Towards a research agenda for animal and disability geographies: ableism, speciesism, care, space, and place

ABSTRACT

Animal and disability geographies have become recognized fields of inquiry gaining traction with geographers of differing interests, approaches, and methods. To date, however, there has been limited engagement between the two fields themselves, despite healthy suggestions for such debate in the wider social sciences and humanities. This paper provides a series of provocations about the interconnections between animal and disability geographies to examine what they might add to each other, and why there is a need for (critical) work at this intersection. First, I suggest that animal and disability geographies share interconnections that encompass: their shared ontological challenges towards deconstructing speciesism and ableism respectively, and a growing focus on intersectional work. Second, I explore spaces of speciesist and disabling violence, arguing that thinking through these spaces will enable geographers to problematize and challenge ableism and speciesism. Third, I outline current engagement between the subfields, through the themes of space, place, and care. I argue that bringing the two together can build a stronger critical geography of justice by highlighting: i) ableism within animal studies, ii) speciesism within disability studies; and iii) the potential for constitutive relationships where both are brought to bear on issues and conceptual resources.

Hacia una agenda para las geografías animal y de la discapacidad: Enredos de capacidad, especismo, cuidado, espacio y lugar

Las geografías de animales y de discapacidades se han convertido en campos de investigación reconocidos que ganan terreno entre geógrafos de diferentes intereses, enfoques y métodos. Sin embargo, hasta la fecha, ha habido un compromiso limitado entre los dos campos, a pesar de las sugerencias saludables para tal debate en las ciencias sociales y humanidades más amplias. Este documento proporciona una serie de provocaciones sobre las interconexiones entre las geografías animal y de discapacidad para examinar lo que podrían agregarse entre sí y por qué existe la necesidad de un trabajo (crítico) en esta intersección. Primero, sugiero que las geografías de animales y de discapacidades comparten interconexiones que abarcan: sus desafíos ontológicos compartidos hacia la deconstrucción del especismo y el capacitismo respectivamente, y un enfoque creciente en el trabajo interseccional. En segundo lugar, exploro espacios de violencia especista y de discapacidad, argumentando que pensar a través de estos espacios permitirá a los geógrafos problematizar y desafiar tanto el capacitismo como el especismo. Tercero, describo el compromiso actual entre los subcampos, a través de los temas de espacio, lugar y cuidado. Sostengo que juntar los dos puede construir una geografía crítica de la justicia más sólida al: i) resaltar el capacitismo dentro de los estudios con animales, ii) resaltar el especismo dentro de los estudios sobre discapacidad; y iii) destacando el potencial de las relaciones constitutivas donde ambos se relacionan con los problemas y los recursos conceptuales.

Vers un programme d’action pour la géographie animale et celle du handicap: les enchevêtrements du validisme, du spécisme, du care, de l’espace et du lieu

La géographie animale, ainsi que celle du handicap sont maintenant des domaines de recherche reconnus et de plus en plus populaires pour des géographes travaillant avec des méthodes, des approches et des intérêts éclectiques. Cependant, il n’y a eu jusque-là qu’un engagement limité entre ces deux domaines eux-mêmes, en dépit de solides encouragements pour ce débat de la part des sciences sociales et humanitaires en général. Cet article propose une série de questions concernant les relations entre la géographie animale et celle du handicap afin d’examiner ce qu’elles pourraient s’apporter mutuellement, et la raison pour laquelle il y a un besoin d’études (critiques) à cette croisée. Premièrement, je suggère que ces deux géographies partagent des interdépendances qui couvrent leurs problèmes ontologiques communs envers la déconstruction du validisme et du spécisme, et une focalisation croissante sur les travaux intersectoriels. Deuxièmement, je passe en revue les espaces dans lesquels on trouve de la violence de handicap et de spécisme et je soutiens qu’une théorisation de ces espaces permettra aux géographies d’énoncer les problèmes autour du validisme et du spécisme et de les affronter. Troisièmement, je mets en valeur l’engagement actuel entre les sous-domaines par le biais des thématiques d’espace, de lieu et de care. Je soutiens que rassembler ces deux géographies peut mener à une géographie critique de la justice plus puissante, et mettrait en valeur: i) le validisme dans les études animales, ii) le spécisme dans les études sur le handicap, et iii) les possibilités pour les relations constitutives qui les amèneraient à exercer une influence sur les problèmes et les ressources conceptuelles.

