Animal studies

In this year’s overview of animal studies scholarship, I examine how authors strike a difficult balancing act between making critical interventions while preserving complexity, in relation to three (overlapping) topics that have long been central to the field: domestication, consumption, and extinction. The essay begins by engaging with three texts that interrogate the dynamics of domestication, especially in relation to animal rescue: Chris Pearson’s Dogopolis, Harlan Weaver’s Bad Dog, and Elan Abrell’s Saving Animals. Next, I move on to work that offers provocations about the politics of consumption: Catherine Oliver’s Veganism, Archives, and Animals, Emelia Quinn’s Reading Veganism, and Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam’s edited collection Meat! The essay closes by turning to research that discusses the fraught politics of extinction and environmental catastrophe: Nayanika Mathur’s Crooked Cats and Danielle Celermajer’s Summertime. While the content of each text explores ethical concerns in relation to nonhuman animals, as I describe below, these books also offer a range of ethical provocations about the trajectory of animal studies itself, which pertain to its norms, values, and methodologies. One thing that unites many of these texts, however, is that they illustrate how staunch critique of existing relations between humans and other beings does not have to come at the expense of situatedness, conceptual nuance, and recognition of complexity.