It can be considered the most systemic, deadly, and all-encompassing form of institutional violence that currently exists: speciesism, the oppression and exploitation of other animals. For most people on our planet, speciesism is something completely normalized, justified, and encouraged through many facets of dominant cultures. The field of critical/political animal studies, and other fields that challenge anthropocentrism, have already thoroughly problematized, questioned, and analyzed speciesist practices, but one topic receives little academic attention: what can a counter-concept to speciesism contain, without saying what it is not? This thesis is concerned with imagining ‘multispecies worldings’, with the goal to construct positive rather than negative aspects of a counter-concept to speciesism. Instead of offering a single answer, this work illustrates how additive knowledges regarding the possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ make worlds richer. These knowledges emerge through a repertoire of world-making practices with other animals in which we recognize and engage with the ability to respond to each other. Thereby, this thesis answers to – and builds on – various scholarly and activist discourses, including posthumanism, welfarism, animal liberationism, and is theoretically grounded in feminist epistemologies. With a focus on negotiating possibilities, this dissertation is also a work of interaction design. The design practice involves tracing and negotiating multispecies responses with other animals and expressing those narratives as a design research program. These responses are presented as a Multispecies Bestiary, in which ten protagonist animals guide the reader through a collection of big-enough multispecies stories. The thesis thereby illustrates how humans can – together with other animals – find possible meanings of ‘multispecies worlding’ not as a single (broken) solution, but as ever-expanding directions that can permanently unsettle and unmake the established speciesist order.
We are currently facing the sixth mass extinction of species in the history of life on Earth, biologists claim—the first one caused by humans. Heise argues that understanding these stories and symbols is indispensable for any effective advocacy on behalf of endangered species. More than that, she shows how biodiversity conservation, even and especially in its scientific and legal dimensions, is shaped by cultural assumptions about what is valuable in nature and what is not.
A collection of stunning images from some of the world's leading photographers of animals in the human environment. HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene is an unflinching book of photography about our conflict with non-human animals around the globe. Through the lenses of thirty award-winning photojournalists, HIDDEN shines a light on the invisible animals in our lives: those with whom we have a close relationship and yet fail to see. The animals we eat and wear; the animals we use for research, work, and for entertainment; the animals we sacrifice in the name of tradition and religion. HIDDEN is a historical document, a memorial, and an indictment of what is and should never again be. Showcased by award-winning designer David Griffin, HIDDEN represents the work of thirty photojournalists who have documented--and continue to document--animal stories. Their exhaustive and in-depth work has resulted in some of the most compelling and historic images of animals ever seen. Among them are (in alphabetical order): Aaron Gekoski, Aitor Garmendia, Amy Jones, Andrew Skowron, Britta Jaschinski, Daniel Beltrá, Djurattsalliansen, Francesco Pistilli, Jan van Ijken, Joan de la Malla, Jo-Anne McArthur, Jose Valle, Kelly Guerin, Kristo Muurimaa, Konrad Lozinski, Louise Jorgensen, Luis Tato, Murdo MacLeod, Paul Hilton, Sabine Grootendorst, Selene Magnolia, Stefano Belacchi, Tamara Kenneally, and Timo Stammberger. "The photojournalists featured in Hidden have entered some of the darkest, most unsettling places in the world. The images they have captured are a searing reminder of our unpardonable behavior towards animals and will serve as beacons of change for years to come."--Joaquin Phoenix, actor "I am, quite simply, in awe of these photographers. In a way, they are like war photographers, except witness to a war that so many people choose to suppress that exists. This takes enormous inner strength and bloody-minded determination, because they cannot save any of the animals that they photograph; they can only hope that their photos will help illuminate the mass extermination that unfolds every second of every day across the planet. To me, they are heroes. Not just for one day, but over and over and over again."--Nick Brandt, photographer
Imagining Afghanistan examines how Afghanistan has been imagined in literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, drama, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening “Afghanistan” has become a conduit for understanding our shared post-9/11 condition. “Afghanistan” serves as a lens through which contemporary cultural producers contend with the moral ambiguities of twenty-first-century humanitarianism, interpret the legacy of the Cold War, debate the role of the U.S. in the rise of transnational terror, and grapple with the long-term impact of war on both human and nonhuman ecologies. Post-9/11 global Afghanistan literary production remains largely NATO-centric insofar as it is marked by an uncritical investment in humanitarianism as an approach to Third World suffering and in anti-communism as an unquestioned premise. The book’s first half exposes how persisting anti-socialist biases—including anti-statist bias—not only shaped recent literary and visual texts on Afghanistan, resulting in a distorted portrayal of its tragic history, but also informed these texts’ reception by critics. In the book’s second half, the author examines cultural texts that challenge this limited horizon and forge alternative ways of representing traumatic histories. Captured by the author through the concepts of deep time, nonhuman witness, and war as a multispecies ecology, these new aesthetics bring readers a sophisticated portrait of Afghanistan as a rich multispecies habitat affected in dramatic ways by decades of war but not annihilated.
