The ANICOM project
© ANICOM
Prof. Vanessa Wijngaarden has been awarded an ERC grant to carry out a project on the theme of animal communicators. As an anthropologist, she joins with her multidisciplinary team and animal communication experts from four continents to dive into dialoging with a variety of mammals and birds.
The research project Animal Communicators: Intuitive communication as a key to dialogic multispecies methods, (ANICOM), funded by an ERC Consolidator grant, will take place from September 2024 for a period of five years, at the University of Liège Laboratory of Social and Cultural Anthropology (LASC). The project involves fieldwork on four continents, the team including prof. Vanessa Wijngaarden, a postdoc (call), 3 PhD students (call), 8 animal communicators and 36 individuals from 12 animal species.
Abstract
As the ‘social’ in social sciences is rethought beyond the human, multispecies research across disciplines increasingly asks how to speak with and for non-human others. I pose that intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), a strategy practiced by successful animal communicators to engage in explicit, detailed, two-way communication with non-human animals, holds uncharted resources for doing research with rather than on animals.
Research on IIC has been curtailed to specific domains and mythologized, while the worldwide boom in professional animal communicators has been ignored. ANICOM’s unique engagement with animal communicators’ practical strategies for relating across nature/culture and mind/body dichotomies is ground-breaking in the often largely theoretical discussions of the ontological and species turns. It simultaneously unsettles continued divides between humans and animals as well as dominant and subjugated ways of knowing.
The project triangulates participant observation, Q method, interviews and audio-visual methods (including video-diaries and video-elicitations) with natural science approaches, to collaboratively work with six expert animal communicators and a variety of animals in Europe and Africa. It addresses unexplored possibilities for cross-fertilization between new materialism and posthumanism on the one hand, and Indigenous studies and knowledge systems on the other, while relying on the latest insights in biosemiotics and animal cognition. It thus develops transdisciplinary innovations that include non-human animals as full research participants, while achieving a deeper reflexivity on the limitations of humans thinking animals outside the human-animal relationship.
It’s ultimate objective is to establish the resources and foundation for dialogic multispecies methods (DMM), a dynamic set of conceptual, theoretical and methodological approaches and tools to engage with the views, experiences and knowledges of non-human animals in academia.
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Funded by the European Union
This research is funded by the European Union (ERC Consolidator, ANICOM, 101124189). Views and opinions expressed on this website or in publications that result from this project are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them
Anicom team
The project team is located at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Liège.
updated on 9/2/25
