More than Human Matters: An interview with Natasha Fijn

Our guest this week is Natasha Fijn, an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker based at the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. Natasha’s ongoing interest is in cross-cultural perceptions and attitudes towards other animals, as well as the use of the visual, particularly observational filmmaking, as an integral part of her research. Her ethnographic fieldwork has been based in the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia, involving engagement with human-animal relations and concepts of domestication. Since 2016, Natasha’s research focus has been on multispecies medicine in Mongolia. She was awarded a Fejos Fellowship in Ethnographic Film, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation to make a film 'Two Seasons: Multispecies Medicine in Mongolia' during 2017. Natasha was a research fellow within an international team ‘Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene’ at the Centre for Advanced Studies in Oslo in 2016. Earlier, Natasha held a College of the Arts and Social Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the ANU (2011-2014). Part of this project 'Encountering Animals' included the making of a film 'Yolngu Homeland' (2015). Natasha has edited a number of themed issues on visual anthropology and observational filmmaking. Her first monograph, Living with Herds: Human-Animal Coexistence in Mongolia, was published by Cambridge University Press.