your own body, place, and intentions.
We welcome feedback on recipes, and experiences working with them. Please feel free to share these with us via our Instagram (@multispeciesbelongings).
Offer a Recipe
We invite contributions of radical, creative, experimental and thought-provoking recipes for collective imagination practices that support interspecies and multispecies belonging. Your recipes can be step-by-step instructions, diagrams, or stories—anything that offers a practical guide to enriching collective imaginations about enhanced human-nonhuman relationalities.
Feel free to include photos and drawings alongside words.
Your recipe should be something you are familiar with and have practiced yourself. We hope it can be somewhat precise and may even refer to a particular place, species, event, or happening.
Your recipe should ideally be a maximum of around 1,000 words.
Possible practices for recipes might include:
A walk or movement-based work
Meditation and/or ritual
A drawing exercise
A community initiative
Embodied inquiry
Mapmaking
Herbalism and/or foraging
Speculative fiction and storytelling
You are welcome to submit more than one recipe.
Style and Editoral Notes:
We welcome a multitude of approaches to practice, and with that a multitude of writing styles.
The topic of this publication and other associated themes (more-than-human kinship, posthumanism, new materialism, animal studies, etc.) is the subject of considerable and emergent academic discourse. Whilst we recognise the importance of these extensive domains of theory, this publication is intended to explore how we can apply that theory in practice (or praxis). Therefore, whilst one or two academic references might be deemed appropriate in some cases, recipes should avoid excess usage of theoretical terminology wherever possible. Where it is felt relevant to include such content, we suggest doing so in a footnote.
Recipes should be in written in English, and avoid using links within the text.
We recommend reading other recipes ahead of your submission to get a sense of the type of contributions we are looking to include.
Submission Deadlines:
Recipes are welcomed on a rolling basis, feel free to submit at any time.
Please send your recipes as a Word or Google document to multispeciesbelongings@gmail.com by the deadline listed above.
If including images, please ensure they are provided separately in .jpg or .png format and of high resolution.
We ask that you also include a two-sentence bio, along with one link where readers can find more about you.
