Composting Storytelling: An Approach for Critical (Multispecies) Ethnography

Abstract

Stories produce bodies that produce stories in an endless intra-active metabolic continuum. Stories do not only represent material worlds but also shape and make new worlds. Starting from these premises, this article develops “composting storytelling,” a methodological approach to heterogeneous, open-ended, small stories interwoven with everyday interaction. Drawing on years-long ethnographic work in a school greenhouse, and multispecies and critical animal studies literature as well as feminist storytelling, the authors develop a twofold argument. First, composting storytelling can be mobilized as a critical research approach in which critique emerges along with horizontal movement from closer, warm assemblages to more distant or erased, cool assemblages. Furthermore, multispecies storytelling can inform the broader field of qualitative research by positioning the ethnographer and the field in a relationship characterized by a hesitant ethics of knowing. The study draws attention to the polyphony of voices and temporalities, foregrounds intra-active transformation, and suggests a more modest position for the human protagonist.

There is a material and semiotic relationship between stories and bodies: stories produce bodies that produce stories in an endless intra-active metabolic continuum. Haraway (2016) describes the enmeshment of stories and worlds as follows: “We relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings” (p. 97). She uses the metaphor of compost to capture the material-discursive processes of worlding, which are mutually transformative: “Critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile” (p. 97).

In this article, we present a “composting” storytelling practice as a means of becoming critically attentive to complex, multispecies worlding and of reconfiguring narrative and ethnographic research. Our methodological ideas have developed—or, indeed, composted—during years-long empirical research on child–animal relations in educational contexts with the aim of considering education as a more-than-human practice. The aim in this article is to discuss how the piling together of an archive —a “compost”—of multispecies stories can be put to work as a critical and generative practice that keeps research open to new concepts, stories, and storytellers—to unprecedented new participants and audiences.

The concept of assemblage (Tsing, 2012, 2015) offers us the underlying structure to think about how stories can be put to work in multispecies ethnography. Assemblages are heterogeneous groupings or gatherings of things, bodies, and ideas. Tsing (2015) emphasizes the constitutive encounters enabled by assemblages, noting that assemblages expand across space and conquer place. They are simultaneously particular to situations and always open-ended. The critical approach that we develop in this article builds on these two capacities of storytelling—the capacity to focus on situated detail and the capacity to open up to “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) or disordered margins, which are sites for folding in new voices, temporalities, and worldings.

Considering the asymmetrical power relations between humans and other species, as well as the anthropocentric legacies that shape educational institutions, it is crucial to tell not only the affectionate stories of interspecies closeness and care but also the critical and difficult stories of interspecies conflict. Criticality also overarches Haraway’s (2016) versions of SF (speculative fabulation, science fiction, string figure) storytelling: “It matters what stories tell stories, it matters which concepts think concepts.” In their “composting feminisms,” Hamilton and Neimanis (2018) suggest an explicit critical focus on “what compostables make compost.” These scholars foreground storytelling’s need to engage with the effects of patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial nature-cultures and fuel vignettes of resistance to these hegemonies. For us, the critical hierarchy to attend to is that between species. We follow van Dooren et al. (2016) in the view that rather than simply celebrating multispecies mingling—a basic fact of life—multispecies scholarship should engage with difficult, critical, and politically charged questions, such as who benefits and who suffers in multispecies entanglements, what agenda is behind allowing only human protagonists into our stories, how the dream of progress shapes educational practices, and how to find ways of challenging persistent anthropocentrism in educational research and practice.

In this article, a composting storytelling practice based on assemblages is put to work to engage with critical questions of multispecies co-living. We are aware that critical animal scholars have doubted whether multispecies methodologies based on open-ended relationality can be employed to properly attend to phenomena such as violence and exploitation (Kopnina, 2017; Pedersen, 2013). In what follows, however, we develop a version of critical research based on openness, arguing that it is precisely the openness of the assemblage that allows us to travel from the normative-positive animal encounters that befit educational institutions, to other, unruly encounters at the “edges” of the school. Open-ended assemblages are always open to new world-making arrangements: to further temporal rhythms and spatial arcs and to discursive realms and histories, as Tsing (2015) says. Here, critique emerges along with empirical engagements in a movement from assemblage to assemblage. These connected and entangled worlds can be seen as a “mosaic” (Tsing, 2015) in which the warm assemblages of here and now open up to cooler ones, that is, more distant, hidden, or erased assemblages. In this fashion, the assemblages of care involving young humans and other-than-human animals can hide the cooler, erased assemblages of the pet industry or educational ideas of human exceptionalism, which aid the reproduction of conflicting human–animal relations or “common violent worlds” (Saari, 2021).

The composting storytelling practice asks that we dig deeply into the details of these situated assemblages while also opening them up by turning them around: “aerating the soil” (Barad, 2014), shoveling and bringing in new compostables, new storytellers, and new intra-active world-making projects.

