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This chapter reflects on how non-human and more-than-human netnography can be utilised by netnographic researchers as the research landscape continues to shift across the social sciences and beyond. Through confronting established thinking about netnography we aim to maintain its relevancy and value. We reflect on the potential of networked sociality, but also the ethical complexities involved with such enquiry. We unpack the characteristics of time in relation to the evolving nature of netnography and deliberate over the challenges in assemblage and enactment afforded by technologies. Human and non-human agency as well as the role of the internet of things are outlined to illustrate their interdependencies and we offer an outline of core topics and future research questions as a map to guide netnographers through the emerging galaxy of networked sociality.

This chapter raises objections to the concept of ‘anthropomorphism’ as a tool for analysing how human animals understand non-human ones, and suggests that an alternative model ‘egomorphism’, might be more appropriate. The term ‘anthropomorphism’ is used in social science to describe some of the ways in which people act towards non-human animals. Evidence that intersubjectivity is generated with non-human beings also comes from countless everyday experiences of interactions with pets, livestock animals, wild animals, working animals and sport animals, and, no doubt, gods and spirits. The distinction between perceiving characteristics in non-human animals (and other things) and attributing characteristics to them, has implications for the debate about the relationship between direct perception and cultural construction. Direct perception and cultural construction are complementary processes, not conflicting ones. The crucial difference is that direct perception, on its own, generates a degree of understanding of the world, whereas cultural construction cannot take place at all without perception.

This chapter considers how women, children, non-human animals, and nature more generally, are the victims of patriarchal actions, ideology, and philosophy. After some prefatory comments about human–animal relationships, this chapter sketches out how international conventions seek to prevent trafficking and trade in human and animal bodies. As the author explains, a major difference between the goal of the conventions and protocols pertaining to human trafficking and those relating to animal trafficking and wildlife trade is that the former—the UN Palermo Protocol (a voluntary supplement to the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime) and the Council of Europe Convention—seek a total ban on the trafficking and trade in human victims, while the latter—the Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats 1979 and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (or CITES)—seek only to control the trafficking and trade of animals, thereby preserving such activities and practices until the covered species have reached a critical state, at which time greater protections come into play. Drawing on ecofeminist theory, the author analyses why women, children, and animals are regarded as commodities or exploitable resources, rather than perceived and treated as beings with rights to freedom and lives without physical and psychical abuse. In so doing, the author contemplates why humans may benefit from legal instruments prohibiting them from trade and trafficking, while the instruments aiming to protect animals may have less power and efficacy.

In Western educational literature people are made aware of the evolution of early hominins in the Eastern Hemisphere within the continent now known as Africa. Discussions that would lead people to question human evolution in broader frames of other possibilities, have remained buried in a few academic papers and the occasional textbook. Western constructs of human evolution are often framed in epistemologies of agnotology. That is, knowledge is constrained through what is not taught. To gain an understanding of the human past it is necessary to discuss the evolution of humanity’s earliest primate ancestors on a global scale. I discuss the earliest reported primate ancestors, recent discoveries of new fossil hominins, human migrations to the Western Hemisphere (the Americas), and the impacts of political control of the human past. I argue that primate and human evolutionary histories have been underreported and silenced in educational literature due to national and historical dimensions of politicised knowledge production. The power of the past as it is created in the present, has a history of producing ignorance rather than knowledge. Discussions of human evolution, as they have traditionally been taught, are often framed through colonialism and epistemologies of agnotology.

In this chapter, I argue for the possibility that some non-human animals might have conscious awareness of God’s presence or action in the world. The argument draws on strands of the Christian tradition that argue that humans are able to have awareness of an invisible, immaterial God primarily because of God’s initiative to accommodate human epistemic limitations. Given what is supposed about God’s nature as personal and loving, there would have to be a principled reason to suppose that God’s self-revelation only reaches down to the human species. After considering two models for thinking about human awareness of God from William Alston and Eleonore Stump, I offer an argument from analogy that concludes that if humans are capable of having awareness of divine action or presence in the world, many animals likely have such awareness as well. I support the analogy by drawing on research about animal social intelligence. In conclusion, I offer suggestions for how the possibility of animal awareness of the divine might have implications for practical ethics and theodicies and defenses for animal suffering.

My worldview of STAIR is based in assemblage theory. In this chapter, I first identify the relevant literature in assemblage theory through a discussion of three key aspects of the assemblage: (a) it is comprised of discernible but interacting human and non-human parts; (b) it works at all scales; and (c) it distributes agency broadly. I then examine how this assemblage-based approach has shaped my own work through a case study of the Internet-as-assemblage and how the Harlem Shake meme functioned in post-Arab Spring Tunisia and Egypt. In the final section I reflect on what an assemblage-based approach has to offer STAIR as a field of study with particular attention to the ways in which human and non-human actors from science, technology, and art participate in IR. The final section also highlights the value of including popular culture texts in the study of IR as an example of what can be done within STAIR.

Tanna is a small island in Vanuatu, a nation of eighty-three islands in the South Pacific. There are, at present, no officially designated protected areas on the island. Nonetheless, there are spaces in which conservation takes place through making specific areas or resources tabu. Personal 252titles govern rights to land on Tanna. Land and more broadly ‘nature’ are inspirited, which makes difficult any establishment of government-sanctioned conservation or protected areas on the island. Indigenous approaches to governance and management under the umbrella of ‘kastom’ (tradition) follow an alternative path to environmental conservation—one that raises certain challenges as well as opportunities to rethink orthodox Western assumptions.

