The more-than-human interview: Comics-based research on eco-entangled memories

Abstract

The more-than-human interview is a new arts-based research method inviting participants to recall and share memories of interactions with the natural world in conversation with a fictional nonhuman character. This approach is grounded in the concept of eco-entangled memory – memories shaped through emotional, temporal, and spatial entanglements between human and nonhuman beings. By giving the natural world an active role in storytelling through the nonhuman interviewer, the method aims to blur the human/nonhuman divide and foster multispecies awareness. This article investigates how narrative and artistic expression can surface eco-entangled memories in order to reconfigure more-than-human relations. It presents a case study with a Danish sustainability activist, whose interview is translated into a comic that functions both as a research output and an integral part of the inquiry. Comics, with their capacity for layered meaning, temporal fluidity, and emotional resonance, offer a unique medium for exploring posthuman perspectives and representing the more-than-human world. Findings suggest that the more-than-human interview, through visual storytelling, offers a reflective space to revisit and revive eco-entangled memories, facilitating ethical recall and strengthening relational engagement. While acknowledging the risks of idealisation of nature memories and human projection onto characters, the study shows that imaginative and playful nonhuman figures can open space for shifting narrative roles and inviting alternative ways of seeing. This article contributes to environmental storytelling, memory studies, and arts-based research by offering a replicable method for cultivating ecological imagination and relational thinking, using comics as a tool for climate communication and environmental activism.