KEYWORDS:

• Ableism
• animal geographies
• care
• disability geographies
• human-animal relationship
• speciesism

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• capacitismo
• geografías animales
• cuidado
• geografías de la discapacidad
• relación humano-animal
• especismo

MOTS CLEFS:

• validisme
• géographie animale
• care
• soins
• géographie du handicap
• rapports d’humains à animaux
• spécisme

Introduction

‘We are overthrowing so much. We aren’t seeking a cure, not according to a patriarchal, speciesist, ableist world. And we aren’t going to have closure. Nothing will easily be tied up together; no narrative will find its “finis”. But together we can work for transformations’ (Adams, 2018, p. 241).

An emerging trend within the wider social sciences and humanities is a concern with the shared challenges that both animals and disabled people¹ face, as well as acknowledging their often-entangled lifeworlds and histories (Gruen & Probyn-Rapsey, 2018; Jenkins et al., 2020; Socha et al., 2014; S. Taylor, 2017). Scholars have argued that the oppression of animals and disabled humans are interconnected through speciesism and ableism, and that their potential pathways to social justice, are just as entangled (Jenkins et al., 2020; S. Taylor, 2017).

Despite this growth of research, there has been an omission of geographical engagement at these intersecting fields. This is despite the fact that, over the last three decades, animal geographies and disability geographies have become recognized fields of study within geographical research (Buller, 2014; Butler & Parr, 1999; Chouinard et al., 2016; Gibbs, 2020, 2021; Gillespie & Collard, 2015; Gleeson, 1999; Hovorka, 2017, 2018, 2019; Hovorka et al., 2021; Imrie, 1996; Imrie & Edwards, 2007; Park et al., 1998; Philo & Wilbert, 2000a; Urbanik, 2012; Wolch & Emel, 1998). Both animal geographies and disability geographies scholarship share ontological, epistemological, and methodological connections. This can be mapped through their aims to challenge and deconstruct systems of power and oppression, to understand lived experience, and create shared pathways to social justice (Collard & Gillespie, 2015; Parr & Butler, 1999; Philo & Wilbert, 2000b). Furthermore, both have played a prominent role in geography’s ‘critical turn’. CAG/S [Critical Animal Geographies/Studies] scholars make clear the need ‘to differentiate itself from the broader AS [animal studies] field by having a direct focus on the circumstances and treatment of animals’ (N. Taylor & Twine, 2014, p. 1).² Likewise, CDS [Critical Disability Studies] scholars aim to trouble ideas about disability and normality and attempt to deconstruct the binaries of disabled and non-disabled through insights from feminism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, queer theory, and crip theory (Goodley, 2013; Goodley et al., 2019; Kafer, 2013; Shildrick, 2020). As Collard and Gillespie (2015, p. 9) outline in relation to CAG, ‘the project is not to enlarge the circle of beings that matter, to bring animals “into the circle of morality and subjectivity” (Wolch & Emel, 1998: xii), but rather to re-examine the practice of circling itself. For what is at the heart of the circle? What or who does the circle defend?’.³ This is critical for bringing animal and disability geographies into a shared conversation, to challenge the uneven processes of oppression, power, and violence that entwine human and animal lives.

That said, there are cautions to be raised about bringing these two diverse fields together (Grue & Lundblad, 2020). Historically, disabled people have been treated as different from their able-bodied counterparts, excluded and marginalized from public spaces, and in the process sometimes ‘animalized’, treated as inferior or less-than-human due to their physical and cognitive differences. Animals too have been treated as inferior due to their cognitive and physical differences from able-bodied humans, confined in ‘disabling’ conditions of intensive battery production or consigned to slaughterhouses in their millions. A fine line must nonetheless be trodden about the possible similarities between animal and disability geographies that does not risk reinforcing potentially pejorative ascriptions (the disabled person as animal) or violent practices (the animal who is bodily disabled by design).