In what follows, we begin to tell stories of bodies, place, and time, in the specific context of a school greenhouse educational zoo. These stories are retold and composted with feminist and multispecies theoretical viewpoints as well as critical animal scholarship. There are two interconnected aims. While we aim to articulate an open mode of criticality for multispecies research, we also discuss how becoming attuned to multispecies worlds affects how we might think of any methodological approach in qualitative research more generally. In relation to this, we will ask how going beyond a human-centric view and the species divide—attuning to broader “questions of kinds and their multiplicities” (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; van Dooren et al., 2016)—can unsettle, inform, and enrich existing research protocols. Finally, we conceptualize the metabolic relationship between bodies and stories as world-making that is partly inhuman and contagious (Tammi & Hohti, 2020; Haraway, 2016).

The Ethnographer and the Ethics of Visiting

The empirical research behind this article is a multispecies ethnographic study conducted in an educational setting, specifically a suburban secondary school with a large greenhouse in the central atrium of the school building. The greenhouse (see Hohti & Tammi, 2019) had the technology required to create a tropical climate even in the midst of freezing Nordic winter weather. This greenhouse was also the home of dozens of animals that belonged to dozens of species: a hen and a rooster, rabbits, various lizards, birds, gerbils, guinea pigs, and a worm, to name just a few. The history of this educational zoo begins in the 1990s, when a biology teacher established a sanctuary to accommodate pets that would otherwise have been left homeless. The number of animals in the biology class grew, and eventually, a political will emerged to provide the school with a proper greenhouse for the animals to live in and for a specific animal pedagogy to be developed. The funding for the greenhouse is to this day secured by the municipality’s positive discrimination policy, as many children of the school come from low-income families or immigrant backgrounds.

Today, the inhabitants of the greenhouse consist of both rescued and purchased animals. The educational aim of the animal pedagogy of the school is to offer pupils a chance to learn about animal behaviors; moreover, the pedagogy claims to enhance the active agency of the pupils, offer them everyday life skills, and prevent marginalization. It is showcased under the title “animals as teachers” in an international webpage that gathers innovative educational approaches. Our study is specifically interested in the care relations that evolved in the context of a caretaking practice in which upper secondary school students, mentored by two biology teachers, took responsibility for the animals and plants living in the greenhouse and in which younger children gradually became responsible carers after first participating in the so-called animal clubs led by senior students. Our ethnographic research in this setting began in 2018 and is ongoing at the time of the writing of this article. However, the majority of the stories included in this article come from an intensive 5-month fieldwork period from 2018 to 2019.

Inside the school building I cross the entrance hall,

one knows these kinds of secondary school entrance halls by heart, they are so familiar, always similar

but when I open the greenhouse door, another world overwhelms

Scents and smells from blooming and decaying plants

bright lights

cries, shouts, sounds and chirps, accompanied by smaller rustles

and the humming sound of a humidifier

I am anxious to go there and hear what has happened,

what’s new, how the animals and plants are doing. (composting fieldnotes) ¹

The term “animal turn” has been employed to mark the ongoing onto-epistemological shift toward understanding other-than-human animals as social and societal actors and acknowledging human relationality with and dependence on these animals (Rautio et al., 2021; Weil, 2010). Events previously considered to be milestones of human culture are being re-estimated as possible only through the help, collaboration, or exploitation of other animals, therefore making them multispecies co-achievements. Human histories are being re-read as inherently entangled with those of other animals. Multispecies research (Kirksey & Helmreich, 2010; Ogden et al., 2013; van Dooren et al., 2016) rejects the human/animal divide and hierarchy as its starting point. It unsettles the given notions of “species,” and instead focuses on “a multiplicity of possible connection and understanding” between the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants. In multispecies studies, the human is not without importance, but this species emerges—as a register of difference consisting of the shifting, often asymmetrical, relations with other agentive beings (see also Grusin, 2015). In this study, approaching species relations through assemblages enables us to take a range of intersecting differences and inequalities into account, as well as to avoid generalizations. It directs us to detail on the ways in which time, space, and materiality play a role in constructing both multispecies worlds and anthropocentric educational traditions.

Multispecies research does not happen by simply adding other-than-human animals to the agencies included in the field. There is a deeper meaning to why renewed societal attention to animals is considered to be a “turn”—a new research paradigm with its own distinct set of methods and theories rather than merely a focus on a particular study object (“the animal”). The complex webs of multispecies relationships structure society in the spheres of education, law, science, economy, media, art, entertainment, and more. Systemic patterns of production and extinction as well as sociocultural and intersubjective relations include distinct paradoxes, tensions, and inequalities (see Cederholm et al., 2014, p. 5). Within these relations, a need for the creative development of research approaches has become evident. In search of these, multispecies scholars have emphasized attentive interactions and intra-actions and coined approaches such as noticing, cultivating arts of attentiveness, “attuning,” and “passionate immersion” (Tsing, 2015; van Dooren et al., 2016). These methodological stances in multispecies fieldwork provide thick descriptions, just as in Geertz’s (2008) classic definition; here, however, thick accounts are committed to embracing other than human species’ modes of being and world-making projects, too. In this approach, other creatures are not viewed as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans.

