Animals Are Our Relations - Preface

Annals of Science, 2013

In 2005 a small group of academics gathered at the University of Western Australia for a modest yet highly significant interdisciplinary conference focused on scholarship in the emerging field of human-animal studies. A critical mass of academics from the University of Tasmania attended that first conference and pledged to host a second human-animal studies conference two years later. True to their word a second human-animal studies conference was held in Hobart, Australia, in 2007. The organisers called the second conference "Considering Animals" and the book under review here is a compilation of papers presented at that conference. The first striking feature of the book Considering Animals (hardback version), is the artwork on the dust jacket (Figure 1). While some may not pay a book's dust jacket much heed, I view Considering Animals stunning cover-art as quite a coup. In an age of publishing rationalisation and belt-tightening, I imagine that the editors must have fought hard for permission to display a colour image on the book's cover; and for the inclusion of such a large number of pictures throughout the book. If this is the case, then their persistence paid off. Not only is Yvette Watt's cover-art beautiful and thought provoking in and of itself, it also serves to remind readers that this book is dealing with a highly interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry. Human-animal studies is not only about words. It is about images, representation, art and interpretation. One of the most noteworthy features of the biannual Australian Animal Studies Group, and the Minding Animals, conferences is the extent to which visual and other creative artists contribute to the field. With the use of such powerful cover-art the editors give effect to the contribution made by creative arts to the emerging discipline of human-animal studies. The book opens with a forward by well-known ecologist Marc Becoff and an introduction by two of the book's editors: Carol Freeman and Elizabeth Leane. The remainder of the book consists of 14 papers by (often prominent) academics, all of who presented at the 2007 University of Tasmania "Considering Animals" conference.

Environment and Society: Advances in Research, vol. 4, 2013

In studying the lives and livelihoods of human beings, the social sciences and humanities oft en fi nd their lines of inquiry tugged in the direction of other, nonhuman beings. When Claude Lévi-Strauss (1963) suggested that "thinking with" animals was relevant and fruitful to the study of humankind, scholars began to follow these leads with academic rigor, enthusiasm, and creativity. Propelled into the new millennium by the passion of the environmental movement, compounded by natural and anthropogenic disaster, and now entrenched in the discourse of the Anthropocene, recent scholarship has simultaneously called into question the validity of human exceptionalism and expanded our social and political worlds to include animals and myriad other nonhuman beings. Th is move is paradoxical: as the signifi cance of human action on this planet has increased, the category of the human is continually challenged and redrawn. While contemporary posthumanist critique rethinks the importance of animals and strives to destabilize long-standing ontological exceptions, it does so just as the eff ects of human presence overwhelmingly single out our species as the dominant agents of planetary change (see Chakrabarty 2009; Steff en, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007).

The event Animal Mind (Mente Animale) organized by SIUA across Italy in 2013 registered a great success of audience. SIUA, the School of Human-Animal Interaction founded and directed by Roberto Marchesini -the well-known cognitive ethologist who is also considered worldwide a leading figure within the field of human-animal interaction -planned in fact several conferences open to everyone who may be interested or intrigued by nonhuman animals lives. The major Italian cities touched by the event throughout the entire year were Turin, Milan, Rome, Verona, Trieste and Bologna. The events hosted scholars, animal rights activists and stakeholders who are in different ways involved in the animal issue in order to spread largely a new way and culture to think about nonhuman animal worlds.

Relations Beyond Anthropocentrism, 2013

Methods in Human-Animal Studies: Engaging with animals through the social sciences, 2023

In this introduction, authors highlight how the present book builds on, and contributes to, methodological debates in human-animal studies. By providing important context about the state of research in human-animal studies, and the current methodological fragmentation, the introduction orients readers to how, and why, a cohesive discussion of methodological tools is imperative. Authors then review each chapters' contributions, describing authors' central aims of re-focusing our methods to better attend to the animal side of human-animal relations. The introduction ends by discussing important limitations of the book, as well as suggesting ways forward for human-animal scholarship.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2018

Society & Animals, 1993

Symbolic Interaction, 2003

Symbolic interactionism and other sociological perspectives traditionally have not attended to a significant form of close relationship-that which exists between people and the companion animals with whom they share their everyday lives. After a brief presentation of a portion of the relevant literature that deals with how humans understand and interact with their animal companions, I present the process by which caretakers come to define the unique identities of their animals and the ways in which the human-animal couple identity shapes public interaction. Since play, mutual gaze, and "speaking for" animals are key elements of friendly human-animal interaction, I discuss these activities as central to the process by which caretakers establish and express intersubjective connections with their animals. Finally, I maintain that attention to human-animal relationships holds promise for advancing an appreciative understanding of how personhood, mind, and culture are constructed in the process of interaction. Of special significance to the broadening of the interactionist perspective is that the understandings and emotional connections that bind people and their animals are created and maintained in the absence of a shared body of linguistic symbols.

2014

Animals' omnipresence in human society makes them both close to and ye tremarkably distant from humans. Human and animal lives have always been entangled, but the way we see and practice the relationships between humans and animals - as close, intertwined, or clearly separate - varies from time to time and between cultures, societies, and even situations. By putting these complex relationships in focus, this anthology investigates the ways in which human society deals with its...

Rethinking the Human–Animal Relation: New Perspectives in Literature and Theory, 2019

Paragraph - Edinburgh University Press Volume 42, Issue 1, March, 2019