Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 50, January 2016, Pages 76-78
Political Geography

Guest Editorial
Towards a political animal geography?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2015.08.002Get rights and content

Section snippets

The boundaries of political geography

It is easy to see why political geography might be disinterested in animals. As Painter and Jeffrey (2009, p. 16) argue, all academic disciplines are social phenomena themselves, and as such have always been marked “by the inclusion of certain topics and points of view and the general exclusion of others.” Even feminism and the women's movement were “marginal to the discourse of political geography” until recently (Painter & Jeffrey, 2009, p. 17). Other key concerns of our times such as

The trajectories of animal geography

Since the publication of an edited collection by Wolch and Emel (1998), a substantial corpus of literature on animals has emerged in human geography. This literature has focused on ontological questions (such as the nature–society dualism) and descriptive and relational ethics (Buller, 2015b). These foci have their roots in dissatisfaction with the humanism of the social sciences and with what is seen as universalistic, abstract work in philosophy on animal ethics (Lorimer & Srinivasan, 2013).

Conclusion

In examining the separation of the animal from the political in geography, I have discussed two issues. One relates to the porosity of political geography's boundaries. Even with the recent broadening of the sub-discipline's boundaries, groups and topics that do not readily match or that trouble existing conceptions of political agency and the political – for example, children's politics (Kallio & Häkli, 2010) – are slow to capture the political geographical imagination. Animals constitute one

Conflict of interest

I wish to confirm that there are no known conflicts of interest associated with this publication and there has been no significant financial support for this work that could have influenced its outcome.

I confirm that I have given due consideration to the protection of intellectual property associated with this work and that there are no impediments to publication, including the timing of publication, with respect to intellectual property. In so doing I confirm that I have followed the

Acknowledgements

Particular thanks to James Sidaway for encouraging me to write this editorial, and to Phil Steinberg and Nick Gill for useful feedback. I will always be grateful to Vijay K Nagaraj for instilling in me a keen appreciation of the political.

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