Animal Geographies

Animal geographies might, at first, be thought a misnomer by those coming across the term for the first time. Current geographies of animals are not just about animals; how could they be? Instead, current animal geographies seek to challenge entrenched assumptions about animals in modern societies and in the historical developments of humanities disciplines. Recent animal geographies have engaged in three overlapping themes that, to some extent, reflect differing political and theoretical leanings. First, they have focused on identities and meanings. That is of the ways certain human identities have been constructed in relation to certain animals in terms of practices such as eating, working, or hunting that stress social categories such as class, race, gender, and religion as important in construction of identities in relation to some animals. Second, studies have focused on human–animal intra actions in terms of the political economy or political ecology of animal productions in agriculture, or struggles over resources in the developing world, but increasingly, in developed regions as well. Third, animal studies have been encouraged by developments in social theory that acknowledge a wider range of actors than just (some) people. Such approaches have pointed to very complex geographies of intra action between people and animals in ways that questions and rethinks the human centeredness of human geography. Such a perspective is allied to certain aspects of posthumanism, but also to nonrepresentational theory, and especially actor-network theory (ANT), though it seeks to further develop the spatialities, politics, and ethics of human–nonhuman associations.