The authors analyze the portrayal in popular conservation discourse of the flowering plant Rhododendron ponticum as an invasive species in the British countryside, especially Scotland. They explore how its invasiveness is materially produced via the cultural and socioeconomic as well as vegetal relations within which it is entangled.
The Extinction Studies Working Group is a group of humanities scholars researching and writing on the themes of time, death, generations, and extinction.
Deborah Bird Rose aims to bring Val Plumwood’s philosophical animism into dialogue with Rose’s Australian Aboriginal teachers.
Xenia Cherkaev and Elena Tipikina examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. The investigate how the program affected human-dog relations.
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.
Katarzyna Olga Beilin and Sainath Suryanarayanan discuss the intertwined nature of movements of resistance by humans and plants struggling against genetically engineered soy monocultures in Argentina, which they provocatively conceptualize as interspecies resistance.
In looking back at Henri Bergson and Samuel Butler through contemporary art, Susan Ballard suggests that in the art gallery can provide an opportunity to locate ourselves in the place of others. She argues that sympathy read alongside machinic evolution can offer a new approach to the ecological disaster of species extinction.
In this Special Section on Familiarizing the Extraterrestrial / Making Our Planet Alien, edited by Istvan Praet and Juan Francisco Salazar, Leah V. Aronowsky uses the history of an unrealized technology, the bioregenerative life-support system, to rethink conventional accounts of American spaceflight that cast the space cabin as the ultimate expression of humans’ capacity to technologically master their environments.
Recognizing elephants as moral actors in the institutional space of the elephant stable, Piers Locke reconceives traditionally humanist ethnography as interspecies ethnography.
