Man’s project and its inherited cosmogonies have in the age of the Anthropocene multiplied and intensified environmental damage, human suffering and challenges that leaders need to care about. The question is how may leaders learn to respond to and lead in this rapidly change of material conditions of living beings in the Anthropocene? In certain contemporary leadership learning laboratories, one finds an ongoing and re-iterated experimentation with ways in which leaders may become affected not only by human beings, but also by other kinds of beings. The interspecies intra-action staged in contemporary leadership learning laboratories permit to develop new kinds and conceptions of leadership. While this kind of interspecies pedagogy decentres the human as the only educator, it does not have the animal as the pedagogical target that is to be educated. Rather, the aim is to educate the human sensorium through an aesthetic intervention design. The chapter builds on cultural sources figuring relation between animals, humans, and leadership as well as different empirical material on interspecies pedagogies. The concepts of differential attunement and auto-affection assist us in doing a speculative reading of how humans may alter and reorient through interspecies pedagogies. The interspecies pedagogy may be one adequate response to the Anthropocene predicament that life on Earth presently faces, however, it also demands an interspecies ethics, that makes it possible for the animals (as well as other beings) to refuse not-respectful, harmful and poisonous world-makings.
Original language
English
Title of host publication
Affective experimentation : methodologies of world-making
