Tervetuloa monilajisten kertomusten pariin!

Welcome to multispecies worlds and stories!

The stories on this site have emerged from encounters between children and young people, other-than-human species, and researchers. They were created in connection with hobbies, visits in the zoo, at home, museums, scout camps, on the streets, and in city shores and parks – in connection with activities such as creating art, telling and retelling memories, reading research literature, and exploring the forest. The stories have been driven by the Children of the Anthropocene research project’s questions:

• How is it to live as a child or a young person within the contemporary environmental atmospheres?
• How are the shifting nature relations visible in children’s environments and their atmospheres?
• What are the emerging forms of multispecies collaboration like? How can we learn to notice them and tell about them?

The story of humans and the rest of the nature has often been based on the special status and separateness of humans. Many believe that the time of environmental crises challenges us to rethink this worldview. However, bringing forth alternative, multispecies stories requires the skills of noticing and attending. The art of attentiveness is something we aim to practice and develop through these stories.

A story sharpens our understanding of a situation, place, or feeling, always providing a beginning for new stories. Like a mushroom in mycelium, an individual story surfaces, but at the same time, it connects to the mosaic of countless other stories. We believe, as anthropologist Anna Tsing does, that small multispecies stories can possess contagious and world-changing power.

Reading Instructions

Through the patches on the homepage, you can access clusters of stories: texts, images, moving images and sounds. There are also artworks created during the research, and research texts. The stories are interconnected, and through links, you can journey from one story to another. Some stories may surprise you by appearing uninvited. Keywords and a story list help you find themes that interest you and guide you back to stories you have already encountered. On the information pages, you will find details about the underlying research, the Children of the Anthropocene research group, and the authorship and copy rights of the site.

The multispecies world is unfolding, and there will always be more stories. We hope that the stories on our site will lead you, dear reader, to new becomings of stories and worlds!