Our multispecies ethnography started our personal “animal turn,” a process of becoming aware of, transforming, and letting go of many of our previous human-centered conceptions.

Perhaps we are becoming bad anthropocentric researchers

in order to make our own respective slow and laborious “animal turn,”

to turn at least a bit away from the human-centred approaches, knowledges and methods

which are the only methods that we currently know.

This turn is not easy, nor should it be.

A case in point is the question of research ethics, which is traditionally based on the integrity and rights of a human individual, expressed through the means of language. In our search for better protocols, we started experimenting with ethics beyond linguistic agreements. Despret (2016) develops the idea of a research protocol that she calls respectful or polite “visiting,” referring to an encounter between beings that do not fully know each other. Haraway (2016) describes this as a preparedness for being surprised (see also Sheldrake, 2021). When you are a visitor in a multispecies ethnographic field, your hosts are not who you thought they were, and you are also not the guest that they were expecting (see Haraway, 2016). The visit also is an intra-active event that transforms those involved. If the human individual emerges in the multispecies assemblage as a “register of difference” (van Dooren et al., 2016), so too does the multispecies ethnographer within their field assemblages, and the possibility of remaining an outside observer with a fixed position and sets of methodological skills becomes utopian.

In many ways, the process of entering the multispecies field relates to time. Often, it means dwelling in extended time and unsettling predecided timelines such that the opening up of a different sensory repertoire becomes available. During the first days that we spent in the greenhouse, as we restricted our own plans and activities, bodies’ movements in space and the smells, sounds, intensities, and shifts in the atmosphere were foregrounded. We began to experiment with approaches such as touch (Tammi & Hohti, 2020) and started to pay attention to more subtle details.

Ilkka the iguana occupies a central place in the greenhouse.

We find him most of the time standing (or sitting?) still on a branch

in his special glass-walled, extra-heated hut.

Ilkka is respected and acted upon with a certain cautiousness

thanks to his beautiful but dangerous looks.

Already, eye contact with this big, slow, stiff reptile feels hypnotic.

One morning, we meet a former student of the school

who used to be Ilkka’s responsible caretaker

he comes every now and then to check if Ilkka still remembers him.

“He does,” he says while stroking Ilkka’s cheek.

Touch connects us to intra-active exchange, it evokes surprise and multiplicity, and reinforces the nonverbal dimensions of hapticality, smell, and hearing. Through touch, subject/object relations are blurred, while multiple, partly speculative worlds are evoked. Touch is like a dance that always involves more than two (Tammi & Hohti, 2020), and the species involved in this dance are “multiple, multiplying their forms and associations” (van Dooren et al., 2016, p. 1). In every touch between individual beings, also millions of microbes and microparticles are involved—multispecies communities of microscopic beings. As Somerville (2018) observes, it is useful here to think with very small animals, such as microbes. While human presence is a matter of relative indifference for microbes, our lives depend completely on them (Tsing, 2013), and each exchange with microbes changes “us.” Such interchanges, invisible to the human eye, became massively consequential for human lives and education globally in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic, another multispecies story (Kirksey, 2020).

Encouraged by this encounter

we also touch and stroke Ilkka

his rough skin (like the surface of a bag or shoes, I think—but alive)

Ilkka closes his eyes as if in pleasure, like cats do.

When we stop stroking, Ilkka opens his eyes, as if saying, “Go on!”

And when we continue stroking his forehead

he again closes his eyes.

Some weeks after the episode

a kid in the greenhouse mentions to us

that iguanas have a third, invisible eye in the middle of their foreheads.

Working as an ethnographer in a multispecies field means to work with the limits of knowledge. Not knowing and separation, as much as connectivity and relating, are present in multispecies work. Indeed, animals teach us radical lessons of not knowing and the necessary dimension of speculation. When guinea pigs or turtles moved toward children in the greenhouse, our repertoire for making sense of their actions was scarce, practically limited to associations with curiosity, which, we realized, was perhaps a fully human construction. When we touched Ilkka the iguana and looked him in the eyes, engaging in what we think of as a mutual interaction, we had no idea that he had a third eye, let alone any ability to speculate what his third eye might see or do during our encounter. If our human understanding maintains that he closes his eyes in pleasure and approval and opens his eyes to mean, “Go on!”—then what messages might his third eye have sent at the same time? On the other hand, do we ourselves control the messages we are sending? How might the smell of our bodies (how do fear and curiosity smell?), the rhythms of our lives (so different from the rhythms of the stiff, slow iguana), or the feeling of our soft, pink skin be received by those who are other than human? What kind of compostables do we emit as we move, speak, and breathe in shared aerial contact zones (Rautio et al., 2021)? The third eye of the iguana reminds us that leaning on previous knowledge or experience in research is not unproblematic—and that to examine more-than-human worlds is a risky endeavor.

