Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Sara Cavallo, Boston University

; ,

Description:

This paper session seeks to bring together scholars in geography and related disciplines to discuss emerging topics within multispecies approaches to health, with emphasis on the politics of wildlife, health, and disease in urban spaces. COVID-19, from its origins as a zoonotic disease to the proliferation of problematic narratives about nature "healing" during the pandemic, demonstrates the deeply-rooted interconnections between humans and nonhumans that shape and are shaped by urban spaces (Searle & Turnbull 2020). Geographers, drawing on more-than-human geographies, urban political ecology, and related fields, have long explored nature-society relationships of wildlife in urban environments (Brighenti & Pavoni 2020, Srinivasan 2019, Barua and Sinha 2017, Robbins 2012, Hinchliffe & Bingham 2008). In particular, emerging scholarship has examined the management of nonhuman health as an important site through which to understand the politics of public health, socioecological change, and biopolitical governance of both humans and nonhumans (Gibbs 2020, Davis & Sharp 2020, Neely 2020, Brown and Nading 2020; Kaup 2018, Ahuja 2016, Barker 2010). Further, urban ecologies of health and disease operate within more-than-human assemblages that are necessarily multi-scalar and tied to logics of racial capitalism and colonialism (Liebman et al. 2020; Davis et al. 2019; Biermann 2016; Heynen 2016). This session aims to draw these varied engagements together to explore what can be gained from using a multispecies approach to health and disease: What theoretical frameworks and concepts can be used to understand how multispecies health is defined and made to matter in urban environments?

For this session, we encourage conceptual, empirical, and methodological papers covering the following (or similar) topics:

· Zoonoses and more-than-human health in urban spaces
· Perspectives on One Health and similar approaches to linking human, animal, and ecosystem health
· COVID-19 and urban wildlife
· COVID-19 and commodified species
· Urban political ecologies of multispecies health and disease
· The politics of pests, invasive species, biocontrol, and biosecurity
· Processes of urbanization, rural development, and multispecies health and disease
· Animal mobilities, surveillance, and disease (Lorimer and Hodgetts 2020)
· Intersections between public health and wildlife management
· Urban greening, re-wilding, and conservation projects and multispecies health
· Methodologies for understanding multispecies health and disease


References
Ahuja, N., 2016. Bioinsecurities: Disease interventions, empire, and the government of species. Duke University Press.

Barker, K., 2010. Biosecure citizenship: Politicising symbiotic associations and the construction of biological threat. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, 350–363. doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00386.x

Barua, M., Sinha, A., 2019. Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation. Social & Cultural Geography 20, 1160–1180. doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1409908

Biermann, C., 2016. Securing forests from the scourge of chestnut blight: The biopolitics of nature and nation. Geoforum 75, 210–219. doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.07.007

Brighenti, A.M., Pavoni, A., 2020. Situating urban animals – a theoretical framework. Contemporary Social Science 1–13. doi.org/10.1080/21582041.2020.1788131

Brown, H., Nading, A.M., 2019. Introduction: Human Animal Health in Medical Anthropology. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 33, 5–23. doi.org/10.1111/maq.12488

Davis, A., Sharp, J., 2020. Rethinking One Health: Emergent human, animal and environmental assemblages. Social Science & Medicine 258 doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113093

Davis, J., Moulton, A.A., Van Sant, L. and Williams, B., 2019. Anthropocene, capitalocene,… plantationocene?: A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass, 13(5)

Gibbs, L., 2020. Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis). Progress in Human Geography. doi.org/10.1177/0309132520942295

Heynen, N., 2016. Urban political ecology II: The abolitionist century. Progress in Human Geography 40, 839–845. doi.org/10.1177/0309132515617394

Hinchliffe, S., Bingham, N., 2008. People, Animals, and Biosecurity in and through Cities, in: Ali, S.H., Keil, R. (Eds.), Networked Disease. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, UK, pp. 214–227. doi.org/10.1002/9781444305012.ch13

Hodgetts, T., Lorimer, J., 2020. Animals' mobilities. Progress in Human Geography 44, 4–26. doi.org/10.1177/0309132518817829

Kaup, B.Z., 2018. The making of Lyme disease: a political ecology of ticks and tick-borne illness in Virginia. Environmental Sociology 4, 381–391. doi.org/10.1080/23251042.2018.1436892

Liebman, A., Rhiney, K., Wallace, R., 2020. To die a thousand deaths: COVID-19, racial capitalism, and anti-Black violence. Human Geography. doi.org/10.1177/1942778620962038

Lowe, C., 2010. Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 25, 625–649. doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01072.x

Neely, A.H., 2020. Entangled agencies: Rethinking causality and health in political-ecology. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 2514848620943889. doi.org/10.1177/2514848620943889

Robbins, P., 2012. Lawn people: How grasses, weeds, and chemicals make us who we are. Temple University Press.

Searle, A., Turnbull, J., 2020. Resurgent natures? More-than-human perspectives on COVID-19. Dialogues in Human Geography 10, 291–295. doi.org/10.1177/2043820620933859

Srinivasan, K., 2019. Remaking more-than-human society: Thought experiments on street dogs as "nature." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44, 376–391. doi.org/10.1111/tran.12291

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda