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Multispecies methods: Researching the geographies of urban rats
This article discusses the increasing interest in ‘multispecies methods’ through the example of research on rats in the city, focusing specifically on the possibilities of such methodological approaches within human geography and interdisciplinary urban studies. It provides a brief introduction to geographical and urban research that seeks to explicitly consider other-than-human beings, including animals, sketching the types of concerns and questions articulated within such studies. Next, it discusses the various methodological strategies that such scholars have developed to conduct this research, and the types of data these methods generate. It ends by exploring the implications for research on urban rats, suggesting what questions, methods and data might be particularly generative. Overall, the article draws attention to how qualitative social science methods might be combined with methods from the natural sciences and from the arts and humanities to understand the geographies that produce and are produced by human-animal encounters.