Human-Animal Studies Books Series
Human-Animal Studies Book Series
The purview of the book series includes any topic that allows exploration of the relation between human and nonhuman animals in any setting, contemporary or historical, from the perspective of various disciplines within both the social sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science) and humanities (e.g., history, literary criticism). Among the broad areas included are:
- Applied uses of animals (research, education, medicine, agriculture
- Animals in the popular culture (entertainment, companion animals, animal symbolism)
- Wildlife and the environment
- Socio-political movements, public policy and the law
The following titles have been published:
Confronting Cruelty-Moral: Orthodoxy and the Challenge of the Animal Rights Movement
By Lyle Munro (Monash University, Australia)
Why and how do people campaign on behalf of a species that is not their own? Responses to this question provide important insights into the much misunderstood animal rights movement and the people in it who challenge the moral orthodoxy that underpins our attitudes towards nonhuman animals. The norm of moderate concern for animals - that animals matter albeit less than humans - permits the (ab)use of animals in vivisection, factory farming, bloodsports and other contexts where animals suffer. Social movement theory is used to show how animal rights activists are engaged in the social construction of cruelty as a social problem which they seek to prevent by their intellectual, practical and emotion work in seminal campaigns against cruelty in the United States, England and Australia.
To purchase Confronting Cruelty click here.
Mad about Wildlife: Looking at Social Conflict Over Wildlife
Edited by Ann Herda-Rapp (University of Wisconsin) and Theresa L. Goedeke (Florida A&M University)
This edited volume documents the presence and types of Nature discourse that emerge during conflicts between people over wildlife. This collection of qualitative case studies demonstrates how social groups create opposing symbolic meanings of Nature and highlights the way in which the successful imposition of those meanings affects wildlife, people generally, and management professionals. Together, the chapters illustrate the significant, untapped utility of constructionist approaches for understanding social conflict over wildlife issues and for managing natural resources in a way that acknowledges and incorporates different definitions of nature.
To purchase Mad about Wildlife click here.
In Search of Consistency: Ethics, Animals, and the Minimize Harm Maxim
By Lisa Kemmerer (Montana State University)
This volume introduces the most important ideas in animal ethics and builds on a critical dialogue emerging at the intersection of animal rights, environmental ethics, and religious studies. In Search of Consistency examines the work of influential scholars Tom Regan (animal rights), Peter Singer (utilitarian ethics), Andrew Linzey (theologian), and Paul Taylor (environmental ethics), and explores ethics and animals across six world religions (Indigenous faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). In Search of Consistency sheds light on 'the sanctity of life' by means of an intriguing moral theory, 'The Minimize Harm Maxim', rooted in the time-honored moral ideals of impartiality and consistency. This volume questions what it means to be human and challenges our assumed place in the universe.
To purchase In Search of Consistency click here.
Knowing Animals
Edited by Laurence Simmons (University of Auckland, New Zealand) and Philip Armstrong (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an �animal turn', an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals showcases original explorations of the �animal turn' by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at least partly) conceptual and textual: paper tigers, beast fables, anthropomorphs, humanimals, and l'animot. In so doing, they investigate the benefits of knowing animals differently: more closely, less definitively, more carefully, less certainly. Contributors include: Laurence Simmons, Alphonso Lingis, Barbara Creed, Tanja Schwalm, Philip Armstrong, Annie Potts, Allan Smith, Ricardo De Vos, Catharina Landström, Brian Boyd, Helen Tiffin, and Ian Wedde.
To purchase Knowing Animals click here.
Canis Africanis: A dog history of South Africa
Edited by Sandra Swart (University of Stellenbosch) and Lance van Sittert (University of Cape Town)
This suite of essays is a first for historical writing about southern Africa: they recover an animal's ubiquitous, yet hidden presence in human history. The authors have used the dog as a way "to think about human society". The dog is the connecting thread binding these essays, which each reveals a different part of the complex social history of southern Africa. The essays range widely from concerns over disease, bestiality, and social degradation through greyhound gambling, to anxieties over social status reflected through breed classifications, to social rebellion through resistance to the dog tax imposed by colonial authorities. With its focus on dogs in human history, this project is part of what has been termed the �animal turn' in the social sciences, which investigates the spaces which animals inhabit in human society and the way in which animal and human lives interconnect.
To purchase Canis Africanis click here.
Animal Encounters
Edited by Tom Tyler (Oxford Brookes University) and Manuela Rossini (Swiss National Science Foundation)
Animal Encounters presents a multidisciplinary selection of essays in which an array of nonhuman animals meet with philosophers, literary scholars and scientists, artists and historians, novelists and naturalists, who are interested in the productive potential of interspecies exchange and collaboration. Brought together under six strategic headings, the collection constitutes a series of encounters not only between animals, human and otherwise, but also between different disciplinary methods, theoretical approaches, and ethical positions.
To purchase Animal Encounters click here.
