Two York University professors, two PhD students and a Connected Minds postdoctoral fellow recently took part in an international meeting on Multi-Species Society, funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and hosted by the Nature Conservation Foundation of India in Valparai, India.
The York delegation included Kristin Andrews, professor of philosophy and York Research Chair in Animal Minds; Hélène Mialet, professor in Science, Technology and Society; Julia Espinosa, Connected Minds postdoctoral fellow; Marriah Alcantara, PhD candidate in philosophy; and Meghana Sharma, PhD student in Science, Technology and Society.
The meeting brought together anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, conservationists, a filmmaker and a photographer to explore shared human-animal norms, the possibility of human-animal politics and new approaches to interdisciplinary collaboration.
"Valparai was a unique experience that was imagined to test on the ground some of the hypotheses and new methodologies we are developing in the context of the CIFAR’s Future Flourishing Program,” Mialet shares. “It was a complete immersive experience in an extraordinary landscape, an open-air laboratory, where students, world renown experts in restoration and conservation, scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, photographers and filmmakers shared their experience and knowledge to imagine the multiple ways in which humans and animals can co-exist. It was also the first time in my life that I had to run out of the room in the middle of my presentation to observe wild animals crossing the garden!”
Valparai was chosen for its unique history of human-animal interactions. The plateau is home to elephants, bison, monkeys and other species, as well as Indigenous communities. British colonization and the introduction of tea and coffee plantations disrupted long-standing ecological balances, creating conflicts between humans and wildlife. Today, efforts continue to mitigate these tensions in and around the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, a protected area that surrounds the region.
“We walked the tea plantations and saw how human workers and buffalo live side by side. We watched an elephant browsing in the fields one morning, and that afternoon talked with ecologists about the interventions they developed to minimize conflicts between humans and elephants,” Andrews explains. “Being there in the field with the scientists and walking the landscape in the mornings, having talks and sharing ideas in the afternoons and evenings, is an ideal way to do scholarship. Bringing students and postdocs along means that we are also training the next generation of scholars in these place-based interdisciplinary methods that CIFAR's Future Flourishing program is advancing.”
Participants engaged in both indoor research presentations and outdoor field observations, witnessing animals in urban and wild landscapes. The meeting sparked new research collaborations, including projects on social norms between elephants and humans, theoretical innovations for studying animals and addressing human-wildlife conflicts, and a forthcoming study on human-dog social norms in central India led by Espinosa.
“We met with a variety of scholars across disciplines who are all interested in the same questions about how to live with, share a planet with, and flourish with nonhuman animals,” Alcantara says. “Being there allowed us to take our discussions outdoors, thinking about how to mitigate human-elephant conflict while watching an elephant forage and learning about strategies for conserving and rehabilitating the rainforests while watching a pair of hornbills at the edge of a forest fragment. As a student, this trip was invaluable to my development as a scholar and will shape how I approach my research for many years.”
The urgency of this work was underscored during the meeting when a tragic human-elephant conflict occurred nearby, resulting in the deaths of a woman and her grandchild.