Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Alida Cantor, Portland State University

; ,

Description:

Law plays a key role in the placing -symbolically and materially- of the non-human animal (Philo & Wilbert 2000). The complex interactions between legal landscapes and the non-human have been theorized through the framework of property, animals’ rights, the welfare of animals, citizenship (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2011), ethics (Derrida 2009, Elder, Wolch & Emel 1998) and a recent turn the rights to nature. Law is not only involved in caring for animals, but it is also key for commodification (Gillespie 2016, Gunderson 2013, Emel & Neo 2010). Law has been used as an orientation device that orders non-human populations by caring and extracting capital through different means and regulations cataloguing animals depending upon their work (Collard & Dempsey 2017). However, the non-human can also shape legal landscapes and actively resist commodification.

A lively legalities (Braverman 2018) approach proposes to think of the interactions between non-humans and law outside the frameworks of liberal rights that treats animals as subjects. Instead, lively legalities challenges us to think of alternative ways animals could be governed within interconnected communities, taking biopower into consideration. In other words, lively legalities call for the recognition of belonging and dependance within the assemblages of the other (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2017). This panel is an invitation to explore the spaces mediated by law, science and more than human entanglements (Whatmore 2002, Brown et al 2019).

In this panel, we focus on animal relationships with law, broadly defined. We invite scholarship using new lively legalities to think differently about the interactions of law and the non-human, going beyond frameworks of liberal rights and the dominion of property rights, which treat animals as subjects, to search for alternative ways animals could be governed within interconnected communities (Braverman 2018, 2015). For this panel, we are hoping to have a broad range of participants who can discuss theoretical innovations, empirical cases, and methodological approaches (Buller 2015, Johnson 2015) that engage with space, non-human animals, and law. The panel will explore the possibilities and ways of thinking of the non-human in relation to law, territory, human-animal encounters, and how stakeholders symbolically and legally represent the animal in relation to environmental legal claims.

References:

Braverman, I. (Ed.). (2015). Animals, biopolitics, law: lively legalities. Routledge.
Braverman, I. (2018). Law's Underdog: A Call for More-than-Human Legalities. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 14, 127-144.
Brown, K. M., Flemsæter, F., & Rønningen, K. (2019). More-than-human geographies of property: Moving towards spatial justice with response-ability. Geoforum, 99, 54-62.
Buller, H. (2015). Animal geographies II: methods. Progress in Human Geography, 39(3), 374-384.
Elder, G., Wolch, J., & Emel, J. (1998). Race, place, and the bounds of humanity. Society & Animals, 6(2), 183-202.
Emel, J., & Neo, H. (Eds.). (2015). Political ecologies of meat. Routledge.
Gunderson, R. (2013). From cattle to capital: Exchange value, animal commodification, and barbarism. Critical Sociology, 39(2), 259-275.
Johnson, E. R. (2015). Of lobsters, laboratories, and war: animal studies and the temporality of more-than-human encounters. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33(2), 296-313.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2017). Critical environmental law as method in the Anthropocene. Research Methods in Environmental Law A Handbook, 26, 131–155.
Philo, C, Wilbert, C (2000) Introduction. In: Philo, C, Wilbert, C (eds) Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human-Animal Relations. London: Routledge, 1–36.
Whatmore, S. (2017). Hybrid geographies: rethinking the ‘human’in human geography. In Environment (pp. 411-428). Routledge.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda