Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper draws on several case studies, including the movements and lives of birds, wild boar and orcas to reflect on the ways in which shifting animal mobilities across urban/rural and national boundaries forge new challenges and pathways for environmental action in an era of climate change.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how shifting animal mobilities begin to challenge existing forms of human governance (from national border fortifications to existing practices of conservation) across cities and beyond. It engages with several animal case studies—wild boars rummaging in the German-Polish borderlands, migratory birds traversing the Mississippi flyway over the Chicago skyline, and orcas breaching in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest—that have incited public, scientific, and political debate about animal (and pathogen) movements across urban/rural and national borders.

Drawing on ethnographic research with actors that engage and care for these animals’ movements, including wildlife ecologists, conservationists, foresters, hunters, fishers, farmers, Indigenous groups, and environmental stewards, I show how the shifting dynamics of wildlife mobility become political: they unsettle public, scientific, and everyday practices of ecological care, as well as our understandings of community, nature, the nation, and justice.