Spår #4: Encounters with animal signs
In this webinar, anthropologist Joshua Sterlin explores how learning wildlife tracking and ‘reading’ animal signs on the landscape can help liberate us from an inward-facing human culture and make multispecies relations possible.
Date: 18 November 2026
Time: 14:15 - 15:30
Language: English
Organiser: SLU Center for Nature Interpretation
Location: Online
Joshua Sterlin is a PhD candidate at McGill University, Canada. He combines his extensive academic training as anthropologist with hands-on experience in ‘cultural rewilding’, which he gained through the Wilderness Awareness School in Washington State.
In his doctoral research, he explores the nature connection movement, examining how practices such as animal tracking, wild harvesting, and cultural rituals foster new ways of relating to the more-than-human world and reimagining culture in a time of ecological crisis. You can find more information about Joshua’s work on his personal website - https://jsterlin.org/
About the series
Spår is a webinar series that explores how ancestral survival skills can contribute to crisis preparedness and a sustainable society.
The series consists of personal stories from guides, educators, rewilding advocates, activists, writers, and researchers who follow the tracks of our shared history as hunter-gatherers in an attempt to navigate through ecological collapse, social instability, and other crises.
Each webinar explores traditional knowledge, skills, and ways of life - whether it is making fire with friction, gathering wild plants, tracking animals, weaving baskets, or sharing stories - along with underlying ethical and cultural approaches that are about living in a mutual relationship with one's surroundings. Rather than searching for simple answers in the past, the series invites a dialogue about how these forgotten knowledge and ideas are being reinvented and renegotiated within contemporary outdoor education, outdoor life, and modern lifestyles. Together we explore how they can deepen our connection to non-human nature, strengthen local resilience, and help us imagine futures that are more regenerative, sustainable, and just.
This webinar series is a part of the project "Surviving with more-than-human kin" run by SLU Center for Nature Interpretation (SSNC) and it is finansed by Formas (2026-2029). Read more about the research at SSNC.