Storytelling in a More-Than-Human World

In the traditional view, narratives have been seen as a means to impose order and meaning (and often a moral lesson) on otherwise chaotic events and experiences in life. Narrativity has been associated with definitions of humanity; it is seen as something essentially human, to the extent that instead of “homo sapiens,” the name “homo narrans” has been proposed to indicate a species that shapes its world through the stories it tells (Niles, 2010). In the humanities, narrative research has offered approaches to human meaning-making and experience. Alternative to the logic of reason, narrative truth claims rely on verisimilitude and the evocation of imagination, intuition, and empathy: “I have experienced this, too!” (Bruner, 1986). Specific modes of narrative ethnography (Gubrium & Holstein, 2008) have evolved to travel the dynamic connections between stories and ethnographic fields.

Language has played a significant role both in ethnographies and in the age-old efforts to define and maintain the human/animal distinction. Weil (2010) elaborates on the animal turn from the point of view of literature, asking about the possibilities of accounting for animal difference across the linguistic divide: “how to give testimony to an experience that cannot be spoken or that may be distorted by speaking it” (p. 4). For us, in our multispecies fieldwork, the question was: what becomes of narrative ethnography when taken outside of the linguistic meaning making paradigm? To a field that unsettles given species divides and positions our human selves as embedded “registers of difference”?

In contrast to the dominant Western narrative traditions that emphasize linearity and meaning, feminist theorists have developed narrative approaches based on heterogeneity and open-endedness. The Carrier Bag theory of fiction by Le Guin (1996) and the concept of Bag Lady storytelling by Haraway (2004, 2016) are examples of these kinds of approaches wherein stories are imagined as containers rather than layers of meaning that are external to materials and bodies. Resisting the idea of stories as revealing secrets and meanings acquired by (qualitative research) heroes, Haraway (2004) likens the storyteller to an old lady who goes around with her worn out, leaky bag:

Engaging halting conversations, the encounter transmutes and reconstitutes all the partners and all the details. The stories do not have beginnings or ends; they have continuations, interruptions, and reformulations—just the kind of survivable stories we could use these days. (pp. 127–128)

In this approach, the ingredients of stories are not assembled for the purposes of a coherent narrative, but they can accommodate unprecedented things, including things that do not necessarily fit. Storytelling, when understood this way, is a situated strategy of accounting for the becomings of these elements in messy and thick copresence.

Tsing (2015) urges us to turn to theories of heterogeneity when researching multispecies worlds. If we follow Tsing and Haraway, the indeterminacy and openness of assemblages offers us a scientific practice that is particularly suitable for the precarious times that both humans and all other species find themselves in—a practice by which “to collect the trash of the Anthropocene” (Haraway, 2016). The practices of listening to and telling “a rush of stories,” for Tsing (2015), renew science by setting their object differently: here, the research object is a contaminated diversity. Tsing (2015) also discusses the possibility of changing the story by reimagining who we are, what we may become, and with whom we might be in alliance. Even if a heterogeneous storytelling focuses on becomings in situated events that cannot be fully known beforehand, it also demands us to push the limits of narrative by turning to resources ranging from myths and tales to poetic modes, livelihood practices, archives, scientific reports, and media sources of various kinds (Hohti & MacLure, 2022).

The above-cited feminist and critical storytellers thus inspire us to experiment with the careful (true to details) and careless (not concerned with the coherence and linear progression of the story) dimensions of storytelling. Let us think about how things are found and stored in everyday life. Children, in particular, tend to develop an interest in collecting candy wraps, sticks, stones, cans, bottles, bones, and shells in their pockets, bags, rooms, and school desks, all without a predetermined idea of for what they might use them. Sheldrake (2021) says that fungi also are being drawn to things. Fungal hyphae branch out, attract one another, and gather together in processes of “homing,” busily forming rhizomes that compose homes and stories. In the container, the bag, or an internet file, the heterogeneous gatherings of entities can, when those entities are connected in unprecedented ways, allow new questions and ideas to emerge. They can “bring energy home” (Le Guin, 1996) by affecting each other, transmuting, and warming the assemblage—in the same way that compost does.

In addition to the above-mentioned work, there is an existing body of multispecies research that helps us to extend our understanding of story, voice, and place (e.g., Despret, 2016, 2022; Haraway, 2016; Kohn, 2013; Snyder, 1990; Tsing, 2015; van Dooren et al., 2016; van Dooren & Rose, 2012). Despret (2022), for example, argues that animal traces and tracks can be viewed as sophisticated methods of writing and conveying messages, qualities, intensities, and speeds—and that these forms cannot be meaningfully detached from the particular communities within which they appear. There are stories being told that we often cannot hear but that are nevertheless being carved into the bodies and places in which they occur.

The hen has laid three eggs

If they are fertilised she begins to hatch them, we’re told,

but how do hens know?

“Maybe they hear it from the eggs,” says Pekka

Sometime later, we are told that the eggs have disappeared

potential stories: maybe eaten, maybe broken, stolen?

the biology teacher gives the hen and rooster some mealworms,

their “comfort food”

But the budgies seem happy, says Pekka,

maybe they will make a nest and have babies.

