In 2011, Nik Taylor and Tania Signal published Theorizing Animals: Re-thinking Humanimal Relations in the ASI-managed Brill Human-Animal Studies Book Series. Utilising 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.
As part of our Interview with the Author series, we sat down with Nik to learn more about this earlier and important work.
ASI: Why is Theorizing Animals: Re-thinking Humanimal Relations important?
NT: Theorizing Animals was one of the first books to bring a collection of animal studies academics—both established and early career—together to consider how our thinking about them actually does (or can) impact their material lives. Across varied areas and topics where humans impact other species, the contributors challenge taken for granted ways of thinking about other animals and highlight how we might approach our relations with them differently; in ways that are not automatically entangled with oppression and/or abuse. For example, in ‘The Underdog in History: Serfdom, Slavery and Species in the Creation and Development of Capitalism,’ Mary Murray demonstrates how science, technology and capitalism work together to position animals as profit-making machines.
ASI: How does the book relate to your background and general areas of interest?
NT: The impetus for this book was the idea that the ways in which we think about, and socially construct other animals through our knowledge paradigms, is one important way that we justify their abusive treatment at the hands of individuals and institutions. Linked to this is the idea that deconstructing these epistemic devices is crucial to seeing, and thus treating, other animals differently. This reflects my interest in power, epistemology, methodology and intersectional feminist ways of visibilizing other animals.
ASI: How is the work situated, and how does it advance debates, within the field of Human-Animal Studies?
NT: The work is a broad consideration of the potential harms done by established (modernist, humanist) ways of thinking about other animals as well as an invitation to develop alternative ways thinking; ways that acknowledge the individuality, agency and (non-economic) value of animals’ lives both to themselves and to other species. While the content is primarily from the social sciences, reflecting my background as a sociologist, the debates in the book are key to much of the disciplinarily diverse work done in animal studies. In particular, the analysis of the role of knowledge in the power humans claim over other animals contributes to debates in critical animal studies. At the time the book was written, animal studies was still in its infancy and so the book also contributed to the legitimacy of actually studying human-animal relations in the social sciences: a debate that is still ongoing at the time of writing, 14 years later.
ASI: Who is your intended audience? (Has your intended audience changed at all since publication?)
NT: The intended audience is a broad one – from animal studies scholars across all disciplines, to upper-level students in sociology, particularly the sociology of human-animal relations and the sociology of knowledge. The intended audience hasn’t really changed although we suspect the book is now seen as an example of early statements of human-animal studies given the ideas in the book have been developed—by others as well as ourselves—over time.
ASI: What were/are your goals of your research in terms of welfare and positive policy change?
NT: The goal of my research has always been to “make animal lives better” in some way. While I understand the complexities involved in even reaching a consensus about what that means, it guides everything I do. This book was an attempt to bring together academics who were/are thinking about how epistemic power plays a role in the subjugation of other species, and how we might ‘think,’ or theorize, about animals in different ways: ways that open us and them up to liberation, equality, and ‘better lives.’
ASI: Theorizing Animals: Re-thinking Humanimal Relations was published in 2011, what changes have you seen in the field and in the world in the past 14 years related to your research?
NT: The short answer here is “A lot!” The field has grown so much since we published this book – this includes more journals dedicated to animal studies, more book series, more academic positions, conferences and events. It’s grown so rapidly that it’s difficult to keep up with all the great work being produced. Of course, with that growth we have seen schisms in the field with some moving more toward anthrozoology and others moving toward critical animal studies. While generally I am glad to see this growth and attendant schisms because they let us expand and refine our thinking about other animals, I am also concerned about the mainstreaming of animal studies and its ability to take away the so-called ‘radical’ edge; a position that I see as being linked to and based in ending animal oppression. This reflects general changes in the higher education sector, where there’s an impetus toward conservative research (anthrozoology, in our field) and a marginalization of dissent and critical voices (critical animal studies, in our field). And in some ways this is puzzling since it seems the world is more open to changes that might help other animals seen for example in the mainstreaming of veganism, and also seen in my teaching where students are hungry for ‘radical’ change that will help liberate other animals and/or have less detrimental impacts on the environment (e.g., the end of animal agriculture).
ASI: What are you currently working on?
NT: I have an ongoing research project addressing working in the neoliberal university including a specific interest in how academics might manage the challenges of doing critical animal studies in a system that itself is embroiled in animal oppression (see here and here). I am also part of a collective working on a special edition of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work that considers social work and animals (due first half of 2025). Within this, my focus is on the need for social work to embrace intersectional, feminist arguments regarding the need to include animals in their analyses of power and to consider species as a form of oppression. Finally, I am just starting a project that returns to my first interest in animal studies – animal sanctuaries – where I am considering the role sanctuaries have in modelling alternative, non-hierarchical, human relations with other species.
Learn more and purchase your copy of Theorizing Animals here.