animals

Lestel, Bussolini, and Chrulew present a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates.

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, Monica Vasile discusses the recent reintroduction of bison in the Romanian Carpathians, and the surrounding local narratives and unresolved tensions.

McKenzie F. Johnson, Krithi K. Karanth, and Erika Weinthal evaluate compensation as a mitigation policy for human-wildlife conflict around four protected areas in Rajasthan (Jaisamand, Sitamata, Phulwari, and Kumbhalgarh), finding efforts insensitive to local livelihoods.

Etienne Sabatier and Charlie Huveneers examine media portrayals of human-shark encounters between 2011 and 2013 in the state of Western Australia, arguing that negative framing by media feeds public anxiety.

James Hatley’s article for the ‘Living Lexicon for the Environmental Humanities’ section discusses the horizon of the ‘Aion’ (as formulated in the four geological eons), and the fact that every species is linked in genetic kinship.

Shannon Cram explores the slippery subjectivities of nuclear waste and nature at Washington State’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation, examining how this space is framed as both pristine habitat and waste frontier. She examines Hanford’s biological vector control program through the fruit fly and discusses how vector control uses instances of nuclear trespass to articulate the boundary between contaminated and uncontaminated. She concludes that nature is being recruited to do what the U.S. Department of Energy cannot: solve Hanford’s nuclear waste problem.

In this article for a Special Section on “Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism,” Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Fikile Nxumalo relate raccoon-child-educator encounters to consider how raccoons’ repeated boundary-crossing and the perception of raccoons as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. They do so through a series of situated, everyday stories from childcare centers in Canada.

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 this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret discuss how humans and animals are making their own contributions to a new cosmoecology, creating cosmoecological connections and contributing to what Ghassan Hage has called alter-politics.