Human and Other Animals Critical Perspectives

About this book

Human and Other Animals brings together a range of inter-disciplinary works which explore the questions raised by scientific practices and by different ways of conceptualizing the place of human beings in the material world. The contributors consider theoretical issues and the debate between those who advocate a post-humanist abandonment of any distinction between society and nature, human and animal, and those who argue for the importance of retaining these categorical distinctions. Through a range of case studies, they explore practices which reproduce and/or challenge the species barrier, including issues of animal rights and animal welfare, whether and under what circumstances animals are regarded as social actors with agency, media representations of human-animal relations, and the relation between animals and national identity. Taken together, these essays examine the social and political ramifications of different ways of theorizing and researching the relation between human and other animals.

Contents

- List of Tables, Figures and Photographs
- Acknowledgements
- Human-animal Connections: An Introduction; B.Carter & N.Charles

PART I
- The Eternal Return of Sociology's Repressed Biological Unconscious; S.Fuller
- Animal Practices; J.Law & M.Miele

PART II
- My Family and Other Animals: Pets as Kin; N.Charles & C.Davies
- Contested Meanings and Canine Bodies; C.Molloy
- The Discursive Representation of Non-human Animals in a Culture of Denial; K.Morgan & M.Cole
- Human Primacy Identity Politics, Nonhuman Animal Experiments and the Oppression of Nonhuman Animals; K.Peggs
- 'Most Farmers Prefer Blondes': Social Intersectionality and Species Relations; E.Cudworth
- A Good Kill: Socio-technical Organisations of Farm Animal Slaughter; M.Higgin, A.Evans & M.Miele
- An Improper Nature: Introduced Animals and 'Species Cleansing' in Australia; A.Franklin
- On the Prowl with the Possum Posse: Nature and Nation in Aotearoa/New Zealand; P.Gruffudd
- Power, Agency and a Different Future; B.Carter & N.Charles

Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Bob Carter is Associate Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of Realism and Racism: Concepts of Race in Sociological Research and the co-author of Applied Linguistics as Social Science (with Alison Sealey). His most recent publication is Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis (co-edited with Nickie Charles).

Nickie Charles is Professor and Director of the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick, UK. She has published widely on many aspects of gender. Her most recent publication is Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis (with Bob Carter). She is currently researching animals in families.