Including animals in sociology

How do we include animals in sociology? Although sociology’s initial avoidance of the nonhuman world may have been necessary to the field’s development, recent scholarship – within mainstream sociology, environmental sociology and animal-centred research – is helping expand the field’s horizons. With a focus on variety, this article reviews four key paths that researchers are taking to include animals in their research: (1) studying interspecies relations, (2) theorizing animals as an oppressed group, (3) investigating the social and ecological impacts of animal agriculture and (4) analysing social-ecological networks. This review shows how applying – and innovating – existing social theories and research methods allows researchers to include animals in their analyses and will be relevant to a variety of scholars, including mainstream and environmental sociologists, animal-focused researchers and social network analysts, to name a few.

Animals as and on Resource Frontiers

This paper attempts to locate changing interspecies relations in the dynamism and violence of capitalist expansion on a world scale, setting out two primary ways that the rising exploitation of non-human animals contributed to the development of settler-colonial economies, destabilization of indigenous societies, and transformation of ecosystems. One path was set by burgeoning demand essentially turning some wild animal species into increasingly valuable commodities and driving the rising scale and systematization of extraction and trade, which tended to quickly undermine conditions of abundance and make these animal frontiers very mobile. The second way started from the introduction of domesticated animals, with the muscle power and bodily commodities derived from proliferating populations valued not only in the expansion of agricultural landscapes but also in the formation and functioning of other resource frontiers, and ultimately bound up in waves of enclosures and expulsions. This framework seeks to simultaneously pose challenges for historical analysis and provide insights that help to understand the trajectory of animal life today.

Multispecies Pasts and the Possibilities of Multispecies Futures in the Age of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene emerges as an aftermath of the long-held, pervasive belief in human exceptionalism, and a wake-up call to reconsider our being in the world as entangled with a plethora of other living selves. Along with ecological and social challenges facing all life on Earth, the very boundaries between Nature and Culture, biological and social, human and nonhuman are being destabilized. From an archaeological perspective, particularly relevant is the understanding of diachronic change through shifting webs of interspecies relations (sensu Tsing). By engaging with various strands of thought within archaeology, anthropology, ecology and ethology, this paper aims to offer a more inclusive, multispecies view of the past. Ultimately, a consideration of human and nonhuman histories as entangled, bears important implications for multispecies futures.

Consider the woodpecker: The contested more-than-human ethics of biomimetic technology and traumatic brain injury

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease caused by traumatic brain injury and most frequently associated with contact sports such as American Football. Perhaps surprisingly, the woodpecker – an animal apparently immune to the effects of head impacts – has increasingly figured into debates surrounding CTE. On the one hand, the woodpecker is described as being contra-human and used to underscore the radical inappropriateness of humans playing football. On the other, there have been attempts to mitigate against the risk of CTE through the creation of biomimetic technologies inspired by woodpeckers. In this article I examine the highly politicized encounters between humans and woodpeckers and discuss how the politics of re-/dis-/en-tanglement during these interspecies relations is rendered meaningful. I show here, first, that those who seek to keep the human and the woodpecker apart envisage social overhaul while biomimetic technologies are put to work for the status quo. Second, I stress that different forms of entanglement have diverse sociopolitical consequences. I conclude by suggesting that the case of the woodpecker troubles a strand of contemporary scholarship in Science and Technology Studies that argues that biotechnologies are inherently transformatory and that foregrounding entanglement and interspecies relations is ethically generative. Instead, a discursive separation of nature and culture may be innovative.

Wheat Rhizosphere Metagenome Reveals Newfound Potential Soil Zn-Mobilizing Bacteria Contributing to Cultivars’ Variation in Grain Zn Concentration

