S2E5: Intimate Geography with Kathryn Gillespie
Claudia chats with Kathryn Gillespie about the ways in which the geography in general and the concept of intimate geography in particular aid in generating knowledge about animals’ experiences. The concept is both theoretically and methodologically rich allowing for focus not only on animals’ experiences but how researchers’ relations with, proximity to, and understanding of animals’ bodies and lives alters the way we come to know said experience.
Kathryn Gillespie is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Kentucky in Geography and the Applied Environmental and Sustainability Studies Program. Her work explores the everyday geographies of violence in which humans and other species are entangled. She is the author of The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and co-editor of Vulnerable Witness (University of California Press, 2019), Critical Animal Geographies (Routledge, 2015), and Economies of Death (Routledge, 2015). She has also published her work in such journals as Hypatia, Gender, Place, and Culture, Animal Studies Journal, Politics and Animals, and Environment and Planning A. Connect with her on her website (http://kathrynagillespie.com/)
Mentioned:
Intimacy, animal emotion, and empathy: Multispecies intimacy as slow research practice, and
Sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in Pacific Northwest US dairy production by Kathryn Gillespie;
Apologiaby Barry Lopez;
At Rest by Emma Kisiel;
"The experience of witnessing animals who have been killed on roads is overwhelmingly an experience of bodies. It’s not an experience of encountering a living animal moving through the world, on their own journey – the magic of seeing a fox running swiftly and quietly through the foggy night. Instead, all we can know is what we can witness about the body – a twisted, contorted, bloody figure rendered dead by human movement. Our own bodies, too, respond – alive – a visceral punch in the gut at the sight, a wave of nausea (disgust mixed with horror mixed with grief?). What can we know through attention to a body, dead? We are left to wonder.
Who are these animals, their lights gone out? What journeys have fallen apart here?” Barry Lopez asks of animals killed on roads in his book 'Apologia'. Each time I read Lopez’s words, I feel a well of emotion, of grief in his acknowledgement, not merely of the fact of the animal dead on the road, but in his call to wonder, to care about these animals’ lives and what was lost, for them and others, with their death. I’m left with more questions.
What had the world lost – that we didn’t even know it had lost – when this animal died? Who had these animals left behind? Were their kin waiting in the forest somewhere for them to return, or were they looking on, just out of sight beyond the road, watching as their loved one was killed and lay dying or dead in the road? What, or instance, of a doe killed on a road in North Dakota, leaving twin fawns on their own who stayed with the body of their mother for four days, until her remains were picked up for disposal? What would become of them, those fawns left behind?" (Kathryn Gillespie, Forthcoming).
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast, Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, and Jeremy John for the logo.