Introduction to A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies: visioning amidst socio-ecological crises

Abstract

Bringing the animals back outAnimal geographies reflect an innovative and thriving subdiscipline. Animal geographers 'investigate how humans think about, place, and engage with animals, how animals shape human identities and social dynamics, as well as how broader social cultural, political economic, and ecological processes influence animal distributions, circumstances, behaviours, experiences, and well-being' (Hovorka, 2020: 127). Animals feature as both objects and subjects of geographical study, rather than being backgrounded as 'nature' in humanenvironment explorations. Animal geographies have challenged entrenched humanist ontologies and epistemologies and advanced multispecies theoretical and empirical understandings in geography. Animal geographies at their core explore human-animal relations through attention to animality, animal spaces, and beastly places as grounded in eclectic and integrative methodological approaches and ethical commitments to improving more-than-human lives (Hovorka, 2020). Animal geographies have also 'firmly joined the ranks of broader animal studies scholarship by infusing debates with context specific, place-based, and spatial frames that extend understanding and explanation of the ways in which humans and animals interact' (Hovorka, 2020: 131). Key texts trace this history and tout the contributions of animal geographies scholarship and engagement (see, e.g.

Editors' introduction to the special issue “Privilege, vulnerability and care: Interspecies dynamics in rural landscapes”

“…There has been a significant and far‐reaching ‘animal turn’ across the social sciences. In geography, for example, an increasing focus on ‘animal spaces’ and ‘beastly places’ (Philo & Wilbert, 2000) has developed our understanding of how animals make and inhabit places (Hovorka et al., 2021). These attempts to ‘hear the cry’ of animals pose ontological and methodological challenges, expose previously unacknowledged power relations and encourage us to expand our interest beyond the most commonly considered species (Gibbs, 2020; see also Buller, 2014; Hovorka, 2018).…”