The questions I wish to address then are: what might bringing animal and disability geographies together add to both, and why is there a need to bring these subfields together? To answer these questions, the paper forms a research agenda. First, I outline the interconnections between animal and disability geographies stating that bringing together both fields are vital for fuller socio-cultural histories that can better account for geographies of difference. Second, I consider the role that intersectional thinking can play in our understandings of animality and disability. The third section moves towards examining two sets of current work undertaken at the intersection between animal and disability geographies: i) spaces of speciesist and disabling violence and ii) animal and disability lifeworlds. This work is crucial in highlighting the potential ways that bringing together animal and disability geographies can attend to the interconnected notions of ableism and speciesism, and forms of power relations and violence. Overall, I maintain that bringing the two subfields together can build a stronger, critical geographies of justice by: i) highlighting ableism within animal studies; ii) highlighting speciesism within disability studies; and iii) highlighting the potential for constitutive relationships where both are brought to bear on issues and conceptual resources. The aim is to broaden the scope of existing scholarship while creating a call for potential future engagement between animal and disability geographies that challenges animal and disability geographers to work together to not just challenge and critique, systems of power and oppression, ‘but enact, multispecies justice through our work’ (Hovorka, McCubbin et al., 2021, p. 15).

Interconnections between animal and disability geographies

There are clear interconnections between animal and disability geographies that need to be explored. First, I examine the roles ableism and speciesism play in systems of oppression that work to violently animalize and disable both humans and animals. Second, in understanding these entanglements, and drawing on intersectionality, I explore how animality and disability have been intertwined with other forms of social oppression within work addressing racism, sexism, and homophobia. I argue that making clear these intersections are vital for developing fuller socio-cultural histories that can better account for geographies of difference.

Ableism and speciesism

One of the main interrelations between animal and disability geographies are the twin discourses of ableism and speciesism. Ableism, as S. Taylor describes in an interview with Grossman (2014, p. 14):

… at its simplest is prejudice against those who are disabled, and against the notion of disability itself. But more than this ableism is the historical and cultural perpetuation of discrimination and marginalization of certain bodies that are understood as different, incapable and vulnerable, and the simultaneous privileging of bodies labeled able-bodied.

Ableism is a system of oppression leading to the process of disablement and attendant discrimination of disabled or chronically ill people through physical barriers in the built environment and social and attitudinal barriers, throughout contemporary and historical society (Butler & Bowlby, 1997; Gleeson, 1999; Imrie, 1996, 2001). Ableism is the driving factor in the long histories of spatial segregation of certain bodies and minds deemed ‘out-of-place’ (Wolch & Philo, 2000), inscribing their bodies and minds as different and immoral (Philo, 2004). In addition, ableism upholds the binaries abled/disabled, healthy/ill, and sane/insane. Historically, ableism has worked to dehumanize people, seen through Charles Darwin’s focus on posture and bipedalism, and Singer’s focus on rationality as key human characteristics (S. Taylor, 2017). Here it is geographies of mind-body difference that are used to dehumanize disabled people and that led to the mass incarceration of disabled people in the UK, US, and beyond (Philo, 2004; Wolch & Philo, 2000).

One way (critical) disability geographies have challenged ableism is through critiquing and challenging spaces of (in)accessibility (Bonehill et al., 2020; Gleeson, 1999; Imrie, 2001; L. White, 2021). Bonehill et al. (2020, p. 358) in their research on the lived experiences, and barriers to mobility of adults with Cerebral Palsy, demonstrate how ‘respondents’ local environment is both a product of, and a catalyst for, the inequality they face’ through ‘both the material reality of their journey – the discomfort, the barriers to access and the danger – and the experiential reality of stigma, fear, dependence, humiliation and marginalisation’ showing how ultimately ‘urban accessibility is squarely an issue of social justice’ (p. 341). Furthermore, work on disability hate crime (Hall, 2018; Hall & Bates, 2019), and fear and (un)safety (Edwards & Maxwell, 2021, p. 1), aim to directly challenge the dominant ableist constructions of ‘disabled subjectivities as inherently vulnerable’ and ‘binary assumptions about spaces as safe or unsafe’. What is worthy of note here, is not only a shared concern around marginalisation, but also dehumanising logics that are engrained within ableist society.

