Crow Cosmopolitics: A Multispecies Walking Ethnography Exploring Crow–Human Coexistential Placemaking

Abstract

Crow cosmopolitics is a multispecies ethnography that explores crow– human relationships past, present and possible futures. This study considers crow–human relational complexity, given the lengthy and entangled nature of the interspecific relationship. This ethnographic exploration of crow–human relations focuses on two main “cartographic hot spots:” Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and surrounding areas. The recent phenomenon (30–40 years) of increasing crow roosting in these urban spaces, presents opportunities to explore intense relational complexities and controversies. Inquiry into these complexities, controversies, and interrogation of current narratives, may offer an epistemological opening for speculations on co-creative creaturely placemaking.

The animist-posthumanist theoretical ground of this inquiry requires that the researcher acknowledges their participation within the field of research as an entangled participant within a continuum of life, and invites entangled speculations into possibilities for multispecies shared place-making in the Anthropocene.

Storytelling evokes the palpable ethos of crow cultures, deeply entangled and co-evolved with our own, offering the recognition that emergent thresholds of encounter expand our speculative understanding of coexistential, ultimately cosmopolitical multispecies placemaking practices.