Narratives for Interspecies Education

The complexity of relationships and forms of cohabitation in the global era implies a reconfiguration of values, be haviours andinteractions that invest not only inter-human relationships but also those with the natural environment and non-human animals. Even species differences are encompassed into dynamics of recognition, inclusion, ex clusion, and oppression that involve the processes of constructions of otherness (Borkfelt 2011; Mahlke 2014; Nimmo 2016). The relationships of care, responsibility, and solidarity that value both the constitutive relationality of humanbeingsandwhattheysharewithotherliving beings becomemoral,political, and educational alternatives to relationships based on power and instrumental, oppressive, and hierarchical social constructions (Pulcini 2009; Freeman 2016; Tota 2023; Nussbaum 2023). This leads to rethink species relationships from an ecological per spective (Tota 2023, 2024) capable of abandoning “discontinuity-based” approaches in considering humans’ relationship with other animals. Recognizing proximity and what is common with other animals allows to withdraw these relationships from processes of reification that translate into practices and systems detrimental to the dignity andwell-being of non-humanindividuals(Taylor andTwine2014;Almiron,Cole,andFreeman2016).Startingfrom this point of view, interspecies education (Andrzejewski, Pedersen, and Wicklund 2009) requires considering non human animals in an inclusive perspective that recognizes them as significant subjects (Pedersen 2013), bearers of rights (Regan 2004 [1983]; Nussbaum 2006) in their individuality beyond species characterizations (often stereotypically constructed). Interspecies education thus shares many fundamental assumptions of anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-ableist education (Nocella et al. 2017; Horsthemke 2018), included their critical purpose (Russel and Spannring 2019). Even the educational tools and strategies in these fields can be considered in line with the goals of interspecies education, especially those aimed at promoting empathetic relationships with various forms of otherness and supporting processes of recognizing and narrating vulnerable subjectivities (Bruno and Peruzzi 2021). Alternative representations of otherness, particularly those provided by literary works, can serve as a ‘reflexive exercise’ capable of laying the foundations for alternative interspecies relationships. On the one hand, such narrative practices can effectively fulfill a delegitimizing function regarding processes of normalization and legitimization of oppressive behaviours that emerge in mainstream communication (Malknecht 2018, 2021). On the other hand, the same narrative structure unfolds its critical potential in the rehabilitation of cognitive faculties and emotional dimensions that make literature, as well as other arts, “schools of complexity” (Morin 1999), en abling “sympathetic imagination” and the imaginative extension of experience (Nussbaum 2010) beyond individ ual and species boundaries, activating processes of self- and otherness-recognition.