In animal geographies, speciesism, as Collard and Gillespie (2015, p. 7) describe is:

… a disregard for animals on the basis of their species (namely, not being human) and a simultaneous belief in the superiority and mastery of the figure of the human. This perceived absolute difference and hierarchy between humans and animals, enshrined in law, is partly what enables – legally, politically, ethically, socially – animals to be owned as property and exchanged at auctions …

Through the power of speciesism, animals are always measured against humans, becoming classified and othered due to their difference from, or closeness to, humans (S. Taylor, 2017), with manifold consequences in terms of how readily, unthinkingly, humans may use and abuse those animals deemed as essentially unlike us. As well as upholding dualisms of nature/culture, human/nonhuman, speciesism is also deeply entangled with anthropocentrism. Speciesism privileges the human over animals or those deemed ‘not human enough,’ whereas anthropocentrism works to close spatialities and potentialities towards the human in an attempt to make humans and nonhumans, ‘more human like’ (Philo & Wilbert, 2000b). Speciesism is felt through individual bodies, and between the same species, as a process of violence that privileges certain animals over others, for example, guide dogs occupy a position of privilege in society and space, becoming part of their human partners’ identity, allowed into spaces which exclude other animals (Michalko, 1999; Pemberton, 2019), while some pet dogs are treated as ‘objects of human affection and love’ (Nast, 2006, p. 894), whereas others dogs are killed as pests (Srinivasan, 2013), killed due to their considered ‘dangerous’ nature (Bloch & Martínez, 2020), have their existence limited and regulated due to their ‘dangerous’ nature (McCarthy, 2016), or are euthanized due to illness or lack of productive use.

The role of (critical) animal geographies in addressing speciesism has been mixed. Building on ideas of hybridity (Whatmore, 2002) and relationality (Haraway, 2008), animal geographers have helped challenge, and blur the boundaries between, animals as objects/subjects (Johnston, 2008).⁴ While, CAG has pushed forward moral and ethical debates in wider geographical work, such as that around vegan geographies (see for example, Oliver, 2021), and the environment, climate change, and political ecology (Emel & Neo, 2015). This could be one place in which sustained critical engagement with disability geographies could occur (although see the following on the ableism and speciesism inherent in some animal ethics arguments).

Ableism and speciesism are deeply entangled, and bringing animal and disability geographies together, through a more critical lens, can help challenge these discourses and the forms of oppression and power they enact. Taylor (2017, p. 57) describes that ‘ … ableism is intimately entangled with speciesism, and is deeply relevant to thinking through the ways nonhuman animals are judged, categorized, and exploited’. Taylor (2017, p. 139) explains how prominent philosopher Singer (2001, 2015) has helped set animal and disability rights discussions at odds due to his animal rights argument being ultimately reliant on the medical model of disability, anathema to most (critical) disability theories, and his negative view of disability, including ‘his rhetorical use of stereotypes about disability, his assumptions of suffering, and his commitment to rationality as the only tool capable of defining personhood’. Singer’s cases for animal rights and liberation are hence built upon foundations that can, with justification, be critiqued as eugenic, risking perpetuating ‘scientific racism’ towards people with disabilities (Kafer, 2013; S. Taylor, 2017). Here is how Singer argues for animal rights and liberation:

We may legitimately hold that there are some features of certain beings that make their lives more valuable than the those of other beings; but there will surely be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. A chimpanzee, dog, or pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in the state of advanced senility. So, if we base the right to life on these characteristics, we must grant these animals a right to life as good, or better than, such retarded or senile humans (2015: p. 19).

Humans possessing language, autonomy and the ability to reason are used not only as a benchmark to differentiate between humans and animals, but in effect also serve to exclude neurodiverse disabled humans from moral consideration (Jenkins et al., 2020). This move positions disabled people as ‘out-of-place’ (Wolch & Philo, 2000) of human realms of morality. Speciesism precisely uses an ableist logic to function (S. Taylor, 2017) through the application of ‘rational thought’ to dictate who is closer to human and who is closer to animal. In a similar shift, it becomes clear that ableism also uses speciesism to function as it centres (certain) humans as able-minded through their capacity to reason, and exploits (some) animals due to their perceived inability for rational thought. As Taylor (2017, p. 59) maintains, ableism and speciesism ‘help construct the systems that render the lives and experiences of both nonhuman animals and disabled humans as less valuable and as discardable, leading to a variety of oppressions that manifest differently’.