Given their tendency to splinter over tactics and goals, social movements are rarely unified. Following the modern Western animal rights movement over thirty years, Corey Lee Wrennapplies the sociological theory of Bourdieu, Goffman, Weber, and contemporary social movement researchers to examine structural conditions in the animal rights movement, facilitating factionalism in today’s era of professionalized advocacy. Modern social movements are dominated by bureaucratically oriented nonprofits, a special arrangement that creates tension between activists and movement elites who compete for success in a corporate political arena. Piecemeal Protest examines the impact of nonprofitization on factionalism and a movement’s ability to mobilize, resonate, and succeed. Wrenn’sexhaustive analysis of archival movement literature and exclusive interviews with movement leaders illustrate how entities with greater symbolic capital are positioned to monopolize claims-making, disempower competitors, and replicate hegemonic power, eroding democratic access to dialogue and decision-making essential for movement health. Piecemeal Protest examines social movement behavior shaped by capitalist ideologies and state interests. As power concentrates to the disadvantage of marginalized factions in the modern social movement arena, Piecemeal Protest shines light on processes of factionalism and considers how, in the age of nonprofits, intra-movement inequality could stifle social progress.
This book explores the growing significance of veganism. It brings together important theoretical and empirical insights to offer a historical and contemporary analysis of veganism and our future co-existence with other animals. Bringing together key concepts from geography, critical animal studies, and feminist theory this book critically addresses veganism as both a subject of study and a spatial approach to the self, society, and everyday life. The book draws upon empirical research through archival research, interviews with vegans in Britain, and a multispecies ethnography with chickens. It argues that the field of ‘beyond-human geographies’ needs to more seriously take into account veganism as a rising socio-political force and in academic theory. This book provides a unique and timely contribution to debates within animal studies and more-than-human geographies, providing novel insights into the complexities of caring beyond the human. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in geography, sociology, animal studies, food studies and consumption, and those researching veganism.
A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and nascent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in this curated collection of essays and artifacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope. For additional materials see the companion website: www.multispecies-salon.org/ Contributors. Karen Barad, Caitlin Berrigan, Karin Bolender, Maria Brodine, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, David S. Edmunds, Christine Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Stefan Helmreich, Angela James, Lindsay Kelley, Eben Kirksey, Linda Noel, Heather Paxson, Nathan Rich, Anna Rodriguez, Dorion Sagan, Craig Schuetze, Nicholas Shapiro, Miriam Simun, Kim TallBear, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
The Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities explores the digital methods and tools scholars use to observe, interpret, and manage nature in several different academic fields. Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, and cultural lenses, this handbook explores how the digital environmental humanities (DEH), as an emerging field, recognises its convergence with the environmental humanities. As such, it is empirically, critically, and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualised, and parsed framings of past, present, and future environments, landscapes, and cultures. Currently, humanities, geographical, cartographical, informatic, and computing disciplines are finding a common space in the DEH and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding, and software into league with literary and cultural studies and the visual, film, and performing arts. In doing so, the DEH facilitates transdisciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, painting, philology, philosophy, and the earth and environmental sciences. This handbook will be essential reading for those interested in the use of digital tools in the study of the environment from a wide range of disciplines and for those working in the environmental humanities more generally.
