Animal Encounters: A Genre of Contact

Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes

“…Whilst the experience of encounter can be one-sided, the contact zone is about lives, cultures, and knowledges that grapple with each other, and is thus always about meaning-making on multiple sides. As a particular 'genre of contact' (Wilson, 2019), the encounter makes up just one element of the contact zone, where the initial shock of difference might give way to something else. Thus, whilst both concepts are intimately linked and draw attention to border imaginaries and immanent potential, the contact zone brings negotiation, interaction, and questions of communicative practice into sharp relief.…”

“…Taking the above concerns forward, the next section reflects more fully on the idea of ‘encounter’ and its relationship to the contact zone as an entry point for thinking about multispecies contact zones. A concern with the dangers of one-sided accounts in the context of unequal relations is one that has been central to multispecies work, which has raised challenging questions about voice, interpretation, and decipherability (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010), whilst recognizing that multispecies encounters are always recounted and refracted through human lenses that are themselves partial and situated (Hovorka, 2017; Probyn, 2016; Wilson, 2019). Although Pratt's ‘contact zone’ has largely been used to consider human framings of the social, it was developed as a critical, postcolonial tool to interrogate travel writing that concerned far more than the human and was often accused of writing the human out (Wulf, 2015).…”

“…In tracing the use of encounter across the social sciences, it is noticeable that it is most commonly used in work that features non-human animals (Wilson, 2017a(Wilson, , 2019. In some instances, 'encounter' is simply used as a means to describe the coming together of human and non-human animals in different contexts but in others it appears as a site of analytical interest (Tsing, 2015).…”

“…The paper then turns to ‘encounter’ as a concept that is, by Pratt's definition, intimately linked to the contact zone. ‘Encounter’ is already used extensively within multispecies work but in offering a conceptual interrogation of encounter I demonstrate how it functions as a very specific ‘ genre of contact ’ (Wilson, 2017a, 2019). In focusing on encounters with embodied difference, I demonstrate how they become important to understanding historical formations of difference, whilst at the same time being central to narratives of difference that concern the immanent potential to become otherwise (Deleuze, 2014).…”

Encounters in the ebb and flood: Knowing marine ecologies in the intertidal contact zone

“…As well as furthering this insight, this article shows how entangled ecological relations may also enable certain types of environmental knowledge, namely the practical, embodied knowledge that emerges in and through specifically emplaced, more-than-human contact zones. In order to interrogate the generation of environmental knowledge through such encounters – and to consider it in contrast to more dominant modes of scientific knowledge – I draw on the concept of the ‘more-than-human contact zone’ (Isaacs and Ortuba, this volume; Wilson, 2019). As elaborated below, by focusing on more-than-human contact zones, I am able to draw attention to the deep attachments and embodied aspects of knowing with more-than-human others through situated encounters, as well as the ways in which this marks a fundamental difference with ecological knowledge about more-than-human others that aspires to detached objectivity.…”