Once one of the budgies laid eggs in the hen’s nest

but she refused to hatch them

Telling stories in the animal turn is not neat or done at one stroke. What is at stake in this research approach is more than asking and more than observing, in a process that includes movements, refusals, and necessary errors all while extending predominantly visual and verbal research approaches toward other senses (Bencke & Bruhn, 2022; see also Pedersen & Pini, 2017). Ethnographic research methods cannot neatly precede these encounters. Instead of representing, explaining, or truth-telling, the narrative approach that we are developing here might gesture to different modes of truthfulness. It aims at staying true to the detail of situated multispecies worlds while acknowledging the concomitant space of speculation, and offering a more modest position for the human protagonist.

Tsing (2012) discusses the “unruly edges” of assemblages as sites of unprecedented world-making. Snyder (1990) calls for paying attention to the wildness that runs through arrangements, even those that at first seem too rigid or even impenetrable. It is these edges of stories, the narrative dimension that is untamed by persistent humanist explanations and habitual human-centric questions and thinking routines, that we turn to as critical multispecies storytellers.

Composting Storytelling: Piling up, Folding in, Turning Around

During our fieldwork, we began to write down notes in a shared online file that we named (after Haraway, 2016) “compost.” The observations were “small stories” (Geogakopoulou, 2006), little narratives that came to us in bits and pieces that were embedded in practice or talk related to the habits, backgrounds, and daily needs of distinct animals. Indeed, as soon as we started to think about the caretaking practices in the greenhouse in terms of stories, we saw that there were stories for everything: for the way that some of the gerbils liked to be petted while others did not, for how stress and hormones affected the rabbits’ behavior, for the vegetables that were taken from the school restaurant to the greenhouse to be shredded into the pieces that suited the guinea pigs and for the responsibility of the young humans to fill the drinking automats with fresh water. Relations of care were sustained by stories, and more stories were continuously generated in daily life. Materials and bodies and stories circled and mixed and mingled and nurtured and produced each other.

Multispecies storytelling builds on the between-space in which species, stories, and beings are generated together. At times, this storytelling involves more carefully tuning into the alterity of another individual being, such as was the case when we were trying to listen to the messages Ilkka the iguana was sending. At other times, however, this storytelling involves a distancing from individual voices (as if they ever were individual and separate) and instead a halting in hesitation and acknowledgment of one’s own limited capacities—removing the mantle of the “master storyteller” (Weaver & Snaza, 2017). At times, the removing of this mantle creates a push toward speculation and fabulation.

In practice, our multispecies storytelling fieldwork involved hanging out inside the greenhouse and delving into conversations with the young people, where new questions concerning caretaking constantly emerged and brought detail and nuance to constantly new, small stories. In other instances, we would sit down and try to do less to attune more—to nonverbal messages and affects that we began to receive through soundscapes, movement, and light. As described in the previous sections, an essential part of this hanging out was resisting too-fixed and active ideas about how fieldwork should proceed.

We came here to do multispecies ethnography about child–animal relations,

but in the greenhouse we lose our efficacy and become indecisive,

halted and overwhelmed by strange encounters

such as the combination of the dove Romeo

and the mechanic humidifier at the centre of the ceiling

with the label Princess.

Our laptops were with us, and occasionally, we would sit down to write. We wrote in short sentences, always leaving spaces between sentences, just as in all the vignettes throughout this article. We adopted this style from the first day on as an instinctive way to avoid closure. Tsing (2015) confirms that the power of (multispecies) storytelling relies not merely on thematics but also on form. Refraining from indicating beginnings or ends with capital letters or full stops means fostering the openness of the assemblages. The story assemblages are open to surprises and additions, affirming the feeling that stories are always more multiple as all events come into being with other events and that all stories are in fact “rushes” of stories (Tsing, 2015) that nest like Russian dolls within each other (Koro-Ljungberg & Hendricks, 2020).

Under closer examination, the “compost” field notes suggest disturbances to several hierarchies. The unsettling of grammatical rules flattens the hierarchical divisions between things and higher-order ideas, enhancing attention to the material world, other-than-human beings, and their agentic ways of telling stories. The short lines of compost storytelling create disruptions and invite nonlinearity, jumps, turns, and further earth-worm-like re-turns. The spaces in between suggest “zooming in” on the details of the events with increased attentiveness, and pausing with the stories. Writing as inquiry (St Pierre, 1997) facilitates a specific mode of reading—“reading as inquiry.” A passionate interest in the parts that other-than-human species play in human assemblages and an attunement to the details that articulate their dynamics is what makes this storytelling specifically multispecies.

