Podcast The Animal Turn – Season 3

Guests:

Shubhangi Srivastava is currently a doctoral research scholar with the ERC Grant project, Urban Ecologies, at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore. Her doctoral research is centred around studying the ecological, political and socio-economic dimensions related to human-dog relationship in the context of urban India. Shubhangi has been working towards combined methods of ethnography and ethology to study nonhuman animal living in the urban. Central to her work are the ideas of beastly places and the politics around the urban animals in India. She developed an interest in human-animal relations during the course of her M.Phil. in Anthropology from University of Delhi, where she worked on the human-macaque conflicts in Northern India, looking at the cultural and religious aspects of the relationship. She can be reached on her email shubha.srivastava06@gmail.com or on twitter @Shubhangi1057. 

Anmol Chowdhury is currently working in the Urban Ecologies Project (funded by ERC) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, India looking at lives of macaques in urban India. Through their work, they are attempting a conversation between ethnographic and ethological perspectives of thinking about animals. Their other interests include gender and queer theory, geopolitics of  Kashmir, folk music and traditional foods. (@kashqueeri) and email address (anmol.c1234@gmail.com).

Featured: Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know by Alexandra Horowitz; The more-than-human city by Adrian Franklin.

Guests:

Michelle Westerlaken is a Research Associate on the Smart Forests project in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She has a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University in Sweden where she did her dissertation on “Imagining Multispecies Worlds” in which presented 10 protagonist species and stories in a Multispecies Bestiary to illustrate a repertoire of world-making practices. As a designer, Michelle works with participatory methods that examine possibilities for humans and other species to propose interaction modalities for multispecies ways of living on this planet. So far, these projects have involved design negotiations together with cats, dogs, ants, and penguins, and various interactive technologies. Central to her work are the ways in which theory and participatory research practices continuously inform and inspire each other. Connect with Michelle on Twitter (@colombinary) or via email and find out more about the smart forests project at www.smartforests.net

Featured: It Matters What Designs Design Designs: Speculations on Multispecies Worlds (Video); Imagining Multispecies Worlds by Michelle Westerlaken; Designs for the Pluriverse by Arturo Escobar; When Species Meetby Donna Haraway; The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing; The Carrier Bag of Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin; What would animals say if we asked the right questions by Vinciane Despret

Guests:

Philip Howell is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is an historical and cultural geographer, and has written about the regulation of sexuality in Victorian Britain, and on the relations between literature and geography. But for 20 years he has been researching “animal geography,” focusing on the place of the dog in Victorian society, but also taking in the politics of animals in contemporary society. Find out more about Philip here and you can reach him via email (pmh1000@cam.ac.uk)

Featured: Flush and the Banditti: Dog-stealing in Victorian London; At Home and Astray; Animal History in the Modern City by Philip Howell; The curious case of the Croydon cat-killer: producing predators in the multi-species metropolis; Black Protest and the Man on Horseback: Race, Animality, and Equestrian Counter-Conduct by Philip Howell and Ilanah Taves; Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-animal Relations edited by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert; The Urbanization of the Eastern Grey Squirrel in the United States by Etienne Benson; About Looking John Berger; Foucault and Animals by Dinesh Wadiwel and Matthew Chrulew; La Vie Des Hommes Infämes by Michael Foucault. 

Guests:

Marcus Baynes-Rock is an anthropologist who studies the interfaces between humans and animals. His book Among the Bone Eaters tracks his experiences following urban hyenas in the town of Harar, in Ethiopia. More recently he has written about the new wave of animal domestication and what is can teach us about the destruction of the world’s ecological systems. Connect with Marcus via his blog (https://amonganimals.wordpress.com/) or on Twitter (@MBaynesRock).   

Featured: Life and death in the multispecies commons; Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar; and Crocodile Undone: The Domestication of Australia’s Fauna by Marcus Baynes-Rock; The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game by Paul Shepard. 

Guests:

Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her work explores the ways in which (other) animals are instrumentalised in sectarian, casteist and even fascist ideologies in India, and how animals are also actors and architects of informal urbanisms. Yamini’s research is supported by two Australian Research Council grants. Yamini’s work on animals, race, and development has been published in leading journals including Environment and Planning A and D, Geoforum, Hypatia, South Asia, Society and Animals, and Sustainable Development. With Kathryn Gillespie, she has co-edited a special edition of the Journal of Intercultural Studies on the theme “Animal nationalisms: Multispecies cultural politics, race, and nation un/building narratives” (2020) . In 2019, Yamini was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Mid-Career Research Excellence. In recognition of her work, she was made Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (FOCAE), a distinguished honour that is conferred through nomination or invitation only. Connect with Yamini on Deakin University’s website or on Twitter (@YaminiNarayanan).  

