Ginn, Franklin, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua. “Flourishing with Awkward Creatures: Togetherness, Vulnerability, Killing.” Environmental Humanities 4, no. 1 (2014): 113-23. doi:10.1215/22011919-3614953.
Considerable energy has been devoted by conservationists, activists, and academics in bringing to light nonhuman suffering. We can now turn to abundant evidence that nonhuman creatures matter politically, ethically, and that they pulse with world-making vitality. Yet, if more-than-human and multispecies approaches have tracked the complex inter-weavings of humans and nonhumans, in so doing they have tended to emphasize co-presence, vitality, and affirmative ways of “being with.” By contrast, and in line with recent work that has stressed the difficulties of caring for “unloved others,” for dealing with subversive, “lively commodities,” or the monstrous insect, this special section takes up the task of considering how multispecies flourishing works when the creatures are awkward, when togetherness is difficult, when vulnerability is in the making, and death is at hand. (Text from authors’ introduction)
© Franklin Ginn, Uli Beisel, and Maan Barua 2014. Environmental Humanities is available online only and is published under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).