Speaking of Animals: Essays on Dogs and Others
By Terry Caesar
Speaking of Animals consists of a linked series of thirteen essays about subjects ranging from deciding to castrate a dog, evaluating recent dog memoirs, observing animals in Spain, reading about the training of big cats, watching Animal Planet, and being unable to kill a racoon in Texas. So often personal, even while analyzing novels such as Water for Elephants or movies such as Giant or Into the Wild, the essays offer both an implicit critique and a continuation of recent discursive trends in animal studies, whose language is too haplessly abstracted from the animals in whose name we humans strive to speak as well as narrate.
To purchase Speaking of Animals click here.
Animals and Agency
Edited by Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger
While many scholars who write about animals deal with animal agency in some way, this volume is the first to position the question of nonhuman agency as the primary focus of inquiry. Section I presents studies of actual animals demonstrating agency; Section II moves agency into new terrain while considering key representations of animal agency in literature; Section III analyzes animals as mediators and as conveyances of human-to-human communication; and Section IV investigates the agency of beings who defy conventional species categories. The Envoi demonstrates how the microscopic polyp is interwoven into notions of agency and mythical superagency. This volume's interdisciplinary explorations press hard on issues of agency to open up space for more questions about how we can understand relationships between the human and the nonhuman.
To purchase Animals and Agency click here.
Paper Tiger: A Visual History of the Thylacine
By Carol Freeman
Images of animals generate perceptions that have a profound effect on attitudes toward species. Can representations contribute to their extinction? Paper Tiger considers the role of illustrations in the demise of the thylacine or Tasmanian 'tiger'. It critiques 80 engravings, lithographs, drawings and photographs published between 1808 and 1936, paying attention to the messages they convey, the politics of representation, and the impact on the lives of animals. This approach challenges conventional histories, offers new understandings of human-animal interactions, and presents a chilling story of just how misleading and powerful visual representation can be. It demonstrates how pictures, together with words, can have a vital influence on species' survival.
To purchase Paper Tiger click here.
Herding Monkeys to Paradise: How Macaque Troops are Managed for Tourism in Japan
By John Knight
This book is a study of the use of monkeys as a tourist attraction in Japan. Monkey parks are popular visitor attractions that display free-ranging troops of Japanese macaques to the paying public. The parks work by manipulating the movements of the monkey troop through the regular provision of food handouts at a fixed site where the monkeys can be easily viewed. This system of management leads to a variety of problems, including proliferating monkey numbers, park-edge crop-raiding, and the sedentarization of the troop. In addition to falling visitor numbers, these problems have led to the closure or fencing in of many parks, calling into question the future of the monkey park as an institution.
To purchase Herding Monkeys to Paradise click here.
Theorizing Animals: Rethinking Humanimal Relations
Edited by Nik Taylor and Tania Signal
Utilizing ideas from post-modernism and post-humanism, this book challenges current ways of thinking about animals and their relationships with humans. Including contributions from across the social sciences, the book encourages readers to reflect upon taken-for- granted ways of conceptualizing human relationships with animals. It will be of interest to those in the broad field of human-animal studies as well as those within most social science and humanities disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, philosophy and social theory.
Taylor is a senior lecturer in sociology at Flinders University in Australia; Signal is a senior lecturer at Central Queensland University.
To purchase Theorizing Animals click here.
Anthropocentrism: Humans, Animals, Environments
Edited by Rob Boddice
Anthropocentrism is a charge of human chauvinism and an acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. Anthropocentrism has provided order and structure to humans' understanding of the world, while unavoidably expressing the limits of that understanding. This collection explores the assumptions behind the label 'anthropocentrism', critically enquiring into the meaning of 'human'. It addresses the epistemological and ontological problems of charges of anthropocentrism, questioning whether all human views are inherently anthropocentric. In addition, it examines the potential scope for objective, empathetic, relational, or 'other' views that trump anthropocentrism. With a principal focus on ethical questions concerning animals, the environment and the social, the essays ultimately cohere around the question of the non-human, be it animal, ecosystem, god, or machine.
To purchase Anthropocentrism click here.
The Animals of Spain: An Introduction to Imperial Perceptions and Human Interaction with Other Animals, 1492-1826
By Abel A. Alves
Writings from 1492 to 1826 reveal that the history of animals in the Spanish empire transcended the bullfight. The early modern Spanish empire was shaped by its animal actors, and authors from Cervantes to the local officials who wrote the relaciones geográficas were aware of this. Nonhuman animals provided food, clothing, labor, entertainment and companionship. Functioning as allegories of human behavior, nonhuman animals were perceived by Spanish and Amerindian authors alike as bearing some relationship to humans. On occasion, they even were appreciated as unique and fascinating beings. Through empirical observation and metaphor, some in the Spanish empire saw themselves as related in some way to other animals, recognizing, before Darwin, a "difference in degree rather than kind."
To purchase The Animals of Spain click here.
Published by admin on 11/15/2011 13:15:14
