 |
 |
RGS-IBG Annual Conference, London, 30th August - 1st September 2006. A Session organised on behalf of the Rural Geography Research Group Wittgenstein's lion: knowing animals in human geography research Convenor: Henry Buller, University of Exeter Wittgenstein's aphorism, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him" sets an infamous limit to our knowing animals. Recent writings on posthumanism and, more specifically, animal geographies, however, call for new theoretical, ethical and methodological engagements with non-human animals. Such writings raise a fundamental epistemological challenge: how do we do this? How can social scientists and geographers get closer to knowing animals (be they wild animals, companion animals, farm animals, laboratory animals<HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS>) and thereby understand (and act upon) the relational symmetries, and spaces, that (co)operate between human and non-human, humanity and animality, subjects and objects, species and species, us and them? The Rural Geography Research Group invites papers from geographers who are thinking about and doing research into such themes as animal 'becomings', immanencies and understandings, from the animal other's knowing of us, to being bats or cows and the potential of 'soft' anthropocentrism. While we are particularly interested in exploring such issues and their epistemologies within the broad context of rurality, we welcome papers from all socio-natural configurations. Possible areas of interest might include the investigation of: Animals, ethics and spatiality Animal embodiments Animals as 'other' Animals and emotions/affect Animals and 'more than' representational theories Animals in networks and human-nonhuman animal relationality Forms of animal agency Animals and the rural (and urban/rural) Differing animals types and their geographies - bodies, scales, spaces Animal/human cohabitations Hybridisation Please send abstracts for papers (max. 200 words), by the 31st of January, to: Henry Buller, Department of Geography University of Exeter Amory Rennes Drive Exeter EX4 4RJ [log in to unmask]