- The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Animal Rights
- Animals in Political Theory
- Animals as Living Property
- The Human-Animal Bond
- Animal Sheltering
- Roaming Dogs
- Misothery: Contempt for Animals and Nature, Its Origins, Purposes, and Repercussions
- Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality
- Animals as Legal Subjects
- The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies
- Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective
- Cetacean Cognition
- History and Animal Agencies
- What Was It Like to Be a Cow?: History and Animal Studies
- Animals as Sentient Commodities
- Animal Work
- Animals as Reflexive Thinkers: The Aponoian Paradigm
- The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice
- The Ethics of Food Animal Production
- Animals as Scientific Objects
- The Problem with Zoos
- Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control
- Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art
- Animals in Folklore
- Archaeozoology
- Animals and Ecological Science
- Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”
- Commensal Species
- Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems
- Animals in Religion
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
The argument that animals are agents is becoming ever more commonplace and forms part of a wider posthumanist intellectual project that reconsiders the power and role of nonhuman forces in both the past and the present. However, according agency to nonhumans raises significant methodological and theoretical issues. Informed by the approaches of Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and others, this chapter offers an overview of the varied ways in which scholars have attributed agency to animals. After considering how animals have historically been denied agency, it explores how animals are agents imbued with a degree of intentionality. It then investigates how animal agents have physically shaped past and present societies and the problematic nonhuman-agency-as-resistance model. This typology is intended to show that animals possess agency, but that claims of animal agency need to be made carefully to better capture the hybrid world we inhabit.
Keywords: nonhuman, agency, animals, posthumanist, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, intentionality, resistance
Lecturer in Twentieth-Century History, Department of History, Liverpool University
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- The Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies
- Preface
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Animal Rights
- Animals in Political Theory
- Animals as Living Property
- The Human-Animal Bond
- Animal Sheltering
- Roaming Dogs
- Misothery: Contempt for Animals and Nature, Its Origins, Purposes, and Repercussions
- Continental Approaches to Animals and Animality
- Animals as Legal Subjects
- The Struggle for Compassion and Justice through Critical Animal Studies
- Interspecies Dialogue and Animal Ethics: The Feminist Care Perspective
- Cetacean Cognition
- History and Animal Agencies
- What Was It Like to Be a Cow?: History and Animal Studies
- Animals as Sentient Commodities
- Animal Work
- Animals as Reflexive Thinkers: The Aponoian Paradigm
- The Ethics of Animal Research: Theory and Practice
- The Ethics of Food Animal Production
- Animals as Scientific Objects
- The Problem with Zoos
- Wolf Hunting and the Ethics of Predator Control
- Practice and Ethics of the Use of Animals in Contemporary Art
- Animals in Folklore
- Archaeozoology
- Animals and Ecological Science
- Staging Privilege, Proximity, and “Extreme Animal Tourism”
- Commensal Species
- Lively Cities: People, Animals, and Urban Ecosystems
- Animals in Religion
- Index
