Drawing from Haraway, Daoist philosophy, de-colonising studies, affect theory, and feminist new materialist theories, this thesis engages with a sustained and thoughtful mourning practice and elaborates on what this mode of mourning practice teaches us about the rich and complex material-semiotic realities of interdependent multispecies lives and deaths on Earth. This multispecies autoethnographic study inhabits the time and space of mourning as an ongoing and relational kin-making encounter (Haraway, 2008) where a more ethical and convivial mode of thinking and becoming with morethan- human kin may emerge.

Applying concept as method (Jackson, 2017; Mazzei, 2017), a post-qualitative research method, this project enters and stays with/in the mourning process, (re)configuring the dualistic divide between the dead/living, subject/object, human/animal, virtual/actual, knower/to be known, and past/present as a contact zone (Haraway, 2008) where different modes of being and knowing intra-act (Barad, 2007). As a means to think beyond the human-centric knowledge system that privileges the logical gaze of the Sovereign human philosopher ‘I/eye’, this thesis works with Haraway’s concept of SF, Daoist philosophical fables, and the Korean mythical trope of Kumiho (the nine-tailed fox lady), (re)claiming storytelling as a political, ethico-onto-epistemological (Barad, 2007) multispecies kin-making practice (Haraway, 2004; Tallbear, 2007). Thinking with both personal and wider loss/suffering, local (Aotearoa New Zealand) and global, human and non-human, past, present and future, and East and West, this project (re)stories mourning as a relational, ethical, embodied, and transformative process to become with multispecies lives and deaths.