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Record W4415472574 · doi:10.1177/10778004251377389

Doing More-Than-Human Research: Developing Qualitative Research Methods for a Multispecies World

2025· article· en· W4415472574 on OpenAlexafffundabout
Sarah Elton, Noha Fikry, Aparna Menon, Arnika Peselmann, Carlos Sanchez Pimienta

Bibliographic record

VenueQualitative Inquiry · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicParticipatory Visual Research Methods
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersPierre Elliott Trudeau FoundationSocial Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaWenner-Gren FoundationToronto Metropolitan University
KeywordsQualitative researchEthnographyOperationalizationAgency (philosophy)PraxisPosthumanismPosthumanSocial researchSituated

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Increasingly, qualitative researchers are considering the more-than-humans that Euro-Western social science largely has ignored. But if social science research methods were made for humans, how does one include everything else? In this article, five scholars describe the methodological steps they each have developed. We explore the role of onto-epistemology as an analytical tool to understand relationships between people and food-producing plants in Toronto migrant gardens; the technique of multimodal noticing used to account for animal agency in fieldwork with women who raise small livestock in Egypt; the use of time as a methodological tool to study human-plant relations in German commercial orchards; a methodological praxis that works with posthuman disability studies to become-with a disability event-assemblage; and how to operationalize the notion of ontological multiplicity in ethnographic fieldwork in a case study of a river in Mexico. These ways of conducting research may lead to innovative responses to complex global challenges.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.376
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.247
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.376
Threshold uncertainty score0.769

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.3760.247
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.002
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0020.002
Bibliometrics0.0090.007
Science and technology studies0.0110.033
Scholarly communication0.0160.019
Open science0.0060.017
Research integrity0.0050.007
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0070.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.961
GPT teacher head0.862
Teacher spread0.099 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes3
Has abstractyes

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