This commentary is an attempt to begin to identify and think through some of the ways in which sociocultural theory may contribute to understandings of the relationship between humans and digital data. I develop an argument that rests largely on the work of two scholars in the field of science and technology studies: Donna Haraway and Annemarie Mol. Both authors emphasised materiality and multiple ontologies in their writing. I argue that these concepts have much to offer critical data studies. I (...) employ the tropes of companion species, drawn from Haraway, and eating data, from Mol, and demonstrate how these may be employed to theorise digital data–human assemblages. (shrink)

In this review of Donna J Haraway’s book, Manifestly Haraway, that brings together The Cyborg Manifesto, The Companion Species Manifesto and Companions in Conversation (with Cary Wolfe), the author aims to show how Haraway’s work taken together is inspiring and revolutionary, offering us a basis for thinking differently about how we can intervene in dominant power relations in ways that are not simply critical but constructive of new ways of doing and being a social scientist. Like Foucault before (...) her, Haraway offers not just exceptional tropes to think with – the cyborg, the companion species – but practices, ways of thinking and writing and relating, through which to make knowledge, and remake worlds. Making kin, becoming-with – not post-humanism but compost – these are the messages of her manifestos for doing our theorizing and our researching differently. (shrink)

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin is universally recognized as one of the most important science books ever written. Published in 1859, it was here that Darwin argued for both the fact of evolution and the mechanism of natural section. The Origin of Species is also a work of great cultural and religious significance, in that Darwin maintained that all organisms, including humans, are part of a natural process of growth from simple forms. This Companion commemorates (...) the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species and examines its main arguments. Drawing on the expertise of leading authorities in the field, it also provides the contexts - religious, social, political, literary, and philosophical - in which the Origin was composed. Written in a clear and friendly yet authoritative manner, this volume will be essential reading for both scholars and students More broadly, it will appeal to general readers who want to learn more about one of the most important and controversial books of modern times. (shrink)

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion (...) species”—knotted from human beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

In this paper, I take up Graham Harman’s critique of the philosophy of access as well as his proposed non-anthropocentric ontology, and I ask what it would be like for human beings to live or practice such a proposal. Drawing on Harman’s thinking about prehension, but shifting focus towards work in critical phenomenology and feminist science studies, I argue for the importance of human prehensive self-awareness within non-anthropocentric ontological practices, an awareness that emerges phenomenologically and in practice. Extending both Donna (...) Haraway’s theory of companion species and phenomenological practices of being-here with other things, I lay a groundwork for practicing being human as companion object. (shrink)

What exactly is the human element separating humans from animals and machines? The common answers that immediately come to mind—like art, empathy, or technology—fall apart under close inspection. Dominic Pettman argues that it is a mistake to define such rigid distinctions in the first place, and the most decisive “human error” may be the ingrained impulse to understand ourselves primarily in contrast to our other worldly companions. In _Human Error_, Pettman describes the three sides of the cybernetic triangle—human, animal, and (...) machine—as a rubric for understanding key figures, texts, and sites where our species-being is either reinforced or challenged by our relationship to our own narcissistic technologies. Consequently, species-being has become a matter of _specious_-being, in which the idea of humanity is not only a case of mistaken identity but indeed the mistake of identity. _Human Error_ boldly insists on the necessity of relinquishing our anthropomorphism but also on the extreme difficulty of doing so, given how deeply this attitude is bound with all our other most cherished beliefs about forms of life. (shrink)

This translated volume by Andrea Borghini and Elena Casetta (original title: _Filosofia della biologia_) introduces a wide spectrum of key philosophical problems related to life sciences in a clear framework and an accessible style, with a special emphasis on metaphysical questions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this (...) fellow creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

This interview reconsiders Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto 21 years after it was first published. It asks what has become of the three boundary breakdowns around which the Manifesto was structured - those between animals and humans, animal-humans (organisms) and machines, and the ‘physical and non-physical’. Against this backdrop, this interview examines the connection between the Cyborg Manifesto and Haraway’s more recent writings on companion species, along with what it means to read or write a ‘manifesto’ today. Recent notions (...) of the ‘posthuman’ are also placed into question. (shrink)

