Critical Animal Geographies provides new geographical perspectives on critical animal studies, exploring the spatial, political, and ethical dimensions of animals’ lived experience and human-animal encounter. It works toward a more radical politics and theory directed at the shifting boundary between human and animal. Chapters draw together feminist, political-economic, post-humanist, anarchist, post-colonial, and critical race literatures with original case studies in order to see how efforts by some humans to control and order life – human and not – violate, constrain, and impinge upon others. Central to all chapters is a commitment to grappling with the stakes – violence, death, life, autonomy – of human-animal encounters. Equally, the work in the collection addresses head-on the dominant forces shaping and dependent on these encounters: capitalism, racism, colonialism, and so on. In doing so, the book pushes readers to confront how human-animal relations are mixed up with overlapping axes of power and exploitation, including gender, race, class, and species.

This book explores the growing significance of veganism. It brings together important theoretical and empirical insights to offer a historical and contemporary analysis of veganism and our future co-existence with other animals. Bringing together key concepts from geography, critical animal studies, and feminist theory this book critically addresses veganism as both a subject of study and a spatial approach to the self, society, and everyday life. The book draws upon empirical research through archival research, interviews with vegans in Britain, and a multispecies ethnography with chickens. It argues that the field of ‘beyond-human geographies’ needs to more seriously take into account veganism as a rising socio-political force and in academic theory. This book provides a unique and timely contribution to debates within animal studies and more-than-human geographies, providing novel insights into the complexities of caring beyond the human. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in geography, sociology, animal studies, food studies and consumption, and those researching veganism.

Exploring the innovative and thriving field of animal geographies, this Research Agenda analyses how humans think about, place, and engage with animals. Chapters explore how animals shape human identities and social dynamics, as well as how broader processes influence the circumstances and experiences of animals.

Parrots and snakes, wild cats and monkeys---exotic pets can now be found everywhere from skyscraper apartments and fenced suburban backyards to roadside petting zoos. In Animal Traffic Rosemary-Claire Collard investigates the multibillion-dollar global exotic pet trade and the largely hidden processes through which exotic pets are produced and traded as lively capital. Tracking the capture of animals in biosphere reserves in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize; their exchange at exotic animal auctions in the United States; and the attempted rehabilitation of former exotic pets at a wildlife center in Guatemala, Collard shows how exotic pets are fetishized both as commodities and as objects. Their capture and sale sever their ties to complex socio-ecological networks in ways that make them appear as if they do not have lives of their own. Collard demonstrates that the enclosure of animals in the exotic pet trade is part of a bioeconomic trend in which life is increasingly commodified and objectified under capitalism. Ultimately, she calls for a “wild life” politics in which animals are no longer enclosed, retain their autonomy, and can live for the sake of themselves.

Animal Spaces, Beastly Places examines how animals interact and relate with people in different ways. Using a comprehensive range of examples, which include feral cats and wild wolves, to domestic animals and intensively farmed cattle, the contributors explore the complex relations in which humans and non-human animals are mixed together. Our emotions involving animals range from those of love and compassion to untold cruelty, force, violence and power. As humans we have placed different animals into different categories, according to some notion of species, usefulness, domesticity or wildness. As a result of these varying and often contested orderings, animals are assigned to particular places and spaces. Animal Spaces, Beastly Places shows us that there are many exceptions and variations on the spatiality of human-animal spatial orderings, within and across cultures, and over time. It develops new ways of thinking about human animal interactions and encourages us to find better ways for humans and animals to live together.

With the ever rising demand for meat around the world, the production of meat has changed dramatically in the past few decades. What has brought about the increasing popularity and attendant normalization of factory farms across many parts of the world? What are some of the ways to resist such broad convergences in meat production and how successful are they? This book locates the answers to these questions at the intersection between the culture, science and political economy of meat production and consumption. It details how and why techniques of production have spread across the world, albeit in a spatially uneven way. It argues that the modern meat production and consumption sphere is the outcome of a complex matrix of cultural politics, economics and technological faith. Drawing from examples across the world (including America, Europe and Asia), the tensions and repercussions of meat production and consumption are also analyzed. From a geographical perspective, food animals have been given considerably less attention compared to wild animals or pets. This book, framed conceptually by critical animal studies, governmentality and commodification, is a theoretically driven and empirically rich study that advances the study of food animals in geography as well as in the wider social sciences.

Each year, billions of animals are poisoned, dissected, displaced, killed for consumption, or held in captivity to be discarded as soon as their utility to humans has waned. The animal world has never been under greater peril. A broad-ranging collection of essays, this publication contributes to a re-thinking about humans' relation to animals.

Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals explores resonances across human and nonhuman carceral geographies. The work proposes an analysis of the carceral from a broader vantage point than has yet been done, developing a ‘trans-species carceral geography’ that includes spaces of nonhuman captivity, confinement, and enclosure alongside that of the human. The linkages across prisoner and animal carcerality that are placed into conversation draw from a number of institutional domains, based on their form, operation, and effect. These include: the prison death row/ execution chamber and the animal slaughterhouse; sites of laboratory testing of pharmaceutical and other products on incarcerated humans and captive animals; sites of exploited prisoner and animal labor; and the prison solitary confinement cell and the zoo cage. The relationships to which I draw attention across these sites are at once structural, operational, technological, legal, and experiential / embodied. The forms of violence that span species boundaries at these sites are all a part of ordinary, everyday, industrialized violence in the United States and elsewhere, and thus this ‘carceral comparison’ amongst them is appropriate and timely.

We experience violence all our lives, from that very first scream of birth. It has been industrialized and domesticated. Our culture has not become totally accustomed to violence, but accustomed enough. Perhaps more than enough. Geographies of Violence is a critical human geography of the history of violence, from Ancient Rome and Enlightened wars through to natural disasters, animal slaughter, and genocide. Written with incredible insight and flair, this is a thought-provoking text for human geography students and researchers alike.

While interest in the relations of power and identity in food explodes, a hesitancy remains about calling these racial. What difference does race make in the fields where food is grown, the places it is sold and the manner in which it is eaten? How do we understand farming and provisioning, tasting and picking, eating and being eaten, hunger and gardening better by paying attention to race? This collection argues there is an unacknowledged racial dimension to the production and consumption of food under globalization. Building on case studies from across the world, it advances the conceptualization of race by emphasizing embodiment, circulation and materiality, while adding to food advocacy an antiracist perspective it often lacks. Within the three socio-physical spatialities of food - fields, bodies and markets - the collection reveals how race and food are intricately linked. An international and multidisciplinary team of scholars complements each other to shed light on how human groups become entrenched in myriad hierarchies through food, at scales from the dining room and market stall to the slave trade and empire. Following foodways as they constitute racial formations in often surprising ways, the chapters achieve a novel approach to the process of race as one that cannot be reduced to biology, culture or capitalism.