Short Abstract

This panel interrogates ‘multispecies mutualisms’: human-animal relationships that are framed as offering win-win health benefits. It is especially interested in research centring questions of harm in species entanglements, and work advancing existing STS theorisations of more-than-human relations.

Description

From conservation volunteering to equine therapy, and cow-with-calf dairy to hypoallergenic dog breeding, a growing range of human-animal relationships are framed as offering win-win health benefits. Indeed, there has been a dramatic surge of interest in ‘multispecies mutualisms’: the conviction that partnerships between humans and animals can underpin mental, physical, and material health for all. There is, however, an urgent need to understand the risks of ‘mutualism’ rather than simply celebrate its potentials. Accordingly, this panel welcomes papers which interrogate human-animal health initiatives that are framed as mutualistic, to ask who really benefits – and who or what might ‘lose’, be harmed, or become marginalised – as ostensibly ‘win-win’ relations unfold in practice. In addition to empirical research about multispecies mutualisms, we are particularly interested in conceptually-informed work that draws on, advances, or intervenes in existing STS theorisations of human-animal relationships. A cluster of interrelated concepts – including care, companion species, and more-than-human entanglements – hold promise for making sense of emergent mutualisms. Yet these approaches can treat questions of harm as secondary to the ethico-political potential of embracing entanglements between species. For instance: The non-innocence of care relations between species, or the imbrication of care and violence, is often acknowledged but presented as a caveat or complicating factor. In contrast, this panel is interested in papers that approach instances of mutualism by centralising questions of harm. What happens, we ask, if questions of risk, harm, or exclusion are treated as the starting- point of analysis, rather than a closing acknowledgement? How might this orientation change the conclusions that are drawn, or the theoretical frameworks that are utilised in STS for conceiving of more-than-human ethics and politics? In offering this focus, our aim is to provoke dialogue about how multispecies mutualisms are enacted in the present and what they could be in the future.

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