In early 2014, Descartes’ Meditations joined the short but select list of Western Philosophy texts that have an entire Cambridge Companion dedicated to them. (The list includes Hobbes’ Leviathan, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Locke’s Essay, Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, Plato’s Republic, and Spinoza’s Ethics. Hume’s Treatise is also expected to be added to the list before the end of the year.) To set itself apart from the many existing volumes that offer (...) guidance and clarification to the Meditations, this new collection of essays aims to prove that the Meditations is not a repository of considered, fully-articulated and spelled-out Cartesian views but rather the exposition of the process, the sequence of steps for arriving at such views. To that end, the rhetorical aspects of the Meditations are especially emphasized: who is speaking, who is spoken to, the manner in which things are phrased, the setting as well as the intended goal of (the speaker of) the Meditations are carefully scrutinized. (shrink)

Haraway criticises Deleuze and Guattari for disparaging women and animals in their work on the notion of becoming-animal, but in doing so betrays the fact that she has not properly understood their concept. Her criticisms are disingenuous, though, because her own position on animals fails to live up to her proclaimed refusal of anthropocentrism. Her companion species project ignores or glosses over the extent to which human exceptionalism prevails in every aspect of the human–animal encounter, particularly where pets (...) are concerned. (shrink)

In this volume, Andrea Borghini and Elena Casetta introduce a wide spectrum of key philosophical problems related to life sciences in a neat framework and an accessible style, with a special emphasis on metaphysical issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first addresses the two main questions stemming from life sciences: what is life, and what is the correct understanding of the theory of evolution? The second part looks at metaphysical questions concerning biological entities: environments, species, organisms, (...) and biological individuals. The third part focuses on theoretical questions of particular ethical and political significance: sex and gender, the biotechnological revolution, and the evolution of behavior and culture. Each chapter is followed by a list of further readings. (shrink)

A nationwide survey that included personal interviews in 1,021 households studied the incidence, species, and numbers of nonhuman animals kept in Costa Rican households. A total of 71% of households keep animals.The proportion of households keeping dogs is 3.6 higher than the proportion of households keeping cats . In addition to the usual domestic or companion animals kept in 66% of the households, 24% of households keep wild species as pets. Although parrots are the bulk of wild (...) species kept as pets, there is vast species diversity, including other birds, reptiles, mammals, amphibians, fishes, and invertebrates - typically caught in their natural habitat to satisfy the pet market. The extraction from the wild and the keeping of such animals is by-and-large illegal and often involves endangered species. Costa Ricans, in a conservative estimate, keep about 151,288 parrots as pets. More than half the respondents have kept a psittacid at some point in their lives. Pet keeping is a common practice in Costa Rican society, and its incidence is high by international standards. (shrink)

A first-of-its kind, in-depth investigation into how companion animals and their humans have carved out a new type of family - the multi-species family - in which identities like parent, child, grandparent, and sibling transcend species to create new forms of kinship.

The focus of this paper is on normative ethical theories and endangered species. To be exact, I examine two theories: the theory of obligation and care ethics, and ask which is better-suited in the case of endangered species. I argue that the aretic, feminist-inspired ethics of care is well-suited in the case of companion animals, but ill-suited in the case of endangered species, especially in the case of “unlovable” species. My argument presupposes that we now (...) live an era where human disturbances to planetary ecosystems are triggering a sixth mass species extinction, and widespread interventions will be needed to save many species from extinction. (shrink)

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in transition, particularly in relation (...) to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness. (shrink)

Nature, as Spinoza conceives of it, contains individual things or finite modes, each with its own essence. Although we humans classify individuals into kinds, Spinoza is adamant that the resulting types or species “are nothing”. Despite Spinoza's nominalism, his mature works posit differences between animal kinds that are discoverable by reasoning and available to philosophical understanding. Spinoza's world is fluid in the sense that the powers of individuals are in flux, changing as they interact with one another. In Spinoza's (...) view, changes in an individual's power are typically the effects of its interactions with external things. Spinoza contrasts the affective dynamics between human natures with a lack of affective commonality between humans and other kinds of animals. In his political works Spinoza translates his account of natures or essences into juridical terms. The claim that mutual sociability is what makes an animal kind is of a piece with the rest of Spinoza's philosophy. (shrink)

