AIM AND OBJECTIVES

To disrupt normalizations of animal use, and with the aim of supporting transformational change in the way humans interact with nature, this three-year project focuses on three sites where animals are commodified for visual consumption, namely zoos, racing events (horses and dogs), and agricultural shows. These sites are seen as routinized and highly visible access points to understand (and potentially rupture) the normalised narratives and practices that sustain global systems of nature appropriation and abuse.

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The overall objective is to provide an empirically-grounded understanding of visual consumption practices, and specifically how animals continue to be materially constituted as visual resources. As part of this, the project will 1) examine the mechanisms by which the constitution of othered ‘natures’ as resources for visual consumption is normalised and made mundane (Gillespie and Lopez 2015), and 2) seek to disturb human-nature binaries in ways that are still largely non-existent in non-/post-/more-than-human conceptions and evaluations of associated relations.

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The rationale for a focus on these mundane practices is that it is here, in these depoliticized or ‘off-staged’ (Swyngedouw and Ernston 2018) sites of human-animal relations, associated with entertainment, education, and fun, that the most persistent understandings of animal use as largely benign and unproblematic, can be accessed.