- Convenors:
-
Rebecca Rutt
(University of Copenhagen)
Sango Mahanty (Australian National University)
Assa Doron (The Australian National University)
- Format:
- Panel
Format/Structure
We expect 3-5 presentations of apprx 12 mins each plus time for discussion.
Long Abstract
This panel will explore the diverse ways that political ecologists examine and articulate the complex relationships that constitute contemporary animal agricultural production. These cover various forms of production and their associated value chains, and span local-to-global relationships. Much recent work on animal agriculture has drawn from environmental humanities, political economy, and food systems research. This panel will open a conversation between political ecology and adjacent fields, such as critical animal studies, multispecies studies, animal geography and anthropology. Key concerns include chemical production and use in animal ag. and subsequent contamination, worsening zoonotic disease emergence and spread, rising antimicrobial resistance, and persistent questions of human and non-human justice. The panel will draw on current empirical material and fieldwork to generate new insights on methodological innovation, narrative practice, and convergences across related fields. It will explore how political ecologists can better study and represent human-animal relationships, how these experiences and relationships are narrated, and emerging conceptual insights on how animals are situated in relation to social and political worlds.
Papers will address one or more of the following questions:
- What are the state-of-the-art approaches and ongoing challenges for political ecologists to examine animal production systems and animals’ positions in these local/global value chains?
- How can we move beyond the framing of animals as ‘protein’ and ‘meat’ to consider alternative ways of seeing human-animal relations, and to generate and nourish alternatives?
- How can our findings be articulated in ways that provoke new ways of thinking and praxis for political ecologists and broader society?
Accepted papers
Presentation short abstract
This paper explores the complexities of care within Vietnam’s broiler chicken industry. Drawing on understandings of care within feminist studies and economic anthropology, it examines the complexities of care and its malleability within industrial animal agriculture.
Presentation long abstract
Focusing on Northern Vietnam, this paper explores the complexities of care within Vietnam’s broiler chicken industry. Drawing on understandings of care within feminist studies and economic anthropology, the paper starts by examining the diverse ways in which considerations of care are relevant to this industry. We discuss the role of state and corporate interventions to strategically expand and change modes of production, including through classification of farming systems, control of breeds, feeding systems and medication/vaccination regimes. These changes complicate the spaces and forms of care that are enabled and depleted in broiler chicken farming. Chickens continue their cultural and social role within social relations of care, where the differentiation of ‘industrial’ chickens (gà công nghiệp) from the more highly prized ‘local’ chickens (gà ta) is significant. Yet industrialisation also enlists and supports certain forms of interspecies care within capitalist logics (e.g. optimal feed/growth regimes, mechanisation of slaughter), while deprioritising others (e.g. the freedom of chickens to bathe in dust or to roam outside in the interests of disease control). Chicken farming thus complicates and shapes care relations in specific ways. Through chickens, we see both the complexities of care within industrial animal agriculture, and its malleability within capitalist modes of production.
Presentation short abstract
Amidst capitalist logics governing life/death in industrial bird production in Denmark, we confront the ethico-methodological challenges of multispecies research in the ‘Pandemic Era’, and call for new modes of attunement that may extend beyond the field of animal geographies itself.
Presentation long abstract
Amidst the capitalist logics governing life and death in the industrial production of birds and pigs in Denmark, we confront the ethico-methodological challenges of conducting multispecies research in this time of increased pathogen emergence and transmission: the ‘Pandemic Era’. Drawing on our empirical insights, we contend that animal geographies in the Pandemic Era are constituted by biological and existential insecurity, underscoring the importance of this work. Through affectively attuning to the bordering devices of biosecurity, we convey the capaciousness of performative understandings of species that industrial agriculture constrains but which animal geographers can advance. Acts of witnessing in industrial agriculture expose the limitations of multispecies ethnography that simultaneously catalyse advancement in the field. Whilst our work reckons with the tragedy of multispecies ethnography in industrial landscapes, the limits we have encountered, from the methodological to the ethical, are incitements to critique and innovate modes of attunement that extend beyond the field of animal geographies itself.
Presentation short abstract
This paper draws on participant observation and creative methods to reveal the affinities, vulnerabilities and contradictions of human and nonhuman life in a traditional grazing landscape
Presentation long abstract
Dehesas, wood-pasture ecosystems co-produced by wildlife and livestock, are one of Spain’s iconic landscapes and one of Europe’s most biodiverse ecosystems. They are not just production sites for beef, pork, lamb and cheese, but also places steeped in socioeconomic history and human-animal sociality. In this paper, I draw on a lifetime of participant observation, analysed through creative writing methods, to provide a dehesa’s perspective on human-livestock interactions. I show that producers’ relations with livestock are not based on crude framings of animals as mere ‘protein’ or ‘meat’, let alone on the separation between humans and nature, but rather on similarity and shared vulnerability. Producers insist that animals are ‘just like us’ in their sentience and intelligence, while drought, the most feared climatic event, lays bare the reality that humans and nonhumans can both be damaged by forces they cannot control. But livestock also pay with their lives for the running of a farm and, traditionally at least, for the feeding of the farmer. This contradiction at the heart of animal agriculture, and at the heart of ecology itself, is not something that can or should be ironed out – it is necessary to living well in a broken world.
Presentation short abstract
Through multispecies ethnography, this paper explores how metabolic optimization and “green” transitions reshape dairy life and labour in the Azores, exposing extractive relations embedded in dairy’s ecological promise.
