Animal Housing and Human–Animal Relations : Politics, Practices and Infrastructures

This book provides an in-depth investigation into the practices of animal housing systems with international contributions from across the humanities and social sciences. By attending to a range of different sites such as the zoo, the laboratory, the farm and the animal shelter, to name a few, the book explores material technologies from the perspective that these are integrated parts of a larger biopolitical infrastructure and questions how animal housing systems, and the physical infrastructures that surround central human-animal practices, come into being. The contributions in the book show in various ways how physical infrastructures of animal housing are always part of a much broader sociocultural and political infrastructure, where the material reality of housing systems combines with human and animal agents, with politics, and with practices. As such, the book explores what kind of practices and relations develop around the physical structures of animal housing, and by whom, and for whom, they are developed. This innovative collection will be of great interest to student and scholars in animal studies, more than human studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology.