Being Well Together? Promoting health and wellbeing through more than human collaboration and companionship.

Being Well Together, an inaugural Research Forum, will critically examine the myriad ways humans have formed partnerships with nonhuman species to improve health across time and place. Across the humanities and social sciences, a growing body of scholarship has begun to rethink the prominence of the ‘human’ in our accounts of the world by exploring the category less as an individualized essence and more as a temporal process of becoming. From this perspective, being human becomes a process of ‘becoming with’, performed through interactions with nonhuman others. This paper introduces a diverse collection of studies, originally presented at a workshop held at the University of Manchester in 2018, which explored how emergent approaches within animal studies might productively and playfully engage with the medical humanities. In each case, human health and wellbeing is shown to rest on the cultivation of relationships with other species. Being well is rethought and remapped as a more than human process of being well together. Collectively, this Research Forum invites reflection on what the medical humanities might look like from a more than human perspective.