Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts

(Hardback)

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The emotional exchange between so-called "humans" and more-than-human creatures is an overlooked phenomenon in societies characterized by the ubiquitous deaths of animals. This text offers examples of people across diverse disciplines and perspectivesfrom biomedical research to black theology to artlearning and performing emotions, expanding their desires, discovering new ways to behave, and altering their sense of self, purpose, and community because of passionate, but not romanticized, attachments to animals. By articulating the emotional ties that bind them to specific animals' lives and deaths, these authors play host to creaturely ghosts who reorient their world vision and work in the world, offering examples of affect and feeling needed to enliven multi-species ethics.

Reviews

This is an ambitious collection that brings an intimate voice to the discussion of ethical issues that are usually developed in more distanced rights-based discussions. -- Jane Desmond, Professor of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
This topical collection of essays takes part in the affective turn of animal ethics, and is distinguished by its focus on personal experiences and a type of auto-scholarship wherein the writers explicitly draw from their own affective engagements with nonhuman animals. -- Elisa Aaltola, Collegium Research Fellow, Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku

Author Bio

Brianne Donaldson is a farmed animal advocate and assistant professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Monmouth College. Ashley King is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Northwestern University. Their dissertation project, Body, Flesh, Meat: A Science-fictional Theory of Soteriology, develops the concepts of flesh and meat to theorize racialized queerness, transness, and animality in the viscously embodied soteriologies of contemporary science fiction.