MULTISPECIES EPIDEMICS: CREATING MORE-THAN-HUMAN WORLDS WITH SPECULATIVE NARRATIVES AND FABULATIONS criando mundos mais que humanos com narrativas e fabulações especulativas

Abstract

Everyday, we face epidemics — some silent, inhabiting our bodies, and others collective, affecting the shared world. We coexist with epidemic beings in our daily lives: viruses, bacteria, pests, weeds, insects, and other unimaginable creatures that share with us the experience of existing. In this text, in an essayistic and narrative tone, we approach what we call multispecies epidemics, understood as experiences born from contact with more-than-human beings capable of displacing, affecting, and transforming us. These movements emerge from our own experiences in epidemic environments, but are also shaped by the readings, writings, and experimentations developed throughout our formation. Narratives and fabulations, in this context, operate as a sensitive research methodology, allowing us to exercise the “art of perceiving the world” through interspecies encounters. Thus, we understand that existence is always composed in networks, by multispecies assemblages that coexist, interact, and create possible worlds.