Pathway 5: Rewriting Through Multispecies Lenses
Purpose
Critically rework existing texts or designs using anti-anthropocentric prompts and multispecies heuristics.
Time
20-60 minutes
Mode
Group
Solo
What is this pathway?
This pathway offers a set of provocations for reworking, reimagining, or questioning existing narratives from a more-than-human perspective. It can be used to revise one's own text, revisit a policy, or examine a design through multispecies and ecological lenses. The checklist invites iteration, redirection, and deeper attention to non-human entanglements.
Objective
To support the revision or reconstruction of existing texts, narratives, or designs through more-than-human heuristics. It can also be used as a generative starting point: applying the provocations to a known scene, object, or concept as a springboard for speculative transformation.
How to use it
As a revision tool: Select 2–3 provocations and apply them to a draft or idea.
As a creative warm-up: Use one spark to generate a new short scene.
As a group facilitation tool: Reflect collectively after reviewing work-in-progress.
As a policy/design reframer: Apply questions to infrastructural plans, reports, or visualisations to surface hidden assumptions.
Optional extensions
Pathway 2 (Umwelt Exploration) for grounding sensory shifts.
Pathway 3 (Speculative Drift) for refining drafts.
Pathway 4 (Multispecies Worldbuilding) for deepening scenarios.
Exercise: Anti-Anthropocentric Checklist – Multispecies Provocations
Use this as a reflective tool for rewriting, editing, or sparking new narrative directions.
1. WORLD-MAKING IN COMPANY
Incendiary question: Which parts of the landscape exist because the entity acts, and which parts shape the entity in return?
Narrative spark: Let one environmental detail (smell, terrain, fossil remnant) be the direct consequence of that co-action.
2. EMBODIED AFFECTS
Incendiary question: Can you show the emotion as gesture, rhythm, colouration, pheromone, before naming it?
Narrative spark: Afterwards, if you wish, speculate on its inner meaning and acknowledge that it is only a guess.
3. MULTIPLE TEMPORALITIES
Incendiary question: What happens if the human dramatic arc is interrupted by a much slower or quicker pulse?
Narrative spark: Insert a micro-story (spore latency, one-day insect buzz) that disrupts the main tempo.
4. PARTIAL PERSPECTIVES
Incendiary question: Where do you openly say we do not know and leave a gap?
Narrative spark: Oscillate between intimacy and opacity. Let this swinging motion maintain the mystery.
5. CONSEQUENCES YOU CANNOT DODGE
Incendiary question: Every action alters another, who is now in debt, on alert, or in danger?
Narrative spark: Show the chain of responses, human or otherwise, that is set in motion. This is already conflict.
6. SENSORIAL POLYPHONY
Incendiary question: How would the scene change if dominant senses were chemical or electromagnetic?
Narrative spark: Mix channels such as magnetism with taste, or pressure with echo. Avoid simplistic one-to-one swaps.
7. ENTANGLED CONFLICTS AND ALLIANCES
Incendiary question: Is there simultaneously care and parasitism, benefit and harm?
Narrative spark: Show an alliance that turns into exploitation, or a conflict that leads to unexpected symbiosis.
8. ENERGY AND MATERIAL FLOWS
Incendiary question: Where do food, fuel, and rest come from? What waste remains?
Narrative spark: Let a by-product (fungus, rust, corpse) drive the next scene.
9. LANGUAGE IN CRISIS
Incendiary question: Does your metaphor reveal more about human culture than about the other being?
Narrative spark: Use a loaded simile such as treacherous rat, then let a character question or subvert it.
10. WILD ITERATIVE REVIEW
Incendiary question: Which element is still mere decoration?
Narrative spark: Give that background detail an action, a sound, or a resistance, then reread and notice what has changed.