This chapter exposes and interrogates the relationship between humans and non-human animals in traditional Yoruba African culture in order to cogently frame the theoretical leaning of the Yoruba people’s worldview in the ongoing global discourse on the ethics of animal relations. Through a hermeneutic exploration of the Yoruba oral tradition, this paper argues that, within the Yoruba conceptual system, ideas such as: ‘non-human animals,’ ‘speciesism,’ ‘veganism,’ ‘animal rights,’ and ‘animal companionship’ are eccentric. However, such eccentricism does not suggest a lack of moral consciousness towards non-human animals. Like the animal liberation/rights theories in the West that extend moral duty to animals on the basis of sentience, this paper establishes that the traditional Yoruba also recognised the sentient nature of animals with some ontologically rooted value and respect. However, unlike the animal liberation/rights theorist who contends that the only right way to treat animals is to treat them as ends in themselves, and not as mere means, the Yoruba recognise only the welfare of animals and not the rights of animals. In the Yoruba worldview, the sentient nature of animals implies that their welfare should be cared for, especially for the sake of promoting others’ (humans and the deities) interests and well-being. This paper concludes that the Yoruba are advocates of an ontological animal care ethics; in this rational framing, religious beliefs, taboos, folktales, proverbs and moonlight poetry are essentially instrumental in serving as restraints to the mistreatment of animals.

This chapter seeks to articulate a theoretical approach that reconciles the human and non-human, and underlines the reality that sustainable relationships between them can only be achieved by the provision of justice for all. It suggests that a concern for the non-human should be encompassed by anthropologists for reasons that are ethical, practical, and intellectual. First, the notion of justice is fundamentally concerned with equalising relations between those who have power and those who do not. Second, humans, other species, and the material world are bound together in communal processes of production and reproduction that are interdependent, such that disruption for any of the participants has potentially major impacts on the others. A short-term focus on immediate human interests has longer-term detrimental effects on humans and non-humans alike. Third, the dualistic vision of Culture and Nature, which underpins the putatively separate categories of 'social' and 'environmental', is theoretically inadequate, and theory is manifested in practice.

Few issues have aroused so much public attention and controversy as recent developments in biotechnology. How can we make sound judgements of the cloning of Dolly the sheep, genetically altered foodstuffs, or the prospect of transplanting pigs' hearts into humans? Are we 'playing God' with nature? What is driving these developments, and how can they be made more accountable to the public? Engineering Genesis provides a uniquely informed, balanced and varied insight into these and many other key issues from a working group of distinguished experts - in genetics, agriculture, animal welfare, ethics, theology, sociology and risk - brought together by the Society, Religion and Technology Project of the Church of Scotland. A number of case studies present all the main innovations: animal cloning, pharmaceutical production from animals, cross-species transplants, and, genetically modified foods. From these the authors develop a careful analysis of the ethical and social implications - offering contrasting perspectives and insightful arguments which, above all, will enable readers to form their own judgements on these vital questions.

What humans know about the soil has material implications for the future of life on Earth. This paper looks at how ‘soil’ is in the process of becoming visible as a living world at the heart of an epoch marked by technoscientific management of the environment. At this time scientific knowledge of the natural world encounters a range of collectives and individuals striving to renew humans’ relationships with non human and organic ways of life. Soil is an interesting case for the study of absence: all around yet hardly apparent for many of us. Drawing upon Susan Leigh Star’s approach to ‘residues’ and ‘infrastructures’ allows soil to appear in all its ecological significance, as the final home to all residues and the dismissed infrastructure of bios. The aim of this essay is not only to make soil visible, but to treat its passing into visibility as an event in its own right that reveals soil’s ambivalent material and cultural value. As ecological visions come to reclaim this mistreated living ecosystem it is not only the knowledge about soil that could be transformed but the soil itself.

In August 2009 the Australian Racing Board responded to welfare concerns by introducing a range of regulatory measures pertaining to the use of whips in horse-related races, trials and trackwork.3 Clause AR137A of the Australian Rules of Racing were substantially redrafted, with the formal regulation to mandate the use of ‘padded whips,’ the introduction of rules regulating the number of times that a rider might use a whip on a horse in a race, and regulation of the way in which the rider should deliver the strike. In addition, the use of stock whips, as a means to force horses into the starting gates, was banned altogether. The rules were – at least prima facie – stricter in nature, offering more detail than the regulation that had previously governed the use of whips.4 In March of 2009, the Chairman of the ARB had commented of the introduction of the rules that:These changes send a clear message that Australian Racing is fully attuned to contemporary community expectations. The need for change is clear and there was no point fiddling around at the edges. There is no point pro crastinating where there is industry and public expectations that practices of the past are no longer condoned. Once we opened up the subject we were determined to do it properly.5

1. Introduction, Yoriko Otomo and Ed Mussawir (editors) 2. The Animal Protagonist: Representing 'The Animal' in Law and Cinema - Connal Parsley 3.Witness Demeanour as Real Evidence: Mechanistic Philosophy of Bodies Without Minds - Piyel Haldar 4.Inventing Animals - Cressida Limon 5.Chimpanzees in Court: What Difference Does it Make - Cimea Bevilacqua 6.The Jurisprudential Meaning of the Animal: A Critique of the Subject of Rights in the Laws of Scienter and Negligence - Ed Mussawir 7.Dressing the Sow and The Legal Subjectivation of the Non-Human Animal - Victoria Ridler 8.Whipping to Win: Measured Violence, Delegated Sovereignty and the Privatised Domination of Non Human Life - Dinesh Wadiwel 9.Law in the Marketplace - Marc Trabsky 10.The Normativity of an Animal Atmosphere - Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 11.Species, Scarcity and the Secular State - Yoriko Otomo