Sharing Spaces: Technology, Mediation, and Human-Animal Relationships

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

Finn Arne Jorgensen (Editor)
Finn Arne Jørgensen is professor of environmental history at University of Stavanger, Norway. He is the author of two monographs on environment and infrastructure: Making a Green Machine and Recycling. He codirects, with Dolly Jørgensen, the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger and is coeditor, with Sarah Elkind, of the Intersections series at the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Dolly Jorgensen (Editor)
Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at University of Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging and The Medieval Pig. She is coeditor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and codirects, with Finn Arne Jørgensen, the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities at University of Stavanger.

ISBN: 9780822948308
Format: Hardback
Pages: 336
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: November 12, 2024

Sharing Spaces offers a highly sophisticated and much welcome contribution to the fields of environmental studies, human-animal studies, and science and technology studies. It serves as an excellent example of how these three fields can be brought into a very fruitful conversation.This rich collection chronicles some of the ways technologies shape human relationships with animals. While some of these relationships are exploitative, here also are chronicled relations of care and symbiotic partnerships. The case studies are fascinating, the analysis consistently attuned to the complexities of these entanglements.How are our relationships with animals mediated by technology and what are the ethical and moral implications of those entanglements? Through case studies that range across species, spaces, and times, this critically important collection explores how technologies—whether tracking devices, cameras, or monitoring tools—both connect and alienate us from animals, creating opportunities for both greater understanding and exploitation.