I’m thrilled to share that I will be contributing a chapter to the forthcoming edited volume Expertise and Environmental Care in Multispecies Worlds, edited by Christian Ritter and Tarmo Pikner, to be published with Routledge in the series Routledge Planetary Spaces. The book brings together case studies on how environmental expertise and care are practiced across different scales and landscapes, foregrounding local, situated practices within wider regimes of knowledge-making and planetary crisis.
My chapter, with the working title “Mapping as a way of caring: an ethnographic exploration of rat infrastructures through empathy and discomfort”, grows out of collaborative fieldwork in a neighborhood in Medellín, Colombia. In it, I experiment with mapping animals’ infrastructures as an ethnographic technique to explore how rats and humans co-produce urban multispecies worlds. Through a series of cartographic exercises and shared observations of rats’ paths, shelters, and encounters with people, I approach mapping not only as a method, but as an epistemological practice of care—one that demands attentiveness to how other-than-human beings inhabit and reshape public space, and to our responsibilities toward them.
The chapter works through the uneasy mix of discomfort and (entangled) empathy that comes with watching and following rats, treating these sensations as analytical and sensory tools for doing multispecies cartography differently. It is structured in four parts: an introduction that situates the case within the volume’s concerns, a discussion of inventive mapping in ethnography and multispecies research, an ethnographic section that traces rat infrastructures in Medellín, and a concluding reflection on why mapping multispecies worlds can be understood as a way of caring.
The edited volume is planned for publication in spring 2027. I’m very grateful to the editors for the invitation and excited to develop this work in dialogue with the other contributors to the book.