Undisciplined Animals

Undisciplined Animals
Author: Pär Segerdahl
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2011-05-25
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1443831425

Animal studies is not a discipline of its own, but emerged simultaneously within many disciplines, such as sociology, geography, biology, art history, education research, philosophy, anthropology, film studies, political science, and gender research. Animal studies stands for a transformed way of doing scholarly work, always through the lens of the human/animal relationship. If anything keeps the field together, it is the productive “incoherence” that it creates wherever it challenges human-centred modes of work. What does it mean to do animal studies? Due to the essential “undisciplinarity” of the field, a traditional textbook approach could not answer the question. Undisciplined Animals is a series of confessions: “this is how I and my basic outlook changed through the efforts of unruly animals, neither of us happily adapting to human-centred perspectives.” The hope is that readers will recognize the same productive tensions in their own work; that the book will help them use these tensions and not hide them as breaches of disciplinary rules. Undisciplined Animals is a collection of invitations to animal studies, addressed to emerging scholars in a variety of fields who want to see how animal studies can vitalize work in their disciplines. The chapters are intersected by short interludes that describe an experience, a notion, or a thought that secretly drives the author’s work. These interludes reveal animal studies to transgress not only disciplinary borders, but also borders between the academic and the personal.

Equine Cultures in Transition

Equine Cultures in Transition
Author: Jonna Bornemark
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2019-01-10
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1351002457

Societal views on animals are rapidly changing and have become more diversified: can we use them for our own pleasure, and how should we understand animal agency? These questions, asked both in theoretical discourses and different practices, are also relevant for our understanding of horses and the human–horse relation. Equine Cultures in Transition stands as the first volume to bring together ethical questions of the new field of human–horse studies. For instance: what sort of ethics should be developed in relation to the horse today: an egalitarian ethics or an ethics that builds upon asymmetrical relations? How can we understand the horse as a social actor and as someone who, just like the human being, becomes through interspecies relations? Through which methods can we give the horse a stronger voice and better understand its becoming? These questions are not addressed from a medical or ethological perspective focused on natural behaviour, but rather from human acknowledgement of the horse as a sensing, feeling, acting, and relational being; and as a part of interspecies societies and relations. Providing an introductory yet theoretically advanced and broad view of the field of post humanism and human animal studies, Equine Cultures in Transition will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as human–animal studies, political sociology, animals and ethics, animal behaviour, anthropology, and sociology of culture. It may also appeal to riders and other practitioners within different horse traditions.

Indians & Soldiers and Ranchers & Rustlers

Indians & Soldiers and Ranchers & Rustlers
Author: Luther Butler
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 454
Release: 1999-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1583486194

From Dublin, Ireland to Barbados, to Virginia, to Georgia, to Mississippi, James Wilkerson's lineage marches westward. Son Wilkerson continues to trace the roots of the people who settle La Plata County, Colorado. Two exciting novels make up La Plata County Series III. INDIANS AND SOLDIERS portrays the Cavalry's role in clearing La Plata County of the Ute Indians. RANCHERS AND RUSTLERS brings two retired Indian fighters into the County and into D.H. and Melinda Wilkerson's life. Privation follows the early settlers, but the beauty of the mountains compensates them.

Meaningful Flesh

Meaningful Flesh
Author: Whitney A. Bauman
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2018
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1947447327

Religion is much queerer than we ever imagined. Nature is as well. These are the two basic insights that have led to this volume: the authors included here hope to queerly go where no thinkers have gone before. The combination of queer theory and religion has been happening for at least 25 years. People such as John Boswell began to examine the history of religious traditions with a queer eye, and soon after we had the indecent theology of Marcella Althaus Ried. Jay Johnston, one of the authors in this issue, is among those who have used the queer eye to interrogate authority within Christian theological traditions. At the same time, there have been many queer interrogations of "nature," perhaps most notably in the works of Joan Roughgarden and Ann Fausto-Sterling, and more recently in the works of Catriona Sandilands and Timothy Morton (an author in this volume). However, the intersections of religion, nature, and queer theory have been largely left untouched. With the exception of Dan Spencer, who writes the introduction for this volume and is one of the early pioneers in this realm of thought with his book Gay and Gaia (Pilgrim Press, 1996), and the work of Greta Gaard in developing a queer ecofeminist thought, religion and nature, or religion and ecology, have largely ignored the realm of queer theory. In part, the blinders to queer theory on the part of eco-thinkers (religious or otherwise) are similar to the blinders eco-thinkers have when it comes to postmodern thought in general: namely, if there are no absolute foundations, how does one create an environmental ethic and a "nature" to save? For this reason and many others, this volume on religion, nature, and queer theory is groundbreaking. Though these essays span many different disciplines and themes, they are all held together by the triple focus on religion, nature, and queer theory. Each of these essays offers a unique contribution to the intersection of religion, nature, and queer theory, and all of them challenge strict boundaries proposed in religious rhetoric and many discourses surrounding "nature." Carol Wayne White's essay draws from a queer reading of James Baldwin to develop an African American religious naturalism, which highlights humans as polyamorous bastards. Jacob Erickson's essay examines Isabella Rossellini's "Green Porno" and Martin Luther's work to develop an irreverent theology. Jay Johnston draws from personal relationships with his late dog, and Master/Pup fetish-play to blur the boundaries between humans and other animals, specifically within ethical and theological discourse. Whitney Bauman reflects on how the very processes of globalization and climate change queer our identities and call for a queer and versatile planetary ethic. Finally, Timothy Morton leads us through a reflection on queer green sex toys to challenge the ontology of agrologistics. Each of these essays in their own way is concerned with fleshing out more meaningful encounters with the planetary community. Without being too ambitious, we hope that these sets of essays will help to open up a new trajectory of conversations at the intersection of religion, nature, and queer theory.

Urban Animals

Urban Animals
Author: Tora Holmberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2015-03-27
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317564820

The city includes opportunities as well as constraints for humans and other animals alike. Urban animals are often subjected to complaints; they transgress geographical, legal as and cultural ordering systems, while roaming the city in what is often perceived as uncontrolled ways. But they are also objects of care, conservation practices and bio-political interventions. What then, are the "more-than-human" experiences of living in a city? What does it mean to consider spatial formations and urban politics from the perspective of human/animal relations? This book draws on a number of case studies to explore urban controversies around human/animal relations, in particular companion animals: free ranging dogs, homeless and feral cats, urban animal hoarding and "crazy cat ladies". The book explores ‘zoocities’, the theoretical framework in which animal studies meet urban studies, resulting in a reframing of urban relations and space. Through the expansion of urban theories beyond the human, and the resuscitation of sociological theories through animal studies literature, the book seeks to uncover the phenomenon of ‘humanimal crowding’, both as threats to be policed, and as potentially subversive. In this book, a number of urban controversies and crowding technologies are analysed, finally pointing at alternative modes of trans-species urban politics through the promises of humanimal crowding - of proximity and collective agency. The exclusion of animals may be an urban ideology, aiming at social order, but close attention to the level of practice reveals a much more diverse, disordered, and perhaps disturbing experience.