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- Convenors:
-
Yayi Zheng
(Oslo University)
Theophile Robert (University of Aberdeen)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Room 109, Teaching & Learning Building (TLB)
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 9 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
In various settings, humans observe and learn to move with and for animals. With focus on movements and mobilities, this panel seeks to explore how animal mobilities are understood and engaged by humans, and the consequential effects on more-than-human social worlds.
Long Abstract:
Focusing on animal movements, this panel asks how animal mobilities are understood and engaged by humans, and the effects on more-than-human social worlds.
Humans observe and learn to move with and for animals. For example, herders follow their herds in pastoral migrations (Gooch 2016; Stépanoff 2012); observing birds around, individuals create space for them in their gardens or homes (Jørgensen 2018); anglers and conservationists work with fish movements in order to manage their population and preserve local biodiversity (Sandlund et al. 2019). These more-than-human movements and mobilities take place at different scales, from intimate spaces to large economic projects that impact the livelihoods of both humans and animals. Urban planning, new infrastructure, environmental changes often reflect patterns of more-than-human mobilities. Simultaneously, through moving with and for animals, humans negotiate their relations with places, their sense of belonging, and landscape memories.
This panel seeks to explore the following questions: how do humans come to understand animal mobilities, and how do they practise this knowledge in everyday life? How do these practices and engagements negotiate social, political and ecological space? How might the way humans work with animal mobilities interact with processes of modernisations, development, climate change, and how might these more-than-human trajectories be maintained, interrupted, or reconfigured as a result? We invite papers from various geographical and social contexts that ethnographically and/or theoretically engage with more-than-human mobilities and shed lights on the diverse ways animal mobilities are shaping human societies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 9 April, 2025, -Paper Short Abstract:
I argue that sometimes, animal movement should be understood as political. While animals cannot deliberate, they can act politically through acts akin to "everyday politics". These animal movements, hence, can also be understood as attempting to move socially: i.e., as political movements.
Paper Abstract:
Multispecies studies have lately been pushing the idea that animals, as social agents, fit certain social frameworks that we earlier reserved to humans. For example, animal studies have portrayed animals as ‘laborers’ (Porcher and Nicod 2018; Hribal 2007) ‘residents’, ‘denizens’, and ‘sovereign’ (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011); similarly, some multispecies studies have recently used vocabulary from the social sciences usually reserved for humans (Cons and Eilenberg 2024; Ogden 2018).
In this paper, I propose that we push further what Ogden has called a “thought experiment”, i.e., using concepts from the social sciences for animals (Ogden 2018). If we take seriously that species have similarities with humans and reject anthropomorphism as has been proposed by some ethologist (de Waal 1999), I argue that anthropology “beyond-the-human” can also apply anthropological models for the study of animals themselves. We would, doing so, go “beyond-the-human” as was programmatically proposed by Kohn (Kohn 2013).
I propose that we understand animals not as agents in human-dominated, anthropogenised environments, but rather animals as political beings themselves. The politics they do, I argue, does not consist of the deliberative activities humans do, contrary to what some argued (Driessen 2014; Meijer 2017). Rather, it is an everyday politics of movement, occupation, invasion (Scott 1985; Vinthagen and Johansson 2013). By playing on the notions of movement and mobility, I argue that animals sometimes move physically to move socially, and their aim is social mobility. These animal movements, hence, are fundamentally a political activity we can understand with anthropological concepts.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper focuses on cockroaches in Bucharest(RO) examining their infrastructural roles. By analyzing how pests like cockroaches transgress and redefine geographic, legal, and cultural boundaries, I aim to explore their co-evolution, co-history, and co-constitution with urban environments.
Paper Abstract:
This study approaches cockroaches not merely as research objects but as knowledge assemblages that co-participate in the production of urban understanding. By studying how residents of Bucharest navigate life with cockroaches, I aim to uncover everyday practices that reveal deeper human-animal relations. I am looking at urban ecologies and infrastructures as 'critical zones'—spaces where various natural, biological, and technological forces interact in a fragile and dynamic way, with the capacity to trigger significant changes in the structure and stability of systems.