An effective solution to global human zinc (Zn) deficiency is Zn biofortification of staple food crops, which has been hindered by the low available Zn in calcareous soils worldwide. Many culturable soil microbes have been reported to increase Zn availability in the laboratory, while the status of these microbes in fields and whether there are unculturable Zn-mobilizing microbes remain unexplored. Here, we use the culture-independent metagenomic sequencing to investigate the rhizosphere microbiome of three high-Zn (HZn) and three low-Zn (LZn) wheat cultivars in a field experiment with calcareous soils. The average grain Zn concentration of HZn was higher than the Zn biofortification target 40 mg kg–1, while that of LZn was lower than 40 mg kg–1. Metagenomic sequencing and analysis showed large microbiome difference between wheat rhizosphere and bulk soil but small difference between HZn and LZn. Most of the rhizosphere-enriched microbes in HZn and LZn were in common, including many of the previously reported soil Zn-mobilizing microbes. Notably, 30 of the 32 rhizosphere-enriched species exhibiting different abundances between HZn and LZn possess the functional genes involved in soil Zn mobilization, especially the synthesis and exudation of organic acids and siderophores. Most of the abundant potential Zn-mobilizing species were positively correlated with grain Zn concentration and formed a module with strong interspecies relations in the co-occurrence network of abundant rhizosphere-enriched microbes. The potential Zn-mobilizing species, especially Massilia and Pseudomonas, may contribute to the cultivars’ variation in grain Zn concentration, and they deserve further investigation in future studies on Zn biofortification.

Justice and Arbitrary Boundaries

This chapter deals with three problems of discrimination, arising from our membership of certain communities. The first of these concerns the debate between cosmopolitans and non-cosmopolitans about international justice. It is just a lucky accident that we were born where we were, but these arbitrary facts can make a huge difference to life chances. Rawlsian non-cosmopolitans thus risk a charge of incoherence if they combine an acceptance of these sources of arbitrariness with a commitment to anti-arbitrariness principles of justice. The Irrelevance Interpretation of Rawls’s justice as fairness advanced in Chapter 7 is used to defuse this charge of incoherence. The second problem concerns the ‘basic equality’ project of establishing robust foundations for human moral equality by locating a morally significant property that every human possesses, and possesses equally. It is contended that the basic equality project is wrongheaded, and that we need not worry about descriptive inequalities among human beings. The third problem concerns interspecies relations and the charge of ‘speciesism’. It is maintained that much anti-speciesist literature rests upon the doctrine of ‘moral individualism’, and that this doctrine is severely flawed. To come to a satisfactory view of what we owe to each other, we need to pay attention to both the properties individuals possess, and also the properties they lack. To do that, in turn, requires that these individuals be situated in certain communities, including species-specific communities.

Marcello the Dog and More-Than-Human Family in Elina Brotherus's Self-Portraits from the Series Carpe Fucking Diem

This article examines the possibilities of visual culture to open new perspectives on interspecies relations by analyzing self-portraits from visual artist Elina Brotherus’s photography series Carpe Fucking Diem (2011–2015). Brotherus has suggested that this series talks “about a failure to have a family with kids and give normality the finger”. The self-portraits can be seen to address this “failure” to have a normative nuclear family, while simultaneously questioning the desirability of the norm itself through Brotherus’s relationship with her pet dog, dachshund Marcello. The article explores the more-than-human notions of kinship and family in Carpe Fucking Diem, drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species, as well as discussions on new materialism and posthumanism. The concept of companion species deconstructs human exceptionalism and the boundaries between human and animal, and indicates that the physical and affective co-becomings between humans and the non-human significant others co-evolve with each other in complex and asymmetrical ways. In affective and embodied readings of three self-portraits and one video work from the Carpe Fucking Diem series, I examine how Elina Brotherus’s self-portraits call into question the normative notions of family as human-centered and heteronormative.

Almanach antropologiczny. Communicare. Tom 8. Miasta/Zwierzęta

An interesting study on interspecies relations in cities, set in concrete cultural phenomena. It is a radical re-definition of human-animal relations, an analysis of mutual dependencies, a description of complexity and dynamics of changes in urban spaces. On the one hand, the publications refers to various cultural contexts, on the other hand, it shows local characteristics of the presented phenomena and the Polish perspective, which includes different towns. The book may inspire reflections on relations between humans and animals in future cities as well as the ways of organising them, especially in the context of the 19th and 20th century modernising movements.

Interspecies Relations: SARS-CoV-2 Spillovers on Mink Farms

This essay argues for the need for research into multispecies relations at the intersection between international political economy, ecology, and disease emergence. It draws attention to the conditions of intensive agribusiness and modern livestock, which alter human-animal-microbe relations, facilitating the emergence of infectious diseases such as the case of mink farms and COVID-19. It also highlights the impact of infection on animals and farming economies. Through a discussion of the ways anthropogenic activities have historically changed the kinds, scale, and spread of human disease, the essay concludes with an appeal to rethink international political economy.