Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Troubled Multispecies Relationships
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.1 Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology Strange Letters no. 9 2023 26491309 2023 periodical issue

    'This special issue of the Swamphen Journal was born from the Strange Letters Symposium held in 2021 when we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. In the Western tradition, people have often turned to letter writing as a means of connection with distant others but this symposium asked us to reimagine the letter for the strange times that we have found ourselves in (for some these strange times began with colonisation). To challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human, seems strangely fitting when the nonhuman is so clearly asking us to listen.' (Publication summary)

    2023
Last amended 6 Jul 2023 08:12:50
Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Troubled Multispecies Relationshipssmall AustLit logo Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology
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