"Avian Bedlam: Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots"
Jean M. Langford explores different modes of interspecies communications at an urban parrot sanctuary, suggesting that humans can alter their interactions to ease parrots’ distress.
Jean M. Langford explores different modes of interspecies communications at an urban parrot sanctuary, suggesting that humans can alter their interactions to ease parrots’ distress.
Les Beldo proposes thinking about nonhuman contributions to production, including those taking place at the microbiological level, as labor, and offers an ethnographic description of the lives of broiler chickens.
Jamie Lorimer uses the concept of awkwardness to discuss encounters between humans and the Auks, a family of maritime birds found on remote coastlines in cooler, Northern waters.
Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.
In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Alexander R. D. Zahara and Myra J. Hird explore the ways in which western and Inuit cosmologies differentially inform particular relationships with the inhuman, and “trash animals” in particular. They compare vermin control practiced in Canada’s waste sites with the freedom of ravens to explore waste sites within Inuit communities, arguing that waste and wasting exist within a complex set of historically embedded and contemporaneously contested neo-colonial structures and processes.
In the special section titled “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section,” Simon Pooley reflects on the decisions and implications of conferring the status of “endangered species” on animals.
In the “Living Lexicon for the Environmental Section” of Environmental Humanities, Maan Barua reveals encounters as spatializing and “ecologizing” politics in ways that are vital for the environmental humanities’ efforts to redistribute powers to act and to flourish.
In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose attempt to dwell with the kinds of writing and thinking practices that we have been developing in their research in Hawai’i over the past seven years. Their aim is to develop “lively ethographies”: a mode of knowing, engaging, and storytelling that recognizes the meaningful lives of others and that, in so doing, enlivens our capacity to respond to them by singing up their character or ethos.
Birds in Our Lives is an account of bird conservation in India, written by conservationist Ashish Kothari. It educates the reader on the importance of birds in Indian culture and economy and highlights the imminent threats to their habitats and populations, as well as growing efforts to conserve birdlife.
Petra Tjitske Kalshoven combines ethnographic studies with ornithological testimonies to present the re-creation and reenactment of the extinct great auk, or garefowl. The author aims to achieve contiguity with lost species through expressions and shaping of human perceptions and imaginations of past, and eventually future, environmental disasters.