Geography and posthumanism

Geography has often been characterized as a unifying discipline, drawing together the social and natural through a focus on the composition of space and place. As such, it might be expected to have a close and productive relationship with critical posthumanism, rejecting the essentialization of humanity and exploring critically the entanglement of nonhumans such as animals and technologies in the co-production of space. However, geographers have often preferred the nomenclature of “more-than-human” over posthuman. In this chapter, we begin by reviewing the nature of geography’s engagement with posthumanism, contextualizing this in relation to its disciplinary history. Throughout the chapter, we focus especially on the field of animal geographies, where the “performative turn” and the methodological innovations that it led to have become significant gestures for expressing posthumanist sensibilities. We examine these methodological innovations in relation to two approaches that have been especially influential over the past two decades: actor-network theory and multispecies ethnographies. We refer to key papers in animal geographies and the geohumanities that illustrate what these methodological innovations might produce, and, in the conclusions, we underline the role of performative research methods in creating the possibility for different subjectivities, new ethical questioning, and political action to emerge