Approaching Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Biocultural Hope of Entanglement

By Jordan Sheridan

Eben Kirksey, ed. The Multispecies Salon. Duke University Press, 2014. 306 pp.

Between 2008 and 2010 the art show called the Multispecies Salon traveled through San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City. Whether individual pieces involve human/goat milk cheese, raw donkey soap, dandelions raised on human blood infected with Hepatitis C, or life-sized sculptures of transgenetic companion animals, each challenge preconceived notions of species division.
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Where the Wild Things Are

By Veit Braun

Eben Kirksey. Emergent Ecologies. Duke University Press, 2015. 312 pp.

Over the last couple of years, Eben Kirksey has been a major figure in carving out a niche for the fledgling field of multispecies ethnography somewhere in between human–animal studies, feminist science and technology studies, and ecology.
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Something Ordinary

By Ben Highmore

Kathleen Stewart. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007.

To name something as ordinary is not without risk. At once the founding act of all that is worthwhile in cultural studies, it also marks the source of all its troubles; the ambiguity of naming culture as ordinary is the stigmata of the burden that cultural studies (often unwittingly and unwillingly) carries.
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