Paper short abstract:

I explore the use of History in conservation efforts. I show how multispecies histories can help humans and animals co-exist based on local knowledge, historical ecology and evolutionary history. I argue that that the cultures of animals themselves can be reconstructed and be used in conservation.

Paper long abstract:

I take seriously the possibilities of including History in conservation efforts. History – as I hope I will illustrate – can be significant in addressing current global biodiversity crises and may be particularly effective in revealing the shifting dynamics of conservation dilemmas and thereby help in shaping more effective responses. Hitherto the integration of History and conservation efforts has been neglected, especially in African contexts, so this essay discusses how such collaborative approaches can find common ground between conservation and animal sensitive histories, from Deep History, historical ecology and evolutionary history, to generate fresh initiatives from the ‘conservation humanities’. There are many ways that History can be deployed in conservation: it can fuse ecological, political, social and economic data into explanatory narratives of change over time. It can explore successful initiatives but also exposes the failures precipitated by unintended blowback from failed efforts. The long roots of (human) coping strategies may be learned from cultures with long oral traditions and vernacular traditions of traditional ecological knowledge. Finally, this essay also tries something much bolder: it looks at the changing cultures of the animals themselves and discusses how these might be reconstructed and how they might be useful in conservation efforts.

Paper short abstract:

Looking at what happened to Burmese elephants during the collapse of British imperialism in Myanmar, I argue that historical struggles for decolonisation can help to ground and hone what it means to decolonise Animal Studies.

Paper long abstract:

The growing call to decolonise Animal Studies, and Environmental Humanities more broadly, is overdue and welcome. The imperative to decolonise enables scholars in the field to better recognise the underlying hierarchies, biases and occlusions in our research, encouraging us to find creative ways of reconceptualising our work anew. Nevertheless, there is something of a tendency in the literature towards considering decolonisation as an abstract process and a predominantly epistemological problem. This divorces decolonisation in the academy from social and political histories of decolonisation. By looking at what happened to Burmese elephants during the collapse of British imperialism in Myanmar, in my contribution to the panel I argue that historical struggles for decolonisation can help to ground and hone what it means to decolonise our studies.

Paper short abstract:

What does the 'sensory turn' mean for historians of human-animal relations?

Paper long abstract:

The ‘sensory turn’ ignited transdisciplinary attention to sensescapes, and the utility of sensory ‘re-enactments’. What does this mean for animal/ environmental historians? It might generate empathy able to smash species boundaries, helping us to ‘become animal’. But it poses questions about the simulation/ spectacularisation of difference. This paper examines sensory history as a 'new frontier' in the study of human-animal relations, reviewing recent historiographical developments, illustrating key ideas with reference to my own research around the 'nocturnal', and proposing avenues for future explorations.

Paper short abstract:

Scholars have been criticized for focusing on our fellow mammals or vertebrates, under the general rubric of “animal history”. Lumping all animals together minimizes their variety and reifies the distinction between “the animal” and “the human.”

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have been criticized for focusing on our fellow mammals or vertebrates, under the general rubric of “animal history”. It is true that the animal kingdom is vaster and more varied, but lumping all its occupants together minimizes this variety and reifies the distinction between “the animal” and “the human,” which is equally problematic. So it makes sense for humanists to pay as much attention to biology as to philosophy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores what human-animal encounters and interactions looked like in the European Arctic during World War II. How and why did humans document the animals they encountered, lived and worked with? What role did these animals play for humans, and what social meanings were attached to them?

