1st Edition
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Liberated Animals Manifesting Futures of Shattered Orders
This volume takes ending the oppression of other animals seriously and confronts the question, ‘What would happen to all the animals?’ by showcasing real, promissory, and imagined counter-sites or heterotopia where animals ‘happen’ in different ways, free of anthropocentric orders of value and purpose.
Rejecting persistent understandings of the oppression of nonhuman animals, across the entire breadth of the Animal-Industrial Complex (A-IC), as either non-existent, unproblematic, and/or fundamentally unalterable–open to merely being reduced in scale or made less harmful, the collection offers readers a variety of pathways towards radically ‘disordered’ ways of thinking about and relating to other animals. Over fourteen chapters, authors describe more liberatory relational reconfigurations playing out in the present, and undertake conceptual, imaginative, and embodied explorations of liberatory futures. The chapters are united by a common commitment to heterotopic disturbance–to contesting and subverting the anthropo-capitalo-centric space in which we live. Each chapter approaches this subversion in its own way, using prefiguration, restorying, speculation, radical imagination, and combinations thereof, to disturb or shatter orders, explore the kinds of liberation and resistance their disturbance demonstrates, demands, or embodies, and ultimately illustrate exactly what would or could happen to all the animals.
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders will appeal to scholars, students, and individuals interested not only in challenging normalised binaries, hierarchies and orders of value, both human and nonhuman, but in creating and realising liberatory alternatives. Scholar-activists, activists, professionals working in animal advocacy, and anyone undertaking activities aimed at radically changing how other animals are understood and used will also find inspiration, new insights, and information that enhance their current methods and approaches. Some readers may also find simply confirmation and comfort in the knowledge that so many others are working in solidarity with the ‘disordered’ belief that shattering the A-IC is possible.
Introduction
Paula Arcari
Section 1. Relational reconfigurations in present future
1. Sites of Vegan Placemaking: A Celebration of Multispecies Alliances at the Borderlands
Elizabeth Tavella
2. Careful Care Towards Animal Liberation for Feral Pigeons and Beyond
Maria Martelli
3. Unveiling Shared Histories: Crafting Sanctuary and the Work of Care in Troubled Domestic Domains
Marie Leth-Espensen
4. Non-ridden horses, implanted chickens, and vegan sanctuaries: The liberatory promises and limits of animal heterotopias.
Paula Arcari
Section 2. Conceptual and political re-ordering
5. The Magpies: Reflections on Liminality, Domestication, and Animal Agency
Angie Pepper and Richard Healey
6. Dog Proposals: Participatory Design, Playfulness, and Multispecies Futures
Michelle Westerlaken
7. The Radical Praxis of Equity: Mutual Interdependence and an Ethic of Responsibility
Charlotte A. Kunkel and Scott Hurley
Section 3. Subversion through radical storytelling and restorying
8. Opening Aquaria
Daniel Vandersommers
9. Beyond the Farm – Towards Multispecies Anarcho-Communities
Amina Grunewald
10. The Post-human Ontology of Gothic Enviro-toons: Defying Anthropo-denial in Watership Down, The Plague Dogs and Padak
Sutirtho Roy
11. Laugh to Liberate: Futurabilities of Posthumanist Comedy
Katya Krylova
Section 4. Personal shifts and transformations
12. Love Beyond the Species Divide in Nizami Ganjavi’s Layla and Majnun
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
13. Choosing Snakes: Towards unhampered hospitality
Sue Hall Pyke
14. A New Pedagogy of Sharing Multispecies Sentience: Coexisting in Spaces of Love and Compassion
Jennifer Rebecca Schauer
Afterword: A methodological side-note
Paula Arcari
Biography
Paula Arcari is an independent scholar living in Melbourne Australia, and a former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2019-2022) hosted by the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, UK. She is the author of Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’ published in 2019.