When writing our “compost” stories, both while in the greenhouse and outside, we found ourselves operating somewhere between field notes and analysis because new additions and precisions could be added long after leaving the field. The grammatically and poetically open form is significant because it “transgressifies” (St Pierre, 1997) data to create connections with other fields. The temporal splitting between fieldwork as the phase of producing “raw” data and analysis as a process of attaching meaning would not hold. “Compost” field notes cannot be fixed, rather, they push us toward a messy mix of temporalities wherein story layers pile up and create the possibility of turn and re-turn. New layers still continue to be added to our compost as a result of shared discussions, new visits to the field, the transcription of audio- and video-taped empirical materials, further readings, and so on. Stories that were originally “thick” are not submitted to reductive modes of analysis (Lenz Taguchi, 2009); rather, the composting process is a nurturing and enriching one. The results of this kind of research can be meanings and increased conceptual understanding, but they can also be hesitations, wonderings, transformations, worldings.

Linearity, for Tsing (2015), is not an innocent tradition within storytelling but is tied to the idea of human-centric progress. As a polyphonic structure, then, a multispecies story can open up an “immense chorus of multispecies voices and temporalities” (Hillman, 2011, p. 47). Similarly, places also become multistoried in multispecies research: “Places become into existence as physical but also storied places, where storytellers should not be limited to humans only” (van Dooren & Rose, 2012). In the greenhouse, watching Fasu the turtle hurry to gnaw on and dance with our shoes re-evoked the story of his previous owner and their dance play. Stories and memories are not “simple replays” (Barad, 2014). They can linger, entangled in bodies and places, sometimes barely sensed as hauntings or ghosts, and they can become alive in assemblages, sometimes in surprising ways. Entangled in multiple times, bodies, and places, memories can be “potential histories in the making” (Tsing, 2015)—stirrings of something lived, told, re-membered, re-told, and worlding. In humanist scientific tradition, and in education in particular, the usual story is not like this. The usual “hero” narrative is impoverished rather than energy-inducing, as Le Guin (1996) states, because the hero fails to recognize the characters that support and enable his story. For Tsing (2015), it is human exceptionalism that “blinds us,” but above all else, her critique points to the limitations that come from time: our attachment to the idea of progress as a temporally linear forward march.

Our final note concerning the piling of the “compost” is how it disturbs the hierarchies related to authorship. When coming to the end of the first phase of our research, we printed out a selection of compost stories and took them with us to the greenhouse for all (humans) to read and talk about. The stories about the things and animals that mattered seemed to energize the young participants and to evoke questions, further observations, and stories in a contagious manner. Van Dooren and Rose (2016) say that increasing attentiveness can draw others into new relationships and accountabilities through their responses. Here, there was a “rush” of affective responses, such as surprise and recognition (I know this is me!”), as well as new stories: “there is always more” (Tsing, 2015). Some of these layers connected stories of closeness and care with more difficult questions, that is, about the right of humans to decide on the captivity, births, and euthanizations of all of the other species.

In the last sections of this article, we will move to these difficult terrains and reflect on composting storytelling as a critical research approach.

Critical Composting: Warming up the Assemblage

One day the special education teacher brings a student into the greenhouse

points out a chair and a table for him

Here, in the midst of the chirps and cries and plants,

bright lights and showers and movements of animals

he finds it much easier to concentrate on the test, the teacher whispers to us

The educational innovation program frames the school’s greenhouse pedagogy as a practice that improves learning and well-being. We witnessed some incidents in line with those aims in the greenhouse, as in the vignette above. The ethnographers, too, felt good in the greenhouse; from the first day on, we found it difficult to leave the greenhouse at the end of the day because we were not tired at all and felt energized and alert—a sentiment quite different from our previous experiences of doing ethnography in traditional school environments. Later, reading Tsing (2015) and other multispecies scholars, we theorized this buzzing energy in terms of the multivocality that these authors associate with assemblages and their unruly edges. The voices and temporalities of the school opened up to become multiple, and the taken-for-granted, always-familiar school space gave space for odd encounters:

Romeo and the other birds enjoy sitting on Princess, the humidifier in the ceiling

while it is working, humming and spraying water all over.

Sometimes they knock on the machine as if to turn their shower on.

The greenhouse birds also like electric wires:

they do tricks on them and sleep on them

rather than on the wooden sticks hung in the ceilings that are meant to serve as swings.

“It is not always easy to guess what the birds like to sit on,” says Armi.

This story illustrates why it makes little sense to talk about interspecies relationships as if they were separate from their assemblages. Whatever took place inside the walls of the greenhouse was a mixture of natural and artificial matters and bodies, among them technologies related to heating, ventilation, and light. The same could be said of the situation concerning the school more generally. Along with detailed storytelling, we began to notice the school itself as a “more-than-human agencement all along” (Tammi, 2020)—an assemblage with unruly edges. The edges of the institutional assemblage can be noticed in situations in which its control over the more-than-human participants fails, such as when wild mice accidentally entered the greenhouse, causing a panic over their unknown, potentially harmful parasites and bacteria. Another example is “mould schools”—the persistent indoor air problems which are generated in assemblages consisting of construction solutions, economies of communalities, and the flourishing of moulds. Or the pandemic. How do the stories promoted by the educational innovation website sit together with these unruly tensions? Framing “animals as teachers” as an educational innovation works well as a justification to secure funding for this rare educational greenhouse zoo. The justification, however, is rooted in a story of a bounded institution that is itself based on an anthropocentric story of education.