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores what human-animal encounters and interactions looked like in the wartime European Arctic. As a point of departure, I examine how and why humans documented and described certain animals they encountered, lived and/or worked with in exceptional conditions between 1940-1945. What role did these animals play for humans, and what social meanings were attached to them? What kind of networks of different humans and animals existed, and how did they relate to one another? A diverse set of humans - including the local original population such as Sámi herders, newcomers like foreign soldiers and prisoners of war - suddenly coinhabited remote Arctic regions alongside local and imported (semi-)domesticated animals and wildlife. Different types of encounters and interactions between these humans and animals shaped the everyday life and the war experience of all parties involved. These relations are under-researched, and this paper aims to address this gap. Especially reindeer and their indigenous Sami herders, who largely kept their cross-border mobility despite the war and its ensuing border closures, serve as a point of departure. The aim of my research is to include a range of heterogeneous sources, including material produced by the German military, Sami reindeer herders, as well as by other representatives of the local population and regional authorities in several Nordic countries. The ambition is to contribute to a less anthropocentric and more integrative human-animal dimension in the historiography of World War II in Sápmi, the cultural Sámi area spanning from Norway to the Russian Kola-peninsula.

Paper long abstract:

Much has been written about the history of human relationships with glaciers, sea ice and the many species that inhabit the Arctic region, but there has been curiously little focus on telling the stories of the rich multispecies landscapes and cultures of Antarctica’s sea ice. This vast, dynamic icescape of the Southern Ocean hosts an extraordinary seasonal gathering of migratory whales, seals and penguins as they gorge themselves on a smorgasbord of Antarctic krill. Yet the seasonal heartbeat of freeze and thaw has been faltering as the Southern Ocean warms, with diabolical implications for the creatures that depend on it for survival and for the planet as a whole. In this paper I challenge the conventional human-centred narratives of Antarctic exploration and exploitation by delving into the entangled stories of ice, ocean, humans and other species as they have encountered the sea ice and each other over time. I aim to bring this little-known, three-dimensional icy world into greater focus and ask what insights a nuanced, more than human history of Antarctica’s sea ice can offer us as we confront the environmental transformations taking place in the south polar region in the climate crisis.

Paper long abstract:

According to a popular tale, during Fascist rule, Benito Mussolini went on a short tour of the most modern farms in Italy to witness with his very own eyes the technological, agricultural, breeding, and land remediation accomplishments of the regime. The story goes that after visiting some labor cattle, then some dairy cattle, and finally some breeding cattle, Mussolini realized that he had been shown the very same bovines in all places. As in all Fascist totalitarian endeavors, propaganda, ideology, racism, and technology were all mixed together and, sometimes, even incorporated into human and non-human bodies.

With this paper, I want to reflect upon the ways in which Fascism saw, conceived of, intervened upon, and incorporated in bovine bodies the ambiguous technophile and conservationist ideas and practices that nurtured Fascist ideology. Societal, cultural, and scientific practices and visions, as well as racism, were all key elements of the totalitarian effort of remediation and transformation of land (bonifica in Italia, literally meaning “rendering good or productive”), society, and race that lied underneath Fascist ideology. By combining STS, history of science, and environmental history perspectives and methodologies, and focusing on bovine bodies and zootechnical journals, I am to present a few stories testifying to those attempts to transform socio-natures and to remediate (bonificare) society and nature in Fascist times.

Paper long abstract:

The history of sharks and humans in the Western world is deeply inflected by myth and legend. Popular narratives surrounding sharks are highly dichotomous; caught between wonder and terror, fascination and fear, love and hatred, fact and fiction, the real and the imagined. Yet, as this paper will show, this myth-making has also been extended to the presentation of human perceptions regarding sharks. Often presented as timeworn, intimacies between sharks and humans have their roots in much more recent 20th-century cultural, scientific, and technological shifts. Likewise, the current preoccupation with sharks dates to this period —not just to the "Jaws" phenomenon, but to real encounters with swimmers, surfers, and divers that occurred from the midcentury on. This work examines case studies of shark-human interactions in the U.S. and South Africa, presenting histories of coastal communities that have dealt with sharks not merely in the abstract, but in the flesh. In doing so, it seeks to disentangle sharks from the stories that have been woven around them, to present examples of real people, dealing with real sharks. It argues that only by moving away from the mythological and metaphorical and towards the material, can we understand our outsized feelings towards sharks, and to uncover how and why our attitudes and interactions with them have changed over time, and continue to change to this day.