The CitiRats project combined education, social sciences and natural sciences. With around 100 secondary school-age young people, we explored how it is possible to perceive our local environments in a way that allows us to understand the other species that share our everyday space as if citizens with their own goals and lives of intrinsic value. Researchers, young people and experts went through three phases of research. In the first phase, the young people took part in an ecological citizen science project to determine the size of the rat population in the area. In the second phase, they undertook ethnographic walks in their local environment to observe interspecies equity issues. In the third phase, author Johanna Sinisalo guided the young people in imagining alternative futures through speculative fiction. The multidisciplinary and speculative approach helped participants to engage with the diversity of their local environment in a critical, curious and multi-perspective way.