We suggest that the processes of composting storytelling—its shoveling, digging deep, and turning around—can move us to other stories and more distant assemblages. There are stories that are not the first ones that a visitor gets to hear. One such story caught our attention only after spending several weeks in the greenhouse: some budgies had gone missing. There seemed to be no explanation, until eventually someone considered the ventilation pipes. While ventilation technology was essential for sustaining the tropical temperature and humidity conditions that most of the plants and animals required, for these animals, the pipes proved to be fatal. The unproblematic celebration of multispecies life becomes difficult when disasters such as this strike—when a practice of care fails and all its material aspects are not considered. The simple story of mutual flourishing also does not hold when life is sustained at the cost of other life.

Armi the teacher instructs the kids on how to use tweezers

to catch some mealworms in the terrarium

and to kill them

Agama the lizard is fed by bugs that have to be killed first

unlike the worms, which are preferably eaten alive

Mariam, Saida and Lini are beside Agama’s terrarium.

The lid is open.

They have a dish in their hands that has one bug and two meal worms

Mariam pinches the meal bug

“Die please!!!” “These are so damn bad at dying”

Lini: “Can I try?”

Lini directs Mariam’s hand—“And NOW tweeze!”

“Ahhh . . .” (with a suffering voice) “Thanks”

Mariam takes the dead meal bug in her tweezers

“Agama! Look at what I found. Your favourite food!”

keeping the meal bug beside Agama’s head.

No reaction from Agama.

. . . Saida is moving the worm closer to Agama

“It doesn’t feel like eating now. Because . . . it is a little angry.”

Why is it angry? we ask

“Because we are close to him and . . . he got scared a bit.”

The children give up and leave Agama

Lunch break in the corridor

They sit on chairs and reflect on the incident—the killing of the bugs

“They are really difficult to kill.”

“Yuck, I feel like I’m losing my appetite”

Mariam has two beautiful croissants for her snack.

“I can’t eat them.”

Our fieldwork constantly produced new observations on how killing was connected to care. Lives, deaths, and questions about decisions concerning both constantly folded into the story compost: when we observed the breeding of the hen and rooster and wondered where all the chickens would go; when we followed the use of “biological control,” meaning specific insects that were purchased with the aim of killing the bugs that plagued the plants in the greenhouse. Some of the controversies were present but never articulated, as in the occasions where children were eating their chicken lunches behind the glass walls of the greenhouse and its chicken coops. Sometimes, the controversies became visible only by taking the time to begin to notice the tensions between the affective, material, and ethical dimensions of care practices (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), which is what happened, for example, when we watched Vilja the snake being fed with dead feeder mice, which were ordered from the internet and arrived deep-frozen in the mail.

In the process of storying the different animals’ routes in the greenhouse, we began to see how the animals present in this educational zoo were a group of beings meticulously selected according to bodily details, size, day activities, and life expectancies. These specific “educational animals” come to the greenhouse accompanied with a range of modes of commodification of life. For example, two pupils told us how they had purchased two mice from the pet shop and had spent a long time in the shop negotiating with the owner to ensure the best possible genes for their beloved Lucy and Dime. In contrast, two rats who accidentally ended up in the greenhouse along with some old terrariums were quickly transported elsewhere, as they were “far too intelligent to be living in the greenhouse” according to the biology teacher. Microscopic bacteria, fungi, moulds, and viruses are nonhumans that abound wherever human–animal relationships take place; however, they hardly fit the definition of animals as teachers as described in the innovation website. Even so, they can teach us crucial lessons about the limits of human mastery and control. These animals at the “edges” of the educational assemblage bring complexity to the idea of “animals as teachers” and illuminate the inherent human-centredness of this phrasing. A mosaic of stories about the pet industry, laboratory animals, the commodification of life, and anthropocentric and instrumental values in education opened up. They were the cooler assemblages that were connected to the seemingly innocent assemblages of care and beneficial interspecies relations.

Conclusions, Contagions

We live in a world in which it is becoming extremely difficult to lean on the traditionally believed divisions between technologies (culture) and living beings (nature) and to speak using the generalizations (human, rat) that stem from the Linnaean notions of species. However, we also live in a world that continues to make decisions based on these divisions and in institutions that continue to blind us to the support we gain from other species. The critical approach we have developed here uses serendipitous storytelling to foreground that which was thought of as “background”—namely other than human animals’ stories, times, and places—and to examine the ways in which the process of storytelling itself participates in processes of composition. We suggest that hard-to-break power structures can be re-storied by digging into the intra-active detail of assemblages and moving outward through their connecting edges. In a similar vein, Horton and Kraftl (2018) suggested that instead of intersectional critique, the outward move of extrasectionality could help researchers to work beyond existing categories of oppression and to produce alternatives to the normative-positive accounts of children’s encounters with nature and other animals, drawing attention to not-readily-in-sight modes of being that are not reducible to human ones (Horton & Kraftl, 2018; see also Hohti & MacLure, 2022). Ruddick (2017) illustrates how research should embrace the situated dimension, in which specificity and proximity of connections matters, combined with an expansive understanding of connectivity. Similarly, we have addressed situations that are somewhere, but also proceeded to tell connected stories that were cool, in the shadows, and often purposefully hidden at first, but that could begin to be warmed up in the process of composting storytelling.

