Resurgent natures? More-than-human perspectives on COVID-19

Stories of nature’s resurgence during quarantine have been dangerously conflated with an alarming narrative contending ‘Earth is healing, we are the virus’. Deploying a more-than-human perspective, we show how this discourse arises from biocultural decontextualisation that assumes nature has an inherent capacity to resurge. Such fetishisations distract from the need for urgent environmental action and obscure what resurgence actually is: a multispecies endeavour requiring cultivation and nurture

Filmmaking practice and animals’ geographies: attunement, perspective, narration

After being captured from the streets of Moscow, Laika was the first living creature to be sent into Earth’s orbit by the USSR in 1957. The 2019 film, Space Dogs, tells the story of Laika’s spectral return to Moscow, and searches for her ghosts in the city’s street dogs 60 years later. Combining archival material with contemporary documentary footage ‘filmed at dog’s level’, the film reanimates Laika’s spectral afterlives. Drawing on a series of in-depth conversations with the film’s directors, writers, and director of photography, we provide critical reflections on filmmaking practice for animals’ geographies. We offer a three-part typology which frames these contributions: attunement, which focuses on the affordances of filmmaking practice for attuning to the lives of nonhuman lifeworlds; perspective, which documents how filmmaking practice allows for more-than-human urban space to be viewed from alternative vantage points; and narration, which enables filmmakers to experiment with affective modes of representing animals’ lives, offering audiences alternative spatiotemporal experiences. Finally, we reflect on the potentials of filmmaking as a fruitful practice, method, and output for animals’ geographers

Living waste, living on waste: a bioeconomy of urban cows in Delhi

The economic implications of biopolitics – or the administration, regulation, and control of life – have received significant attention in recent geographical and cognate scholarship. An emerging theme of inquiry, largely focused on the Global North, makes contributions to specifying ‘lively capital’, defined here as bodily value in motion – predicated on accumulation from other-than-human life. In this paper, we argue that the biopolitical process of bringing life into the ambit of capital works in cultural, political, and economic registers and not just through singular logics of the economic, as extant accounts have implied. The rendition of life into capital through modes of biopower is not a universal process. It has diverging trajectories that, in postcolonial contexts, involve hybrids between biopolitical and vernacular practices. This argument is made through an account of bovine biopolitics in urban Delhi with specific reference to the city's ‘cattle problem’ involving ‘surplus’ animals. It unfolds in four distinct parts. First, drawing on archival work, we trace colonial histories of cattle improvement to reveal how the category of ‘surplus’ was invented. Second, we deploy more-than-human ethnographies of free-ranging animals in Delhi to foreground how ‘surplus’ cattle – which we conceptualise as ‘living waste’ – are driven to feed on waste as a result of gentrification and the enclosure of erstwhile grazing grounds. Third, we turn to gaushalas (cow shelters) in Delhi to show how ‘surplus’ cattle from the city's streets are rehomed and managed. Fourth, we examine the uneven practices of care afforded to different bovines based on logics associated with right-wing Hindutva nationalism. Our account provincialises lively capital by opening up more nuanced and situated understandings of the relations between biopolitics and capitalism, attentive to divergences from models situated in Western modernity

Thinking-together through ethical moments in multispecies fieldwork: dialoguing expertise, visibility, and worlding

The recent proliferation of multispecies research contains a conspicuous gap when it comes to the methodological and ethical dimensions of navigating relations with more-than-human participants. Although codified protocols can be a useful starting point, the ethical tensions that inevitably emerge during fieldwork are often fetishized in final outputs. Whilst calls to ‘stay with the trouble’ are important, they often remain descriptive and un-actionable. In contrast, this paper offers a method for working through these tensions, asking what obligations they place on researchers and how they might be negotiated in practice, without slipping into advancing prescriptive rules or guidelines. We discuss this in the context of a range of ‘ethically important moments’ that we each encountered in the field, which were both complex and ambiguous. During our respective periods of fieldwork with dogs in Chornobyl and urban coyotes in Canada, we have each faced moments in which rapid decisions must be made as we navigate the affective intensities that move us as geographers, participant observers, and community members. In this paper, we perform and reflect upon Kohl and McCutcheon’s (2015) ‘kitchen table reflexivity’ as one approach for working through these moments, not just staying with them. Here, ethical tensions are worked through via dialogue. This paper is both method and product, as stories from our individual research are brought into dialogue around three fraught dimensions of multispecies research: negotiating expertise and positionality, making visible or concealing the animal, and intervening in animal worlds

For a new weird geography

The contemporary ecological condition is one of ‘global weirding’, a term coined to describe both anthropogenically changed worlds and the experience of dwelling within them. In this paper, we foreground New Weird fiction as a progressive literary style, distinct from its problematic roots, with conceptual import to human geography. Through attention to the New Weird’s treatment of difference, dis/orientation and ecological relation, these texts provoke geographers to foster a speculative ethics suited to a weirding world. In suggesting this ethical approach, this paper contributes to emerging debates in geography concerning ambivalence, disorientation and affirmation/negation

Claiming veganism and vegan geographies

A decade ago, veganism was a fringe radical movement. It was also largely absent from the geographical discipline, despite a rich history of vegan scholarship being present in disciplines such as Sociology and Psychology. However, veganism has recently seen a surge in popularity, with more people than ever before becoming vegan for a mixture of animal welfare, environmental, and health-based reasons. With this mainstreaming, veganism has become contentious and fiercely defended. As veganism has become a growing social and political force, geographers have started to take notice of this previously fringe movement, which is gaining economic, ecological, and cultural power as investment flows into ‘plant-based’ products and new markets are emerging. In this commentary, we look at how veganism has recently been taken up in Geography via several distinct trends that all stake a claim in defining an emerging geographical sub-discipline, vegan geographies. We note the importance of scholarly pluralism and attention to establishing geographical sub-disciplines more broadly

“More-than-human collaborations” for hacking the Anthropocene

Calls to “hack” the Anthropocene highlight the necessity of destabilizing, diversifying, and decolonizing understandings of the anthropos and the complex ecological relationalities obscured by majoritarian visions of anthropogenic planetary change. In this short intervention, we contend that hacking the Anthropocene must be collaborative in nature. Specifically, it must be a morethan-human collaboration. We present three propositions on more-than-human collaborations as: storying; resistance; and orientation. More-than-human collaborations are fundamental to a politics and praxis of knowledge- and worldmaking. Borne from ontologies of relationality, they become epistemological as method and verb, reflecting an aspiration for convivial multispecies futures

Quarantine encounters with digital animals: more-than-human geographies of lockdown life

Quarantine conditions led to the proliferation of digital encounters with nonhuman animals. Here, we explore three prominent forms: creaturely cameos, avatar acquaintances and background birding. These virtual encounters afforded during lockdown life generated novel and affective human–animal relations that could have lasting effects for humans and nonhumans post-quarantine, posing interesting questions for more-than-human scholarship