Human-Non-Human Interaction (2015)

Journal of Animal Ethics, 2013

Sociology Compass, 2009

This paper will talk about the relationship between human and animals that have co-existed overtime.

Current Sociology

How do we include animals in sociology? Although sociology’s initial avoidance of the nonhuman world may have been necessary to the field’s development, recent scholarship – within mainstream sociology, environmental sociology and animal-centred research – is helping expand the field’s horizons. With a focus on variety, this article reviews four key paths that researchers are taking to include animals in their research: (1) studying interspecies relations, (2) theorizing animals as an oppressed group, (3) investigating the social and ecological impacts of animal agriculture and (4) analysing social-ecological networks. This review shows how applying – and innovating – existing social theories and research methods allows researchers to include animals in their analyses and will be relevant to a variety of scholars, including mainstream and environmental sociologists, animal-focused researchers and social network analysts, to name a few.

Pp. 79-105 in Frank Theime, Ranata Brucker, Melanie Bojok, Birgit Mutherich, and Martin Seeliger (eds) Das Mensch-Tier-Verhaltnis: Eine sozialwessenschaftliche Einfuhrung.

Human interaction with nonhuman animals is a central feature of contemporary social life. Animals are used for food, clothing, and transport; hunted for subsistence and sport; worshipped, sacrificed, tabooed, and vilified in religions; represented in art, literature and film; incorporated into homes and families as pets; used as models for humans in a range of experimental situations; put on display in zoos and natural history museums and used to entertain in circuses; they are the focus of debates about human nature in philosophy and theology. In the United States, the majority of household (64 percent) include at least one companion animal (Americafl Veterinary Medical Association 2003); attendance at zoos far exceeds that at professional sporting events; more people carry photographs of their pets in their wallets than their children; married women report that their pets are more important sources of affection than are their husbands or children (Arluke 2003); the income of the pet industry amounts to almost 36 billion US dollars each year (Fetterman 2005).

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Society and Animals, I present a brief history of the journal in the contexts of the development of the field of Human-Animal Studies – largely operationalized as the tacks taken by the now considerable numbers of journals in the field. The talk ends with some thoughts and concerns about the future trajectory of the field.

Journal of Sociology, 2018

Sociologists have contributed to the development of the animal studies field in recent decades. However, many of these ventures have been anthropocentric, stopping short of sociological calls for animal liberation despite the fact that critical sociological concepts are often the (unspoken) antecedents of such work. Here, we present a systematic review of peer-reviewed sociological articles on human–animal relationships since 1979. Our analysis identified key themes supporting charges of anthropocentrism, but also aspects of politicised animal sociology. Based on this we call for sociological animal studies to incorporate a specifically Emancipatory Animal Sociology: an approach grounded in a social justice and emancipatory praxis that explicitly and critically engages with the material conditions of animals’ lives, taking into account the experiences and knowledge of activists and others working directly with animals and, where possible, centres the animals themselves.

European Journal of Social Theory

In this article, we ask why is it that sociology has been slow to take up the animal challenge, and ask what would happen if it did. We argue that sociology’s fraught relationship with biology, its assumptions about human exceptionalism and its emergence in the context of industrialization and urbanization are key to understanding its lack of attention to animals and contribute to a limited conceptualization of society. This can be remedied by viewing non-human animals as involuntarily embedded in social relationships, a move which involves a redefinition of the social and of what it means to be human; a revision of notions of agency, subjectivity and reflexivity; and a rejection of the speciesism and anthropocentrism on which sociology is based. Finally, the article contends that a full understanding of society is not possible if we continue to direct the sociology gaze only at humans.

HAS is the only field that directly investigates relationships between human and nonhuman animals and their environment. The forms of bonds, attachments, interactions, and communications under investigation are impressively variable because of (1) the number of species of nonhuman animals, (2) the ingenious (and often exploitative) ways that humans have used other animals, and (3) the ways that humans view other animals. These latter views also have played a critical role in the complex and often contradictory ways that we compare ourselves to them. The different names of the current field reveal these contradictions in their disregard of the fact that humans are also animals.

The Sociological Review, 2013

This paper focuses on sociology and the study of human non-human animal relations. Using as a catalyst referees' comments on a previous paper about experiments using non-human animal subjects, in this present paper three problematics are identified and discussed. These problematics centre on the ‘acceptable’ content of sociological inquiry, the ‘permissibility’ of advocacy-oriented sociology, and the ‘admissibility’ of non-human animal-advocacy to advocacy-oriented sociology. The three problematics are explored through the lens of reflexive and critical sociology. Two central questions are raised: first, should sociology include the study of nonhuman animals and secondly, can sociology advocate for non-human animals? The paper concludes with an affirmative response to both of these questions. The paper ends by stressing that sociology has so much to offer the study of human non-human animal relations. Professional sociologists have a key role to play in enabling this work to mov...