1st Edition
Human-Animal Relationships in Times of Pandemic and Climate Crisis Multispecies Sociology for the New Normal
This book situates sociological research as a vital tool for understanding, and responding to, the multispecies entanglements that cause, inform and arise from states of crisis involving the environment, climate and zoonotic disease transmission. Considering the consequences of a range of multispecies engagements that challenge the perceived distinction between the social worlds of humans and other animals, it explores the themes of crisis through a range of studies, including ecological disturbance, consumer culture, intensive farming and interspecies relations in urban life. With attention to central questions about life in ‘the now normal’, including the extent to which a human-animal perspective can contribute to our understanding pandemics, the ideological foundations of mainstream norms for human-animal relations and the scope of current and emerging social movements for reshaping human-animal relations, this volume represents a timely and important call for sociological vision to embrace the implications of a multispecies planet, and to expand concepts of inclusion and justice. A reconsideration of the human-animal relation that seeks both to revise sociology’s past and inform its future, Human-Animal Relationships in Times of Pandemic and Climate Crisis will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in human-animal relations and the environment.
Notes on contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction
Zoei Sutton and Josephine Browne
Part I: Animals in everyday life
1 The chicken city: Urban interspecies sociabilities
Catherine Oliver
2 Fairweather friends? Rethinking multispecies companionship in the new normal
Zoei Sutton
3 Power, politics and representation in research with (other) animals in the ‘new normal’
Nik Taylor and Heather Fraser
Part II: Activism
4 (Not so) hidden barriers to a vegan-inclusive norm: The struggle against speciesism for compassionate children who could change the world
Lynda M. Korimboccus
5 Incorporating a structural approach into animal advocacy
Nick Pendergrast
6 Selling veganism in the Age of COVID: Vegan representation in British newspapers in 2020
Corey Wrenn
Part III: Species(ist) relations
7 Food animals as an economic class: Animals as commodities under capitalism
Dinesh Wadiwel
8 Resisting Zoopolis: bordering species relations as a response to COVID-19
Erika Cudworth
9 That killing joke isn’t funny anymore: Rebranding speciesism after Brexit
Matthew Cole
10 Dystopian or utopian fiction? The sociological imagination and the representation of pandemic futures in The Animals in That Country
Josephine Browne
Index
Biography
Josephine Browne is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Australia.
Zoei Sutton is a Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University pursuing critical, non-human animal-centric research.
