In recent decades human population expansion has led to significant overlaps between human and wildlife communities. Accordingly, understanding how humans and wildlife coexist in shared spaces is becoming increasingly important to achieving sustainable conservation outcomes. These studies are trending away from single disciplinary projects towards socio-ecological approaches, which seek to provide a broader view of interactions.  Yet, human-wildlife researchers often struggle to combine social and ecological information in ways that balance the experiences of human and more-than-human communities. Research typically occurs within positivist paradigms that position humans as separate and dominant over the more-than-human and privilege knowledge created by research professionals. These approaches can be problematic because they are often unable to account for the diversity of participants experiences and the accompanying complexity of interactions, risking inappropriate or unwanted management interventions.

Penney Wood's research considers coexistence within a relational paradigm, which regards reality and knowledge as pluralistic, created in partnership between researcher and relating communities. Reflected within methodologies, a relational paradigm frames coexistence as a multidirectional co-constructive act, opening space for observations of reciprocal agency not easy recognised in positivist, empirical frameworks. Interactions between humans and dingoes in in the Myall Lakes region provided a case study for revealing the value of relational approaches. The data gathering focused on ways humans and dingoes express agency when interacting in shared spaces and included open-ended interviews combined with ecological and environmental data through thematic analysis.  In the resulting narratives Penney hopes to highlight the entanglement of human-wildlife relationships and identify how coexistence is uniquely co-constructed in this system.

Growing up in regional Tasmania fostered Penney’s enduring love of wildlife and sparked a deep appreciation for the need to strengthen relationships between human and non-human communities, particularly in the nexus between built and natural spaces. To further pursue her passions in this area Penney is undertaking a Doctorate focusing on the social and ecological relationships between humans and wildlife in shared environments, utilising a case study of interactions between humans and dingoes in the Myall Lakes region of Northern NSW. Her research investigates the relationships between entities by employing a relational ontology to guide her data collection and thematic analysis. This ontology frames the experiences and agency of both humans and wildlife, as multidirectional acts that contribute to the co-construction of coexistence in various ways.