Featured: Street dogs at the intersection of colonialism and informality: ‘Subaltern animism’ as a posthuman critique of Indian cities, Jugaad and informality as drivers of India’s cow slaughter economy; Animal nationalisms: Multispecies cultural politics, race, and nation un/building narratives by Yamini Narayanan; ‘Posthuman cosmopolitanism’ for the Anthropocene in India: Urbanism and human-snake relations in the Kali Yuga by Yamini Narayanan and Sumanth Bindumadhav; Colonisation and Urbanisation by Clare Palmer; The War on Animals by Dinesh Wadiwel.

Guests:

Catherine Oliver is a postdoctoral researcher, currently working on the ERC-funded project Urban Ecologies at the University of Cambridge, where she is researching urban backyard chickens and chicken-keepers in London. Her monograph, Veganism, Animals, and Archives is forthcoming with Routledge (August 2021). She is also a Wiley-Royal Geographical Society Digital Archives Fellow, researching animals as collaborators and workers in geographical knowledge production. Catherine’s other research is in feminist geographies, notably focussed on ‘dis-belonging,’ precarity, and the reproduction of neoliberal hierarchies at academic conferences. More information can be found on her website (https://catherinecmoliver.wordpress.com) and she can be found on twitter at @katiecmoliver. 

Featured: City chickens: What the rise of urban hen-keeping might mean for veganism and Veganism, Animals, and Archivesby Catherine Oliver; Earthlings with Joaquin Phoenix; Animal Liberation by Peter Singer; Industrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge by Hannah Landecker; Eating in Theory and I Eat an Apple by Annemarie Mol; The Rise of Cheap Nature and Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method by Jason Moore; Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift; and Metabolic Labor: Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality by Les Beldo; Cities: Nature’s New Wild by the BBC.

Guests:

Krithika Srinivasan’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations. Through empirical projects on street dogs and public health, biodiversity conservation, animal agriculture, and non-elite environmentalisms, her scholarship focuses on decolonizing and reconfiguring approaches to multispecies justice. Both her research and teaching are deeply rooted in long-term field engagement and praxis in India. Krithika has worked as a Lecturer in the departments of Geography at the University of Exeter and Durham University before moving to Edinburgh. You can find out more about Krithika here and connect with her on Twitter (@kritcrit). 

Featured: Featured:  The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India; Conservation scapegoats and developmentality; and Reorienting rabies research and practice: Lessons from India; by Krithika Srinivasan.

Guests:

Paula Arcari is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow within the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University, UK. Her three-year project ‘The Visual Consumption of Animals: Challenging Persistent Binaries’ aims to support transformational change in the way humans conceive and interact with nature. Before joining Edge Hill, Paula worked at RMIT University in Melbourne on a range of climate change projects and completed her PhD there in 2018. She is primarily interested in understanding the constitution of societal change and stability in relation to climate and environmental change, the expropriation of nature, and the oppression of nonhuman animals.

Find out more about Paula here.

Featured: Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of Meat and Where species don’t meet: Invisibilized animals, urban nature and city limits by Paula Arcari; In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism by Heynen, Nik, Maria Kaika, and Erik Swyngedouw; A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with A Theory of Meaning by Jakob von Uexküll; The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J Adams; The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen; The War Against Animals by Dinesh Wadiwel

Guests:

Nicolas Delon is Assistant Professor or philosophy and environmental studies at New College of Florida. He specializes in animal ethics, with particular interests in moral status and animal agency. He has published on these topics as well as the ethics of killing animals, urban animals, wild animal suffering, and Nietzsche, among other things. He’s currently working on a book project about animals and the moral community of persons. Check out his website (https://nicolasdelon.com/) or connect with him on Twitter (@NicoDelon).

Featured: The Ethics of Captivity and Entangled Empathy by Lori Gruen; The Global Pigeon  and How Pigeons became Rats by Colin Jerolmack; Pervasive Captivity and Urban Wildlife by Nicholas Delon.

Guests:

Marie Carmen Shingne is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology Department at Michigan State University with specializations in animal studies and global urban studies. Her dissertation research is focused on the experiences of the slum residents and street dogs in the Indian city of Pune and what these experiences tell us about power in and access to urban spaces and resources. Using multispecies ethnographic methods, her research asks: how is the urban space currently shared and negotiated by different urban human and nonhuman residents, in what ways are the human and nonhuman residents impacted by these negotiations, and what does an inclusive and equitable city look like according to various stakeholders? Marie Carmen can be reached via email at abneyma1@msu.edu.

Featured: The more-than-human right to the city: A multispecies reevaluation by Marie Carmen Shingne;  Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar by Marcus Baynes-Rock; Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka; Street dogs at the intersection of colonialism and informality: ‘Subaltern animism’ as a posthuman critique of Indian cities by Yamini Narayanan; and The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the UK and India by Krithika Srinivasan, S3 Animal Highlight on Youtube.