Critical posthuman ethnography: grappling with human-more-than-human interconnection for critical public health

ABSTRACT

To address the intertwined health issues of our time, from climate change to colonialism, from mass extinction to mass consumption, this commentary argues that critical public health must grapple with relationality onto-epistemologically. In it, I offer the provocation that entangling ethnography, both as method and methodology, with critical posthumanism can offer the potential to hold the tensions, nuances and multiplicities needed to account for human-more-than-human relationality as multiple inputs of data. This argument is made in three parts: first, via a discussion of relationality within public health; second, by means of a cartography of critical posthumanism; and third, with a discussion of how a critical posthuman ethnography might disrupt anthropocentric approaches to health. The paper concludes with a discussion of the possibilities of, and potential for, critical posthuman ethnography in public health research. In summary, critical posthuman ethnography provides one way of methodologically approaching some of the intertwined health issues of our time.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical posthumanism
• ethnography
• relationality

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Amaya Perez-Brumer, Brenda Gladstone and Fady Shanouda for their generous feedback on this commentary.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Abram (1996) employs the term ‘more-than-human’ in reference to the ‘sensuous terrain’ around us with which we are in continual interaction, noting that if we are inattentive to our interactions with the more-than-human world, we may unintentionally invisibilize the limitations of the human.

2. For further reading on agency, affect, and emotionality in relation to multispecies health, see Haraway (2016), Van Dooren (2019), and Verlie (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This commentary was supported by funds from a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Doctoral Scholarship and a Queen Elizabeth II Inge and Ralf Hoffman Graduate Scholarships in Science and Technology.