Animal geographies I

Abstract

Animal geographies has emerged over the last 15 years as a lively and provocative area of current human/non-human geographical research and scholarship. Yet, while the ‘animal turn’ has arguably impacted widely across a range of social sciences and the humanities, for ‘human’ geography it offers what is potentially a far more fundamental and profound reconfiguration of the discipline’s traditional ontological and epistemological reach, not least given the challenge that the ‘animal’ brings to the exclusivity of geography’s adjectival humanism. This article is the first of three reports on animal geographies. It sets out the development of the subdiscipline, from the mid-1990s onwards, and charts the emergence of what has become a distinctive and innovative field with increasing interdisciplinary connections.

(Just) a walk with the dog? Animal geographies and negotiating walking spaces

“…This paper will therefore argue that, far from being a mundane activity, walking is highly sensual and potentially empowering, but also heavily contested and negotiated. In line with thinking in the animal geographies field (Johnston, 2008;Buller, 2014;Moran, 2015), we contend that when undertaken with a dog, the ways in which we would ordinarily conceptualise 'the walk' and/or the practice of 'walking' must be reconsidered on the basis that both these things have been constructed in human terms. In other words, literature has tended to focus on the ways in which humans walk, why humans walk and how humans understand the walk.…”

“…There is a belief within the literature on animal geographies that we need to go beyond regarding animals as mere signifiers of human endeavour and meaning to acknowledge the complex ways in which animals shape individual and collective human identities (Buller, 2014). It is no longer sufficient to simply incorporate, represent and ultimately define animals as 'other' presences and bearers of meaning within humans' cultural spacings and placings (Buller, 2014).…”

“…It is no longer sufficient to simply incorporate, represent and ultimately define animals as 'other' presences and bearers of meaning within humans' cultural spacings and placings (Buller, 2014). Instead, animals should become, in Whatmore's (2006) phrase, 'agent provocateurs' for thinking by and about ourselves (cited in Buller, 2014, p.4).…”

Dilemmas of transgression: ethical responses in a more-than-human world

“…We argue that encounters with dingoes, either directly, or indirectly through sharing knowledge, can form the basis of an ethics that resituates the dingo outside the transgression discourse, requires a greater openness to understanding the dingoes' 'standpoint', and guides humans towards a less punitive and more informed way of living alongside the dingo. … what is being advocated … is an interspecies contact or symbiogenesis based upon a more convivial, less fixedly human and more risky approach to boundaries 4 .…”

Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn: animality, authenticity and automobility in the emergence of the English safari park

“…3 Indeed, while nature-techno-culture assemblies have featured in work relating to multispecies spaces such as farms, the general context of the road and of the car are conspicuous in their relative absence to date. 4 And yet, cars and roads are principal sites of human-animal encounter. They permit access to the countryside, and they are localities of violence -as many as twenty-seven million birds are killed on European roads each year -just as much as they are spaces of sentimentality and ecological awareness in the form of nature tourism.…”