Vanessa Wijngaarden joins ULiège with her ANICOM project, funded by an ERC Consolidator grant

Vanessa Wijngaarden, a social anthropologist specializing in multispecies studies, indigenous knowledge systems, and dialogic research methodologies, is joining the University of Liège with her project ANICOM - funded by an European Research Counsil Consolidator Grant - a pioneering research project that seeks to revolutionize our understanding of interspecies communication.

T

he ANICOM project addresses a critical question in contemporary multispecies research: How can we move beyond human-centric social sciences to engage meaningfully with non-human animals? While traditional studies have explored animal cognition, sentience*, and communication, ANICOM aims to push the boundaries further by integrating Intuitive Interspecies Communication (IIC), a practice used by so-called animal communicators to engage in explicit, two-way exchanges with animals.

"The past decades have witnessed a surge in discoveries regarding the intelligence and communicative abilities of non-human animals, explains Vanessa Wijngaarden, anthropologist at the ULiège Social Sciences Research Institute. These insights challenge long-standing assumptions about human superiority in language and culture. Despite this, academia has yet to develop methodologies that fully incorporate non-human perspectives into research. ANICOM seeks to bridge this gap by combining social and natural science methodologies with the expertise of professional animal communicators, Indigenous knowledge holders and animals themselves."

ANICOM’s research design is innovative in multiple ways:

• It collaborates directly with expert animal communicators to study their practical strategies for engaging with animals.
• It triangulates diverse research methods, including participant observation, Q-methodology, interviews, and audiovisual techniques such as video diaries and video elicitation.
• It integrates Indigenous knowledge systems, new materialism, posthumanism, biosemiotics, and animal cognition studies to create transdisciplinary innovations.
• It includes animals as full research participants, rather than merely as subjects of human observation.

Breaking down human-animal divides

By investigating IIC and its implications for multispecies dialogue, ANICOM challenges entrenched divides between humans and animals, as well as dominant versus subjugated knowledge systems. The project argues that intuitive exchanges with animals, often dismissed in mainstream science, hold significant untapped potential for understanding non-human perspectives.

In early exploratory studies, Vanessa Wijngaarden observed more than fifty communication sessions between expert animal communicators and animals across different species and cultural contexts. The findings were striking, because through the animal communicators, animals provided clear, verifiable responses that revealed personal experiences, needs, and even historical biographical details. By working with expert communicators from different backgrounds- including English, Afrikaans, Shona, and KhoiSan – the pilot study has identified commonalities in how these interactions occur. In ANICOM, the presence of shared communicative mechanisms is further investigated by adding European, Asian, African and North American case studies and including animal participants from 12 species.

Towards Dialogic Multispecies Methods (DMM)

The ultimate goal of ANICOM is to establish Dialogic Multispecies Methods (DMM), a groundbreaking framework that equips scholars with theoretical and methodological tools to integrate non-human perspectives into academic research by challenging human-animal hierarchies, fostering equitable dialogue between diverse knowledge systems - including Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies - enhancing reflexivity on the limitations of human understanding of animal perspectives, and amplifying the relevance and impact of non-human viewpoints in scholarly discourse.

By synthesizing insights from animal communicators, academic theories,  Indigenous worldviews and animals’ own knowledges,ANICOM paves the way for a more inclusive, ethical, and holistic approach to studying the social world-one that acknowledges the agency and intelligence of non-human animals.

* Sentience is the ability of a being to experience subjective experiences such as sensations or emotions.
** Elicitation is a set of techniques designed to bring out knowledge, memories, opinions or emotions in a participant.

About Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden

Dr. Vanessa Wijngaarden is a leading social anthropologist specializing in multispecies studies, Indigenous knowledge systems, and dialogic research methodologies. With extensive experience conducting fieldwork across Africa, she has pioneered interdisciplinary approaches that bridge the gap between traditional anthropology and emerging posthumanist paradigms.

Through ANICOM, Dr. Wijngaarden and her team are not only advancing scientific understanding but also contributing to a paradigm shift in the social sciences, one where the ‘social’ extends beyond the human, embracing the voices and experiences of the more-than-human world.

ANICOM website