Introduction to the urban ecologies open collection: a call for contributions on methods, ethics, and design in geographical research with urban animals

This Open Collection proposes innovative research directions for both urban and beyond/more-than-/non-human geographies with animals. We are seeking papers for this Open Collection across three themes: (1) methods; (2) ethics and politics; and (3) planning and design. Specifically, we are interested in papers that pose questions of and reflect upon emergent tensions in researching with urban animals in each of these themes. This Open Collection aims to explore urban space beyond the human lens and to offer new modalities and frameworks for geographical research with urban animals. We are interested in papers that explore urban geographies with animals from a range of different theoretical, methodological, and empirical locations and perspectives. In this introduction to the Open Collection, we briefly summarise existing research in this field, before outlining the three thematic areas of the Collection

Introduction to the urban ecologies open collection: A call for contributions on methods, ethics, and design in geographical research with urban animals

This Open Collection proposes innovative research directions for both urban and beyond/more-than-/non-human geographies with animals. We are seeking papers for this Open Collection across three themes: (1) methods; (2) ethics and politics; and (3) planning and design. Specifically, we are interested in papers that pose questions of and reflect upon emergent tensions in researching with urban animals in each of these themes. This Open Collection aims to explore urban space beyond the human lens and to offer new modalities and frameworks for geographical research with urban animals. We are interested in papers that explore urban geographies with animals from a range of different theoretical, methodological, and empirical locations and perspectives. In this introduction to the Open Collection, we briefly summarise existing research in this field, before outlining the three thematic areas of the CollectionThis paper was funded by Dr. Maan Barua's European Research Council Horizon 2020 grant, “Urban ecologies: governing nonhuman life in global cities,” grant number 759239

A ‘South within the South’: writing from more-than-human entanglements in Guwahati, India

This paper attempts to theorize from two peripheries within the Indian ‘knowledge production nexus’: one which is spatial vis-à-vis a ‘peripheral’ city; and the other which is relational vis-à-vis more-than-human relations in the city. Drawing from Southern and postcolonial urban theory and more-than-human geographies, we postulate that first, the city of Guwahati in North-East India remains a ‘South within the South’ as a site to theorize from, and second, the everyday enmeshed lives and relations of animals within this landscape remain negligible within the above-mentioned discursive nexus. In a parallel enquiry over ‘other Souths’ and ‘other lifeforms’, we explore animals’ geographies in Guwahati, finding potential in the framing of ‘entanglements’ to encapsulate varied relations with pigs, rhesus macaques, bovines, and dogs – both historically and in the contemporary. More-than-human entanglements, we contend, unveil more-than-human material, spatial, and liminal relations in the city, striated along economic, gender, caste, and class lines. Such a framing is both located and dislocated, suggestive of a comparative analytic and a plural ethic