...Dominique Lestel; Jeffrey Bussolini; Matthew Chrulew Abstract This paper presents a bi-constructivist approach to the study of animal life, which is opposed to the realist-Cartesian paradigm in which most ethology operates. The method is elaborated through the examples of a knot-tying orangutan in...

... animist. As I understand her term, she was making connections with animism as a worldview, but rather than mimic or appropriate indigenous animisms she was developing a foundation that could be argued from within western philosophy. Her beautiful definition of philosophical animism is that it “opens the...

... intervention in Việt Nam to explore how avian influenza threats challenge long-held understandings of animals' place in the environment and society. In this intervention, poultry farmers collaborated with health workers to illustrate maps of avian flu risks in their communities. Participant-observation of the...

.... Some inhuman animals seek out and uncover our wastes. These ‘trash animals' choke on, eat, defecate, are contaminated with, play games with, have sex on, and otherwise live out their lives on and in our formal and informal dumpsites. In southern Canada's sanitary landfills, waste management typically...

..., which alternate with a minimalist interface: a grid populated with dots signifying other animals and plants living in Banff. This essay argues that Bear 71 uses two strategies to reframe the data-driven discourse of wildlife management. First, the anthropomorphized narrative of Bear 71 reframes wildlife...

... which life is associated with disruption, pathology, and chaos, while that part of the animal that remains productive comes to be viewed as determined, machinelike, and anthropogenic. In this essay, I focus on the way that life is counted upon to exceed . Industrial animal husbandry depends upon...

... Palo Verde, multiple social and ecological worlds went to war. The haunting specter of capital joined the fray—animating the movements of cattle, grasses with animal rhizomes, rice seeds, and flighty ducks across national borders and through fragmented landscapes. Amidst this warfare, the fringe-toed...

...Etienne Benson Abstract The fact that industrial infrastructures are embedded in complex environments animated by unexpected agencies is often invisible to their users—at least those who live in rich, industrialized societies with reliable systems for distributing water, power, and other goods and...

... animals they seek to manage. I do so through a case study of Oregon's efforts to manage the invasive species that are rafting across the Pacific attached to tsunami debris in the wake of the Japanese tsunami of 2011. Focusing on the state's response to a dock that washed ashore on Agate Beach with various...

... modernization policies. In some cases they have found themselves entrusted with sheep that are as naive about herding as they themselves were. Before their introduction to transhumance—seasonal movement between pastures—these animals were primarily confined and fed indoors or in small fenced areas. The...

... ethics of animal experimentation, our experiment also considered speculation linking the Xenopus pregnancy test to the extinction of other frogs. Amphibian biologists once hypothesized that Xenopus frogs brought a pathogenic fungus out of Africa. We found that this outbreak narrative projected colonial...

... discursively and plastically, predicated on assumptions about natural appearance and behavior that may not reflect evidence from historical records. Animated by what I call techniques of contiguity, reconstructions play a persuasive role in expressing and shaping human perceptions and imaginings of past...

... argues that human activities cause ecological and sonic disruptions that really are rendering the world silent or discordant, submerging the “animal orchestra” beneath noise. A healthy natural environment can be heard, according to Krause, in a rich and harmonious soundscape that has evolved over...

... community, where the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations are played out on a daily basis. We also try to do this rethinking collectively, in the presence of other animals with whom our inherited pasts, our mundane everyday presents and our uncertain futures are...

...Max Ritts; John Shiga Abstract Throughout the Cold War, the US Navy aggressively explored the sound-making and sound-detecting capacities of cetaceans to help it retain its supremacy in marine battle space. Whales, dolphins, and porpoises were engaged as animals that “see with sound,” that produce...

... language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening up the distinctions...

..., animals, and objects despite multiple experimental human regimes of elephant care, governance, and organization. The viral creep exceeds the physical and intellectual contexts of human interpretation and control. It reminds us that uncertainty and modes of imaging are always involved when we make sense of...

...Thom van Dooren; Eben Kirksey; Ursula Münster Abstract Scholars in the humanities and social sciences are experimenting with novel ways of engaging with worlds around us. Passionate immersion in the lives of fungi, microorganisms, animals, and plants is opening up new understandings, relationships...

... not to some immaterial quality of mind or soul, but rather to the distinctiveness of human anatomy. It was, we will argue, the body—and, above all, the head—which provided the basis of a modern attempt to establish that humans were creatures of a categorically different order from all other animals...