Human history is deeply interwoven with the life of animals. Despite the long history of dialectical human-animal relations, animals have comparatively received ‘a curious lack of interest in the political’ (Srinivasan, 2016, p.76; Hobson, 2007). While animal and more-than-human geographers have taken animal agencies and subjectivities into account in their examination, their perspectives have been challenged by political geography and political ecology because of the lack of recognition of existing political and economic structures in which animals are often imbricated. Political geographers and political ecologists shed more light on those structures that coconstitute certain human-animal relations.
In light of the theoretical debates, this session foregrounds states in shaping human-animal relations. States often engage in defining our understanding of animals. Through states’ practices of labeling animals, animals fall often under the category of natural resources to be exploited and protected. This categorization, however, is not a fixed outcome but an ongoing process through which human-animal relations are reconstituted.
This session asks how thinking with and through animals can complicate existing geographical theories of states, resources, and territory. Addressing those dimensions will better animate the politics embedded in shifting human-animal relations at multiple scales. While this session is anchored generally in political geography and political ecology, it welcomes contributions from a range of vantage points including animal, more-than-human, and resource geographies, and beyond. The following questions are suggested as possible entry points for contributions:
- What aspects of animals are mobilized in resource-making and state-making projects?
- What other actors are to be incorporated to better apprehend state-animal relations?
- How are human-animal relations mediated and negotiated with broader political, economic, and social contexts such as colonization, globalization, urbanization, etc?
- How do animals’ features and subjectivities complicate states’ efforts to control animals?

Organizer: Hanbyeol Jang

Please submit your abstracts to Hanbyeol Jang at hanbyeol.geo@temple.edu by 15 December 2023.

Modality: In-person