This book explores the past and current traces that cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals used by humans have left in Anglophone literary fiction. In times of accelerated global warming, an acute pandemic, and breakthroughs in bioengineering practices, discussions on how to rethink the relationships to these animals have become as heated as perhaps never before. Livestock and Literature examines what literature has to contribute to these debates. In particular, it draws on counter-narratives to so-called livestock animals’ commodification in selected science- and speculative fiction (SF) works from the twenty-first century. These texts imagine ‘what if’ scenarios where "livestock" practice resistance, transform into biotechnologically modified, postanimal beings, or live in close companionship to humans. Via these three points of access, the study delineates the formal and thematic strategies SF authors apply to challenge anthropocentric and speciesist thought patterns. The aim is to shed light on how these alternative storyworlds expand readers' understanding of the lives of farmed animals; seeking insight into how literature shapes human-animal relationships beyond the page. Liza B. Bauer is Interim Scientific Manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking and co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research section on Human-Animal Studies at the Justus Liebig University, Giessen, Germany.
This set of multi-reference works is meant to be read together as the five volumes interlace one another like the laces of a shoe in the famous painting by Vincent van Gogh. The question of who will wear the shoes is long debated in art history and philosophy. If we take these five volumes from different points of view on the theory and practice of business storytelling then we have a crisscrossing, a new and impressive dialogue for the reader. This set is presented as a new way to lace up the laces of business storytelling.Volume 1 aims to help and inspire leaders, business owners, and researchers in creating a commitment to ethical and sustainable changes and ideas, and live in a world of high complexity without getting stressed but experiencing freedom instead.The book combines tools, case studies, and theories about the ethical change-management method of True Storytelling and other perspectives and views on ethics and storytelling. It delves into important topics such as true storytelling sustainability and freedom, storytelling and start-ups in the health industry, storytelling and diversity and culture, storytelling and teams, storytelling, sustainability and the UN Goals, storytelling and well-being, storytelling in higher education, and storytelling and fundraising.Book authors are experienced and successful researchers, business owners, leaders, and consultants from Scandinavia, the USA, Africa, and Europe.Volume 2 is an endeavor into the creation of new concepts for engaging with sustainability. It maintains that storytelling is important for our emplacement in nature and can be important for enacting another relationship between nature and the cultural artifice — our social and material constructions of houses, cities, villages, harbors, streets, and railways, and our use of objects and artifacts to construct our lives.Business storytelling communication is that space for social symbolic work that brings the symbolic objects of the organization, the human, and the natural environment into a dialogical relationship. Volume 3 posits that organizations are arranged as social symbols that are arranged in institutions based on the needs of organics, for example health, food, shelter, mating, leisure, and labor. Organics, as a social symbolic object, specifically humans, have emotions, language, and culture to organize their institutions and organizations. In this book, readers will find that many of the authors attempt to understand the body's exclusion or attempt to bring the body back into the organization. Business storytelling communication takes aim at the social symbolic work of making space to negotiate the social arrangement of organizations with its organic components.Volume 4 covers a variety of methodological topics from a storytelling perspective. Why a storytelling perspective? Consider that a common business research goal is to convince others that what the researcher has to say matters. If the researcher is a basic researcher who wishes to promote a theory, the goal is to make a convincing case for the value of that theory. If the researcher is an applied researcher who wishes to promote a particular application, intervention, or policy change, the goal is likewise to make a convincing case. Either way, the researcher has a story to tell, and the onus is on the researcher to tell the best possible story; storytelling failures likely will result in a failure to convince others of the value of one's theory or application.Here is where methodological issues come into play. Poor methodology, whether in the form of less-than-optimal study designs or invalid statistical analyses, harms story quality. In contrast, high-quality methods and statistics enhance story quality. Moreover, the larger one's methodological and statistical toolbox, the greater the opportunities for researchers to tell effective stories. The chapters in this book come from a wide variety of perspectives and should enhance researchers' storytelling in the following ways. By opening many different methodological and statistical perspectives, researchers should be more able to think of research stories that otherwise would remain unavailable or inaccessible. Secondly, the present chapters should aid researchers in better executing their research stories. Therefore, researchers and graduate students will find this book an invaluable resource.Volume 5 opens a window into the world of quantum storytelling as an organizational research methodology, providing numerous exemplars of work in this storytelling science that has disrupted qualitative inquiry only with the intention of providing expanded, improved, and generative ways of understanding and knowing the narratives that emerge from qualitative interviews and observations during organizational research studies.
