Working Group 3.5

Critter Countrysides

Convenor:
Henry Buller, University of Exeter H.Buller@Exeter.ac.uk

Animals, both domesticated and wild, have always played a critical role in
representations and iconography of the countryside and rural nature. The proximity of animal life in rural settings has been at the centre of a longstanding moral consanguinity that modernism has only partially succeeded in overcoming. Even now, in the countryside, one is never alone. The rural is quintessentially a ‘more than human’ place. Animals are also, to borrow Franklin’s phrase ‘good to think with’ and, as such, creep, slide, crawl and walk across and through some of our more persistent binaries. In this workshop, we cast our net wide in order to draw in papers that reflect and report upon current research and ideas on the rural non-human animalia; papers that seek to re-define or re-draw (or perhaps re-enforce) the boundaries of that Derridean abyss through practices and performances of shared lives and subjectivities; papers that investigate new and un-researched areas of animal representation and imaginaries; papers that investigate corporeal and material networks that interlink the human and the non-human and reconfigure the societies and the spaces of each; papers that trace out a social science of human-animal society.