Blaise de Sebaste is depicted on a page of the manuscript of the Book of Hours of Louis de Savoie (1445-11460, BNF Latin 9473, folio 176v.). He appears there as the saint who preaches to the wild beasts, long before Francis of Assisi. A woman and a wolf both bring him offerings. Some of the elements of his closeness to beasts and women (together or separately) come from the legend, others allow us to question more generally the relationship between gender (...) and animal species in medieval Christianity. Since Augustine, animal species had been divided into domestic and wild, but paradoxically, the former were thought to precede the latter. It was the Fall, provoked by a woman, that caused the reversion to the wild of the peaceful companion species that God had entrusted to humans. The life of St Blaise traces for men the path of domination to regain control over both beasts and women. (shrink)

The book integrates humans’ biological lives as animals with acculturation and interaction within diverse social worlds. Recent work in evolutionary biology, the social theory of practices, and cognition as embodied and enactive shows how aspects of human life often treated as social or cognitive are integrated “naturecultural” phenomena. Human evolution enables people’s varied biological development in practice-differentiated environments sustained by ongoing niche reconstruction. These naturecultural aspects of human life include language and other expressive repertoires; cultivated bodily skills; differentiated practical and (...) cultural domains and their associated settings and equipmental complexes; critical assessment of lives and practices; and power and resistance. This interdependent, practice-differentiated way of life explains how humans are accountable and responsive to diverse normative concerns. Our moral, social, practical, skillful, epistemic, conceptual, aesthetic, and other normative concerns are evolved, “two-dimensional” transformations of other animals’ one-dimensional biological success or failure in sustaining their lineages. These diverse normative concerns are not already-determinate norms, however. They indicate what is at issue and at stake in the ongoing development of various practices and their mutual interdependence, including how people express and reason about those issues discursively. Social power is thereby also a normative phenomenon, expressing how causal capacities and actions reconfigure the normative significance of other people’s situations. The book primarily addresses the biological significance of people’s situated involvement with one another. It nevertheless also highlights the social-ecological interdependence of people’s practice-differentiated ways of life with many non-human companion species, from microbial symbionts and pathogens to domesticated or commensal plants and animals. (shrink)

This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with both (...) subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect. (shrink)

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges--of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location--are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying (...) force of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures. (shrink)

The cyborg that Donna Haraway appropriated in ‘Manifesto for Cyborgs’ as a metaphor for political action and theoretical inquiry has ceased to have the potency it did 20 years ago. While Haraway has turned from a central focus on technoculture to companion species, much important cultural work remains to be done, especially in networked and programmable media. Problems with the cyborg as a metaphor include the implication that the liberal humanist subject, however problematized by its hybridization with cybernetic (...) mechanism, continues as a singular entity operating with localized agency. In a word, the cyborg is not networked enough to encompass the emergent possibilities associated with the Internet and the world-wide web and other phenomena of the contemporary digital era. Instead I propose the idea of the cognisphere. As operational concept and suggestive metaphor, the cognisphere recognizes that networked and programmable media are not only more pervasive than ever before in human history but also more cognitively powerful. It is closely associated with what many researchers regard as a major insight: the idea that the physical world is fundamentally computational. While these scientists regard computation as a physical process, the cultural critic is apt to see it as an over-determined metaphor. The binary choice between seeing the computational universe as a literal description of the physical world and reading it as an over-determined metaphor misses a crucial aspect of contemporary cultural dynamics: the interaction between means and metaphor, technology and cultural presupposition. Taking this dynamic into account leads to a more complete understanding summed up in the aphorism, ‘What we make and what (we think) we are co-evolve together.’. (shrink)

Here I craft a case for recognizing the roots and patterns that ground the possibility of contemporary com-posting—as outlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble—by New Materialists and critical pragmatists, especially those who are affected by the social injustices and ill-advised practices of today’s formal education. I explore both Spinozan Ethics and American pragmatism in order to fashion a pattern that affects educational thought and action. That pattern of affect/affecting is one Haraway calls “attunement”, a state of co-relation that (...) makes “unexpected feats possible.” My goal is to encourage those educational theorists who dwell in a critical pragmatist archive and those who dwell in a New Materialist archive to “make kin,” to learn to play string figures with a companion species, as they com-post educational possibility in a world where agency is both more limited and more widely-distributed. (shrink)

