Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders Manifesting a Future of Liberated Animals

Foreword

Richard Twine

Preface: Once There Was a Bear Here

Amy Dover

Introduction

Paula Arcari

Section 1. Relational Reconfigurations in Present Futures

1. Sites of Vegan Placemaking: A Celebration of Multispecies Alliances at the Borderlands 

Elizabeth Tavella

2. Careful Care Towards Animal Liberation for Feral Pigeons and Beyond

Maria Martelli

3. Unveiling Shared Histories: Crafting Sanctuary and the Work of Care in Troubled Domestic Domains

Marie Leth-Espensen

4. Non-ridden Horses, Implanted Chickens, and Vegan Sanctuaries: The Liberatory Promises and Limits of Animal Heterotopias

Paula Arcari

Section 2. Conceptual and Political Re-ordering

5. The Magpies: Reflections on Liminality, Domestication, and Animal Agency

Angie Pepper and Richard Healey

6. Dog Proposals: Participatory Design, Playfulness, and Multispecies Futures

Michelle Westerlaken

7. The Radical Praxis of Equity:  Mutual Interdependence and an Ethic of Responsibility 

Charlotte A. Kunkel and Scott Hurley

Section 3. Subversion Through Radical Storytelling and Restorying

8. Opening Aquaria

Daniel Vandersommers

9. Beyond the Farm – Towards Multispecies Anarcho-communities

Amina Grunewald

10. The Post-human Ontology of Gothic Enviro-toons: Defying Anthropo-denial in Watership Down, The Plague Dogs and Padak

Sutirtho Roy

11. Laugh to Liberate: Futurabilities of Posthumanist Comedy

Katya Krylova

Section 4. Personal Shifts and Transformations

12. Love Beyond the Species Divide in Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

13. Choosing Snakes: Towards Unhampered Hospitality

Sue Hall Pyke

14. A New Pedagogy of Sharing Multispecies Sentience: Coexisting in Spaces of Love and Compassion

Jennifer Rebecca Schauer

Afterword: A Methodological Side-note

Paula Arcari

Biography

Paula Arcari is an independent scholar living in Melbourne Australia, and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2019-2022) hosted by the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’ published in 2019.

'To create a future where humans and other animals are free, we need inspiring visions to guide us. After all, we can only create what we can imagine. Over 14 chapters, this collection offers much needed examples and visions of more liberatory ways of seeing and relating to our animal cousins, providing glimpses of what this promises, and helping us uncover pathways to create these alternative futures.'

Dr Laila Kassam, Animal Think Tank, UK

'How may genuinely enduring post-liberatory scenarios for (other) animals be realised in the wake of upending human relations of power, violence, and exploitation over them? This essential pragmatic question is startlingly missing in much scholarly and activist work for multispecies liberatory praxis. Conceiving and transcending a visionary manifesto, Arcari’s curation of ‘heretotopia’ takes us across sanctuaries, neighbourhood trees, dovecotes, and design projects to show why and how noticings and imaginings of possibilities otherwise, arising from the ashes of singular knowing, is imperative for liberatory politics to be conceivable, and hence actionable. Each chapter exuding care, this groundbreaking collection, heralding a momentous generational shift in animal studies, composes nothing less than conceptual insurrection, a new political grammar, and critically, a tangible cartography for radicalising human-to-animal alliances.'

Associate Professor Yamini Narayanan, Deakin University, Australia