Birmingham Multispecies Forum

The Birmingham Multispecies Forum is a research collective which includes academics, artists, activists and practitioners. Our work together focusses on listening and communication across forms of difference and we explore these things through speculative field experiments. The forms of difference in our team and among the creatures we co-research with are various, arising from unique aspects of our bodily form and/or cultural location. The tools we use are various as well. You can read a bit more about the traditions of thought members of our research team are engaged with in deployment and critical refinement on a separate page of this website. A crucial part of our work is exploring the intersections of different life worlds, particularly in human experiences of disability, gender, race, neurodivergence and religion. We write about this in a way that foregrounds experience, personal situatedness and life narrative.

One major intended outcome of this (slow) research is collective thinking about exclusion and injustice in the context of environmentalism. We help policymakers develop more inclusive tools for ecological assessment, restoration, protection, and environmental policy design.

There are several ways you can get involved in this work if it sounds interesting to you. In the first instance, you should feel free to host your own multispecies forum. We provide a kit for getting started with this kind of work you can use if you’re interested. You can also join the mailing list to hear news of our projects as they develop. If you’re located in the Midlands and are interested in joining this research collective, please get in touch.

workshops

Following are the workshops we have done / are planning. Please get in touch if you’d like to offer to join or collaborate with our team as a workshop site host

wild bees

trauma-therapy horses

guide dogs

ancient / intact forests

the severn river

microbiomes

research team