animals

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.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Eben Kirksey, Dehlia Hannah, Charlie Lotterman, and Lisa Jean Moore conduct a performative experiment which blurs the boundaries between performance art, science, and ethnography. They conduct an outmoded pregnancy test with live Xenopus frogs to probe the contours of the gap between the biochemistry of being pregnant and the experience of recognizing oneself as pregnant.

Drawing on sources ranging from gardening books and magazines to statistics and oral history, Andrea Gaynor’s book challenges some of the widespread myths about food production in Australian cities and traces the reasons for its enduring popularity.

In this special issue on Multispecies Studies, Jamie Lorimer addresses the growing interest in restoring components of the microbiome. His article explores some of the implications of these developments for multispecies studies through a focus on helminth therapy—the selective reintroduction of parasitic worms as “gut buddies” to tackle autoimmune disease.

This collection brings a Canadian perspective to the growing field of animal history, ranging across species and cities, from the beavers who engineered Stanley Park to the carthorses who shaped the city of Montreal. Some essays consider animals as spectacle, while others examine the bodily intimacies of shared urban spaces.

In this introduction to the special issue on Multispecies Studies, Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster provide an overview of the emerging field of multispecies studies. Unsettling given notions of species, the article explores a broad terrain of possible modes of classifying, categorizing, and paying attention to the diverse ways of life that constitute worlds.

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.