I follow the path of the cockroach through the underground infrastructure of Bucharest, moving through sewage systems, pipes, waste areas, surviving bursts of disinsection, entering the building's basement and climbing into people's apartments. Alongside the cockroach's journey, I also examine the movements of people. How we move from apartment to apartment because of cockroaches, and who has the privilege to do so - because although, in theory, we are equally exposed, pests tend to be abundant in the poorest and most crowded urban neighborhoods.
Additionally, I am also looking at the broader “movements” triggered by cockroaches, such as the infrastructure associated with their presence in cities, including the legal and regulatory issues governing when and how cockroaches should be controlled, the use of chemical substances, the effects of cockroach infestations on our relationships with others, and the role of the state in the proliferation and control of cockroach populations.
Paper Short Abstract:
In fox-hunting, the movements of humans, foxes, and hounds intersect. The overall activity, however, is shaped by efforts of rival human groups to manipulate the sensory and spatial worlds that hunting's non-human participants move through.
Paper Abstract:
Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork with hunt saboteurs - direct action animal rights activists who disrupt fox-hunting, this presentation will explore the interrelated movements of humans, foxes, and hounds at British fox-hunts.
While the movements hunting hounds should, in theory, be guided by those of the fox, they are heavily mediated by the actions of humans. Unlike in American fox-hunting, British hounds are not relied on to spontaneously find the line of the fox, but are guided by their huntsman, who will seek to manipulate both them and the fox in order to ensure the longest chase possible. Hunt saboteurs, moreover, use a variety of tactics to prevent the chase, misleading the hounds as to the location of the fox through voice calls and audio recordings, and using scent sprays to physically interrupt the trail laid by the fox.
Here, Tim Ingold's (2007, 2008, & 2015) theorisation of lines is useful, however the power differential between humans, hounds, and foxes suggests that the species are not equal in how they relate to the lines, with humans not simply moving through their own lines, but also working to manipulate the lines of others in order to ensure that multispecies encounters proceed as they wish them to.
Paper Short Abstract:
Drawing on a multispecies ethnography in the Lagunas de Chacahua national park, I look at the migration of humpback whales and the ‘feral’ movements of Chacahua’s crocodiles to illuminate the rapidly changing entanglements of more-than-human lives, conservation and tourism within park territory.
Paper Abstract:
The Chacahua-Pastoria lagoons, one of Mexico’s oldest national parks on the Pacific coast, sustain a rich diversity of species and are home to Afro-Mexican, Chatino, and Mixtec communities, all facing escalating ecological pressures. Drawing on the (visual) multispecies ethnography I have carried out, I examine the migration paths of humpback whales along the Pacific coast and the ‘feral’ movements of Chacahua’s crocodiles to illuminate rapidly changing entanglements of more-than-human lives, conservation, and tourism within the park. The seasonal passage of humpback whales off Chacahua’s coast attracts increasing numbers of tourists who board boats for brief (and sometimes risky) encounters. This demand drives the development of trained professionals and technology: fishermen use their oceanic knowledge to become whale-watching captains, community monitors gather data and form ephemeral relationships with the whales, and AI-supported global projects track these migrations. The movements of Chacahua’s hybrid crocodiles, a ‘feral effect’ from interactions between the native Crocodylus acutus and Crocodylus moreletii escaped from a local cocodrilario, reshape crocodile populations and behaviours in the park. Human responses to these more-than-human movements raise questions about conservation and the role of a national park. I argue that seeing these movements as part of the pluriverse, a negotiation of heterogeneous worlds, is significant to understanding how different ontologies shape the multispecies relationships of the lagoon, where biological knowledge and the ontology of being tonal, sharing life with an animal, come together in a fluid negotiation of moving with more-than-human animals in Chacahua.