Affect, Space and Animals

In recent years, animals have entered the focus of the social and cultural sciences, resulting in the emergence of the new field of human-animal studies. This book investigates the relationships between humans and animals, paying particular attention to the role of affect, space, and animal subjectivity in diverse human-animal encounters. Written by a team of international scholars, contributions explore current debates concerning animal representation, performativity, and relationality in various texts and practices.
Part I explores how animals are framed as affective, through four case studies that deal with climate change, human-bovine relationships, and human-horse interaction in different contemporary and historical contexts. Part II expands on the issue of relationality and locates encounters within place, mapping the different spaces where human-animal encounters take place. Part III then examines the construction of animal subjectivity and agency to emphasize the way in which animals are conscious and sentient beings capable of experiencing feelings, emotions, and intentions, and active agents whose actions have meaning for the animals themselves.
This book highlights the importance of the ways in which affect enables animal agency and subjectivity to emerge in encounters between humans and animals in different contexts, leading to different configurations. It contributes not only to debates concerning the role of animals in society but also to the epistemological development of the field of human-animal studies.

Jopi Nyman is Head of English at the School of Humanities at the University of Eastern Finland. Nora Schuurman is Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Eastern Finland.

1 Introduction PART I Being with Animals: Affect 2. Never-ending Stories, Ending Narratives: Polar Bears, Climate Change Populism, and the Recent History of British Nature Documentary Film 3. Cattle Tending in the "Good Old Times": Human-Cow Relationships in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Finland 4. In Pursuit of Meaningful Human-Horse Relations: Responsible Horse Ownership in a Leisure Context 5. "... and Horses": The Affectionate Bond between Horses and Humans/Gods in Homer's Iliad PART II Mapping Human-Animal Spaces: Relationality 6. Re-reading Sentimentalism in Anna Sewell's Black Beauty: Affect, Performativity, and Hybrid Spaces 7. Seeing the Animal Otherwise: An Uexküllian Reading of Kerstin Ekman's The Dog 8. Transcultural Affect: Human-Horse Relations in Joe Johnston's Hidalgo, Steven Spielberg's War Horse, and Belá Tarr's The Turin Horse 9. What's Underfoot: Emplacing Identity in Practice among Horse-Human Pairs Part III From Objects to Subjects: Exploring Animal Subjectivity 10. Moving (with)in Affect: Horses, People, and Tolerance 11. Companionable Human-Animal Relationality: A Reading of a Buddhist J-taka (Rebirth) Tale 12. Passing the Cattle Car: Anthropomorphism, Animal Suffering, and James Agee's "A Mother's Tale" 13. An Avian-Human art? Affective and Effective Relations between Birdsong and Poetry Part IV Methodological Afterword 14. Ethnographic Research in a Changing Cultural Landscape