Presentation long abstract
This paper examines contemporary transformations of dairy production in the Azores through a political ecology of metabolism and multispecies labour. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how technological and biopolitical interventions reorganize bovine life, labour, and ecological processes to sustain dairy productivity in a peripheral island context. The Azores are currently framed as a laboratory for sustainable intensification, promoting a “green” transition in which cattle metabolisms—at microbial, bodily, and ecological scales—become the primary terrain of optimization. These interventions position dairy cows as lively commodities and labouring bodies, central to the maintenance of a desirable “Good Anthropocene”, reinforced through narratives of insular bucolic landscapes and harmonious human–nature relations (Hamilton, 2016; Searle et al., 2024).
Approaching these dynamics with critical animal studies and feminist political ecology allows me to conceptualize dairy production as an extractive regime that reorganizes bodies and territories through techniques of control, care, and enclosure. Maintaining and developing farming is enacted not only through new technologies and infrastructures, but through forms of extraction that move across scales—from animal microbiomes and reproductive capacities to land-use patterns and labour relations on the islands. This perspective foregrounds how metabolic optimization also recomposes persistent hierarchies: gendered divisions of farm work, dairy cows’ subjugation, and forms of ecological imperialism embedded in the colonial history of the archipelago.
Emerging insights from this fieldwork point toward methodological and conceptual avenues for rethinking animals’ positions in value chains and possibly opening alternative ways of analysing human–animal relations beyond agrarian modernization and commodifying framings.
Presentation short abstract
Bridging research and embodied practice, this work explores how ecological knowledge is produced. It analyzes the complex reality of communal grazing, challenging simplistic urban-rural narratives and administrative barriers. Sustainability is a negotiation between shepherd, herd, and mountain.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation explores the complex reality of modern pastoralism through the lens of a practitioner who transitioned from a background in Environmental History of Agricultural Systems (PhD Economic History) and academic research (postdoc in the Basque Centre of Climate Change-BC3) to working as a shepherd. The experience highlights the crucial divide between knowledge acquired "from the office" and the profound learning that occurs by "putting the body" into the work of shepherding.
By detailing daily circuits, herd behavior, and interactions with the mountain, the talk argues that effective and sustainable grazing is fundamentally a process of negotiation between sheep, the flock, the mountain, and other users. This intimate, territory-bound knowledge is complex and often transmitted orally, yet is frequently undervalued, dismissed as "folklore," or simplified by external observers and policy.
The discussion employs a political ecology framework to analyze external pressures, including the challenges of new sector entrants (age, lack of land tradition), administrative barriers (being deemed "not professional" or "not young"), and societal gendered expectations (questions about fear and strength). Ultimately, the talk contends that genuine knowledge, distinct from "marketing," is essential for addressing the challenges of climate change, public policy design, and the demographic crisis in rural areas. It calls for valuing practical, embodied understanding as critical for a resilient rural future.
Presentation short abstract
This presentation explores methods for researching relations between humans and ‘animals-as-food‘ in animal agriculture. It discusses multispecies ethnography as a way to research human-animal relations and material realities of animals’ lives and body mapping as a method to depict meat relations.
Presentation long abstract
This presentation explores methods that are helpful for researching relations between humans and ‘animals-as-food‘ in animal agriculture. Specifically, it discusses multispecies ethnography and body mapping. Based on multispecies ethnographic research on a Swiss goat alp, I share insights on the possibilities and limits of such species-spanning ethnography for studying the material realities of animals’ lives and human-animal relations which entail a strong power imbalance as the animals in question are conceptually viewed and materially treated as animals-as-food.
Furthermore, based on the review of Heide Bruckner’s work on body mapping (dis)connections to animals in alternative food networks, I present this as a method to depict meat relations.
Presentation short abstract
Food system research shows that the easy equation of ethics with vegetarianism has led to invisible harms and diminished responsibility to other people and non-farm animals. This paper argues that an ethical response to harm must incorporate knowledge about and accountability to harm.
Presentation long abstract
The overwhelming consensus in the world of food ethics, is to eat "mostly plants." However, food system research shows that the easy equation of ethics with vegetarianism has led to invisible harms and diminished responsibility to other people and non-farm animals. Very little evidence is marshalled to support these conclusions aside from problematic and controversial claims for how a plant-based diet is ethical or environmentally-friendly, while deeper investigation reveals the widespread harms of plant-based foods. A primary driver of harm in the food system and especially with plant-based alternatives is the perpetuation of unseen and unacknowledged hierarchies between and among humans and nonhumans. This paper combines social theory, philosophy, and academic research to reveal the harms of all food consumption, and how an ethical response to them must incorporate knowledge about and accountability to harm.
Presentation short abstract
A series of mechanisms contribute to the invisibility of the ecological and ethical impacts of animal production. We offer an original conceptual tool to identify regimes of invisibility and illegibility, thus deepening our understanding of contemporary socio-ecological dynamics.
Presentation long abstract
On the one hand, some ecological effects like South American soybean cultivation for livestock feed on deforestation has received some media attention. One the other hand, European agricultural practices, including forms of intensive farming that generate poor animal welfare remain largely hidden from public view. A series of mechanisms contribute to the invisibility of the ecological and ethical impacts of animal production: the geographical remoteness of industrial farms, marketing discourse idealising animal welfare, and the opacity and complexity of global supply chains.
The struggle over the visibility of industrial farming is not new. Citizens and consumers have long been distanced from the violence of meat production, even as they are regularly confronted with attempts to make these realities visible.
To better understand these asymmetries of visibility and highlight the strategies employed by different actors, we propose an analytical framework for examining how certain social and environmental realities are systematically obscured or blurred, while others are granted with increased exposure. Applying this framework to the livestock sector, we aim to reveal the underlying mechanisms through which invisibility and visibility are produced. In doing so, we offer an original conceptual tool to identify regimes of invisibility and illegibility, thus deepening our understanding of contemporary socio-ecological dynamics. Ultimately, this framework shed light on how relations between humans and non-humans are shaped and mediated by these processes.