Critical composting affirms that the world does not sit still. All pattern-forming matter is in a continuous state of recomposition and decomposition (Ruddick, 2017). This gives us another reason not to depart from the frameworks of hierarchy or injustice but rather to emphasize material details and the ways that unruly edges of heterogeneous assemblages can push us to further stories and even alien life forms, making the institutional boundary-making perceptible. When storying the edges of the educational institution, we come to notice how there is always more: other than human lives and other than educational stories in thick and wild copresence.

Tsing (2015) has a great deal of hope in the contagious power of stories, and we also like to think about the viral nature of composting storytelling, which makes this storytelling different from the generally morally inclined stories that are common in (environmental) education. The example of the pandemic illustrates the necessity of bridging the story of the harm caused to society and institutions with the more distant stories of human–animal relations gone wrong. Kirksey (2020) brings forward how virus-assemblages involve “unfaithful” copying that happens without precise foreknowledge about future forms and unstable boundaries. Furthermore, viruses themselves are transformed as they interact with the immune systems of animal hosts, ecological communities, and the human institutions. This is why, for Kirksey (2020), understanding pandemics requires turning to the concept of assemblage, which foregrounds the ways in which political, economic, and ecological forces come together to shape forms of life. In viral assemblages (i.e., all of the assemblages on this planet), ideas of isolation, control, and ownership become challenged.

The contagious power of storytelling might also explain us how the stories of everyday life in the greenhouse engaged the young people and how they kept and still keep us engaged as researchers. By carefully (and sort of carelessly, referring to the feminist figuration of the Bag Lady) folding in compostables that matter, such as stories about bodies that must survive, and combining them with critical questions, concepts, and ideas, storytelling compost can be put to work as a powerful educational space, albeit one that cannot be fully predefined. It is important to note, however, that storytelling is neither an immune nor innocent practice. In the current “storytelling boom,” a specific “story economy” (Mäkelä et al., 2021) exists, in which stories of personal experiences are instrumentalized and meticulously utilized for a variety of purposes. This is why we need to look carefully at what compostables to use (Hamilton & Neimanis, 2018).

Since our first fieldwork period, we have returned to the greenhouse several times for new projects. Some of the visits took place during the lockdown and were sustained by mere remote connections. In these situations, we noticed that some of our original “compost” stories still circulated in the greenhouse, while some merely echoed in the place: in the empty dwellings of the hen, rooster, and Ilkka. Some of the stories were forgotten and were only present in the greenhouse atmosphere as a ghostly, if not totally decomposed, dimension.

Entering the greenhouse again

we find our article from a couple of years before

printed, hanging on the note board

yellow and curly from humidity

stained by bird poo

and beside it, a bunch of skins shed by the snake Viljami

Some stories, however, re-enlivened for the new research participants the almost-forgotten members of the multispecies pre-COVID-19 community, bridging the familiar and the unknown through their affective worldings. Affect, memories, and stories once again “thickened” the place and opened the institution to new rushes of stories.

a portrait of Ilkka the lizard on the wall still hangs

his dwellings now filled with cleaning equipment

what happened to him?

The young caretakers repeatedly replied

“I have not heard that story”

They directed us to one of the caretakers

who had been there the longest,

maybe he knows?

and we hear a story about Ilkka’s gut infection and death

how the probability of infections and disease increases as animals age

—and in captivity, they tend to live longer—

and in the same breath, several other affective stories,

about the time when Ilkka was alive

in the mixings and turnings of the greenhouse compost pile,

stories become decomposed too

some cooling down, sliding to the brink of evanescence,

sometimes only to wait for another moment

another caretaker hears us talking and joins in

her father—a lizard hobbyist—used to cut Ilkka’s nails

this was her first encounter with the lizard

long before she became a “Greenhousian”

and now she is “a bit of a reptile specialist” herself too

Composting storytelling enriches multispecies studies by its detailed critical approach, and by affirming that stories do not just represent, but also make worlds. Along with resisting too-simplistic notions of species, this approach rejects simplified storylines concerning time, space, place, research ethics, and institutions, thus informing qualitative research, especially narrative and ethnographic methodologies, more broadly. It is an approach that broadens the ways that we think about the ethnographer, instead of a separate observer, as someone situated and immersed, an individual who is extending to associative contagions (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). This approach suggests that we articulate better the habitual stories of care, responsibility, or empathy. It suggests that critical scholars hesitate and be mindful so that they can attune to details, when thinking about issues such as integrity, identities, morals, or rights. In general, it urges us to master less and notice more when researching more-than-human worlds.