Intersectionality

To understand deeper the interconnectedness between ableism and speciesism, animality and disability; how they operate and unfold within everyday life, and how they are felt and experienced, the attention of this agenda now turns towards intersectionality. Intersectionality was first conceptualized by black feminist scholars (Crenshaw, 1989), who rejected the notion that gender, race, class, disability, and ethnicity, are singular categories, but rather that they are interconnected and interdependent (Hopkins, 2018). It is important to note that an intersectional approach is not just ‘adding’ another identity into geographical analyses, but understanding how experiences of, for example, disability and animality, inherently change understandings of gender, ethnicity, race, and class; they are mutually transformative.

Animal and disability geographers/studies scholars have begun to adopt intersectionality as a conceptual device. Goodley et al. (2019, p. 977) argue that CDS ‘should place disability in the foreground of theoretical and political debates whilst, simultaneously, demonstrating disability’s relationship with the politics of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class and age’. While, in CAS, intersectionality is one of the key principles (White, 2021), with the field influenced by ecofeminists exploring the intersection of gender and species (Adams, 1990; Emel, 1995), critical race scholars exploring the intersection of race and animality (Deckha, 2009), research on animality and disability (Socha et al., 2014), and anarchist thought (R. White, 2015). However, animal and disability geographers have also engaged in intersectional work, albeit to various extents.

Hovorka (2015: p. 876, citing Deckha, 2009, pp. 249–250) argues ‘experiences of gender, race, ethnicity, class, orientation, age, ability etc. are often based on and take shape through speciesist ideas of humanness vis-à-vis animality’. Geographical intersectional analyses have discussed in detail the entanglements of racialized and gendered notions of human-animal boundary making that shapes the processes of animal domestication, containment, and extermination (Anderson, 1997, 2000; Bloch & Martínez, 2020; Gillespie, 2014). Important geographical work on animality and race has been undertaken by Elder et al. (1998, p. 138) who explore how the ‘idea of a human-animal divide as reflective of both differences in kind and in evolutionary progress, has retained its power to produce and maintain racial and other forms of cultural difference’. They argue that ‘during the colonial period representations of similarity were used to link subaltern groups to animals and thereby racialize and dehumanize them’ however, during the postcolonial present animal practices have become a tool in which to dehumanize people (p. 183). This work, shows a deep interconnection between our understandings of animality and race, influenced through shared histories, and how it is impossible to understand the two separately.

Whilst the above work does not explicitly engage with intersectional theory, keystone engagements in animal geography with intersectionality by Hovorka (2012, 2015) use intersectionality through an understanding that there are intersectional linkages between forms of oppression and inequality and that intersectional analysis can be expanded by incorporating gender as a category and axis of difference in human-animal relations. Hovorka (2015, p. 6) finds intersectionality useful as it ‘expands the nodes from which it is possible to unpack how power works in society by taking seriously species as a driver of social construction, experience formation, difference and inequality’. Thus, intersectionality is adopted as an approach to critique systems of oppression. But beyond this, Hovorka (2015, p. 6) contends:

“Intersectionality thus complements threads in animal geography purporting the centrality of animals; it generates possibilities for considering what an individual animal may experience in the world on account of who they are (based on their own sex, breed, age, etc.), where they are symbolically and materially located (in relation to humans or to other nonhumans) and with whom they are connected”

Embodying intersectional differences comes into view through the animal’s body and interestingly through the animal’s material relations to humans.

McKeithen (2017) examines the ‘crazy cat lady’ as a discourse that intertwines animality, gender, and sexuality through the making of the home. McKeithen shows how the discourse of the ‘crazy cat lady’ challenges the boundary of what is considered a ‘normal’ relationship between human and cat; they go beyond an ‘acceptable’ amount of pet love. In this instance, the ‘crazy cat lady’ challenges both heteronormative and patriarchal society through their human-animal relationship. In further work on the ‘crazy cat lady’ Probyn-Rapsey (2018) explores the figure through popular culture. Probyn-Rapsey shows the gendered dysfunction of loving ‘too much’ and how this pushes women’s care for animals to the margins of what counts as rational political behaviour. What McKeithen and Probyn-Rapsey could have said more about, was the representation of the women as ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’. Here a greater engagement with disability geographies, could help show how disability and animality are intertwined, how associating oneself with the animal ‘too much’, leads to representations of impaired thinking. McKeithen and Probyn-Rapsey do not implicitly deploy intersectional theory but reading their work in relation to Hovorka’s use of intersectionality shows how they challenge the intersectional linkages between systems of oppression and inequality through incorporating axes of difference into analysis of human-animal relations. Moreover, in both papers, it is the material location between human and animal that acts as a thread of intersectional analysis, the humans and animals are ‘too close’ within the space of the home.

