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
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