The paper addresses some rhetorical uses of the figure of water management from the perspective of an affirmative approach to contamination which Derrida saw as constitutive of affirmation itself. Contaminated water and its discontents discussed in the text frequently appears in various kinds of writings as a frightening figure of contamination which simultaneously brings in the figure of water management as a way of controlling the purity of cultural exchanges and transmissions in which, as Caroline Petronius puts it, contagion journeys (...) out of medicine into culture. The paper also addresses water and its management from the perspective of Astrida Neimanis’s liquidizing of the border between the solid and the fluid as a border between the human and the inhuman. This perspective opens up the sphere of mutual contamination of the human and the inhuman and translates posthumanist theoretical positions into spheres of affirmative exchanges managed not by masters, but by Donna Haraway’s companion species whom, or which, we all are. (shrink)

This essay zooms in on a series of parentheses in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship in order to examine a somewhat failed encounter between deconstruction and Donna Haraway’s ontological discourse on kinship and companion species. The essay claims that Derrida’s notion of trace, as it exceeds the humanist-anthropocentric logic and challenges any simple division between humankind and animality, can be followed as a condition for thinking friendship, kinship, or companionship as non-strictly anthropological categories, and for accounting for a principle (...) of failure or fallibility at the very heart of the ‘encounter’ with the other – human or nonhuman. What Derrida calls ‘the possibility of failure’ is inseparable from a certain legibility and illegibility of friendship, kinship, and companionship, from their dependence on the trace-structure, suggesting that they do not have strict ontological consistency (pace Haraway) but are structurally differantial and heterogeneous, and therefore remain to be read, interpreted, attested, translated, perhaps in view of transformative deconstruction. Reading and, with it, fallibility and undecidability, contribute to problematising Haraway’s ontology of companionship, making-kin, and becoming-together. Moreover, from the perspective of the exegesis of deconstruction, the essay also claims that the problematic of the trace-structure – virtually limitless in Derrida’s corpus – presupposes, everywhere it appears, the interrogation of the anthropological machine, of human exceptionalism, and raises the ‘question of animality’ even when this ‘question’ is not formulated as such, and when the so-called ‘animal’ is not named as such. (shrink)

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary (...) practices. Sparked by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway's critical storytelling and "risky reading" practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with "naturecultures" as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously. (shrink)

Industries of production and scientific research rely on the use of nonhuman animals and plants, remaking environments, populations, and even genetic information to suit human designs. This issue of _Social Text_ considers the radical implications of questioning the exceptional status of humans among the planet’s species. Responding to growing interest in animal studies and posthumanism, the contributors draw on racial, feminist, queer, postcolonial, and disability theories to probe the diversity of human relationships with other forms of biosocial life. “Interspecies” (...) queries the politics of traditional species taxonomy and examines the ways humans use the material characteristics of other species to pursue their economic, political, and social aims. This collection goes beyond companionate species to examine less charismatic life forms: viruses, vermin, transgenic pigs, and commodified plants. Bringing together prominent scholars and artists from a range of fields, the issue examines the histories of species collection and display. In the context of current public health challenges, including the swine flu epidemic and the scarcity of donor organs, the contributors explore the limits of transgressing species boundaries that arise when human bodies contain other species, such as viruses or transplanted organs from genetically customized pigs. “Interspecies” analyzes the use of nonhuman species in the biopolitics of warfare and torture and examines how interspecies relationships shape conditions of colonialism, imprisonment, and violence. The issue also complicates romanticized narratives of human/nonhuman animal dynamics without resorting to oversimplified portrayals of human exploitation of animal and plant life. _Julie Livingston _is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. _Jasbir Puar _is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of _Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times_. _Contributors: _Neel Ahuja, Suzanne Anker, Ed Cohen, James Delbourgo, Sarah Franklin, Carla Freccero, Alphonso Lingis, Julie Livingston, Chakanetsa Clapperton Mavhunga, Jasbir Puar, Kingsley Rothwell, Lesley Sharp. (shrink)

The present work explores interspecies intersubjectivity, including its content and limitations, through the paradigmatic instances of such relationships that are present among companion species. I aim to defend the claim that meaningful relationships are possible and do in fact occur between humans and nonhuman animals by appealing to both philosophical and empirical literature. I will also begin to delineate the content and limitations of these interspecies relationships.