Humans, Animals and Biopolitics (Multispecies Encounters)

Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who ’we’ humans think ’we’ are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples’ everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others.

Kristin Asdal is Professor of Science, Technology and Culture at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.

Tone Druglitrø is Postdoctoral Fellow at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.

Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK.