Critical Animal Geographies ─ Politics, Intersections, and Hierarchies in a Multispecies World

Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter. It works toward a more radical politics and theory directed at the shifting boundary between human and animal. Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures with original case studies in order to see how efforts by some humans to control and order life – human and not – violate, constrain and impinge upon others. Central to all chapters is a commitment to grappling with the stakes – violence, death, life, autonomy – of human-animal encounters. Equally, the work in the collection addresses head-on the dominant forces shaping – and dependent on – these encounters: capitalism, racism, colonialism, and so on. In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.

Rosemary-Claire Collard is an assistant professor in geography at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research looks at capitalism, environmental politics, science, and culture, especially film, with an eye to how they depend on and engender certain human-animal relations.

Kathryn Gillespie is a part-time lecturer in Geography, the Honors Program and the Comparative History of Ideas Program at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Her research focuses on the lived experience of animals in spaces of commodity production (e.g., farming, breeding, sale, and slaughter), with a particular emphasis on those animals humans use for food.