Flights of Fancy: Speculative Taxidermy as Pedagogical Practice

Humans have long been in the thrall of birds-of-paradise plumes. When encountered the seductive power of these plumes is immediately felt, making it clear why for millennia they have been desired ornaments and commodities. In this chapter I describe how I harness these charismatic avian effects in the classroom to underline not only how these effects have co-constructed the allure of birds-of-paradise plumes as commodities, but how they ensure that even a millinery preserved bird-of-paradise will always remain more than an object enframed by human desires and designs. In doing so, the paper recognises and forwards taxidermy objects as sophisticated speculative pedagogical tools for not only examining the co-constitution of human-avian histories but for offering diverse registers of knowing and relating to birds-of-paradise across time and space and states of life and death.