In another example, Monroe (2018) explores ideas of interspecies closeness between autistic people and animals. Through analysing experiences of emotional connectedness between autistic women and their pets, Monroe challenges gendered and ableist stereotypes about autistic women and empathy. This is contrasted with Monroe’s critique of the ‘harsh empathy’ of autistic scholar Temple Grandin, whose work stays within the confines of animal oppression by changing the spatiality of beastly places to be ‘more accommodating’ to the animals that inhabit them. This is an important critique and moves Hovorka’s use of intersectionality to address greater questions of justice (although this was still an underlying aim). As Monroe (2018) argues, nonhuman animals and autistic people can be allies for one another, through connections and sites of solidarity to work against speciesist and ableist oppression. Indeed, Jampel’s (2018, p. 125) work is key here, in arguing that disability justice ‘includes a commitment to addressing multiple forms of oppression’. Animal and disability geographers are well positioned to adopt intersectionality to critique how power works in society by drawing on: what an individual animal may experience in the world (based on their own sex, breed, age, etc.), and their symbolic and material relations to humans or to other nonhumans. Furthermore, in adopting intersectionality, animal and disability geographers must aspire to an end goal of creating a more socially just world for all.

Lines of investigation between animal and disability geographies

‘Truly intersectional work aims to address all the systems of oppression that might leave someone in the metaphorical basement’ (Jampel, 2018, p. 123).

In addressing this quote, I build on the main tenets of what bringing animal and disability geographies together can add to both, namely: a critique and challenge towards ableist and speciesist hierarchies and systems of power, and an understanding of the spatialities, temporalities, and material affects of care between animal and disabled people. This is done through two sections: i) analysing spaces of speciesist and disabling violence, and ii) analysing experiences of the shared lifeworlds of animals and disabled people through the themes of space, place, and care.

Analysing spaces of speciesist and disabling violence

This section shall explore geographical work that has begun to attend to spaces of speciesist and disabling violence, arguing for a greater need to attend to, explore, and challenge, these spaces as spaces of violence and oppression. This builds on a key tenet of CAS and CDS, through work rooted in social justice. Furthermore, I will emphasize that disability geographers can offer conceptual resources for animal geographers to utilize in analysing the ableist, controlling, disabling and oppressive, processes animals are put under in spaces of production. Animal geographers can also offer conceptual resources that disability geographers can utilize to examine the processes of animalization, dehumanization, and spatial segregation that disabled people face. I also highlight that ableism and speciesism are felt through (non)human bodies.

As discussed earlier the inherent entanglement of ableism and speciesism works in tandem to oppress disabled people, positioning disabled people as different, immoral, or deviant. This form of oppression, through a perceived fear of difference, has led to disabled people being widely stereotyped, stigmatized and, in the process, animalized (Hahn, 1989). These stigmas and stereotypes, running throughout history, have chastised disabled people, excluding them from mainstream society, as can be seen through mass institutionalisation of disabled people and the enactments of the so-called ‘Ugly Laws’ in the US (Schweik, 2009). The Ugly Laws in particular vilified impairment on the streets of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century US cities, debarred from the normal public spaces of human social interaction, and strengthening dualisms positioning disabled people as ‘closer to nature’ and hence closer to animals (Philo, 2012; Schweik, 2009). Further examples of exclusion and animalization arose through ‘freak’ or side shows. Taylor (2017, p. 104) has argued that ‘perhaps nowhere are histories of disabled people being compared to and treated like animals more unabashedly on display, and more brazenly explicit, than in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European sideshows’. Such shows, as Johnson (2020) explains, were oppressive, sometimes violent occasions, reinforcing both speciesism and ableism and constraining the agencies of animals and disabled humans. Humans were collected into these shows due to bodily differences and animalized, positioning disabled people as the ‘elephant man’ and ‘monkey girl’ being just two prominent examples of the animalization process, pushing these humans from the boundary of human towards that of the animal. As Taylor (2017, p. 104) maintains, ‘in the sideshow animality was used to spark imagination by transgressing common categories and distinctions with theatrics and spectacle, while also legitimizing scientific racism, imperial expansion, colonization, and fear of disability’. In this sense, the animalization of disabled people worked to dehumanize them through assigning animal attributes, thus legitimating their exploitation, and exclusion, from society (Philo & Wolch, 1996).

In parallel, the (ableist) idea or assumption that animals do not have rational thought, emotional awareness or intellectual capacity has been used to justify human domination over animals (S. Taylor, 2017). The animal body, with little, if any self-awareness about, for instance, its potential fate in such environments, and on some older doctrines not even supposed to feel pain as do humans, is hence consigned – with usually little compunction – to the mercies of human control and dominance in slaughterhouses and factory farming facilities. These institutions, as key violent spaces where ableism and speciesism subjugate nonhumans, ‘work on’ animal bodies, genetically modifying and commodifying animal bodies to a ‘required’ weight and species to turn a profit. Potts (2016) outlines the lives of broiler chickens, who are now largely a mixture of two species (the Cornish male and White Plymouth Rock female lines) and weigh on average 100 g, 300% more than fifty years ago when they weighted on average 25 g. This artificial bodily change has drastically altered the lives of such chickens, which Potts (2016, p. 13) describes as ‘short and miserable’, with the confined spatiality and filthy living conditions leading chickens to being viewed as things or objects by those who grow and consume them. Such intense conditions have also led to the disablement of many chickens, since ‘their bodies grow too large to support their skeletons and organs … They may suffer heart failure, have trouble breathing or walking, and become unable to stand. When crippled like this they may starve or die of thirst’ (Potts, 2016, p. 14).

This disabling of animals does not stop in the broiler chicken industry, but spreads over all factory farms and food production institutions. Gillespie (2014, p. 1326) provides an insight into the sexualized violence faced by dairy cows, who go through a ‘cycle of artificial insemination, birth and milking’ which is ‘repeated for several years until lameness, mastitis, infertility, and/or declining milk production set in’. Once again, the animal body is commodified through the processes of ableism and speciesism, until the last bit of capital is drained out, rendering them ‘useless’ and ‘disposable’. Joyce et al. (2015) research on the production of workers and ducks in Hudson Valley Foie Gras provides another disturbing insight into systems of violence that dominate both animals and workers. Violence, in this context, is used by humans against nonhuman animals, both in a direct sense through killing and inflicting pain towards ducks, and through systematic violence via speciesism:

Holding ducks between their legs, ‘feeders’ insert a funneled tube down the birds’ esophagi and into the ducks’ stomachs as they fill the feeding funnel with corn mash … the ducks are then brought in cages to the slaughterhouse where workers plunge them into electrified water to render them unconscious. The ducks are then bled and de-feathered, their heads, feet, and wings removed and sold, and processed into pet food. Their carcasses, minus the appendages, are refrigerated overnight and moved to the next processing phase in which their bodies are dismembered and the necks – that organ so critical to the creation of foie gras – discarded. Finally, the livers are extracted, packaged, and sold (Joyce et al., 2015, pp. 98-99).

This passage shows the violence that these nonhuman bodies experience due to exploitation and systems of commodification compounded by speciesism and capitalism. Every bit of capital is violently extracted from the animal body. These animal bodies are hence designed to be disabled from birth to death for human domination and control to be successful, and for maximum capital to be extracted from their bodies. Factory farms and other forms of animal institutionalisation simultaneously obscure the institutions’ disabling of non-human animals while killing those whose bodies will not transform into profit (Somers & Soldatic, 2020). The examples above show how ableism and speciesism is felt through bodies, whether human, chicken, duck, or cow. This shows how social difference (in this case, species and disability) and embodiment (bodies, minds, and experiences with/in them) are part of historical and spatialized processes of ableism and speciesism (Jampel, 2018).

There is much geographical work to be done exploring the entanglements of disability and animality in specific spaces such as slaughterhouses: as Philo and MacLachlan (2018, p. 87) state, ‘the bloody spaces of slaughter that necessarily precede the chicken in the freezer or the beef in a bun [as yet] remain strangely absent’. The constellations of discourses and attendant spaces and practices that lead to the slaughter of certain animals, but also to that of certain humans portrayed as animalistic or regarded as ‘too’ impaired to be regarded as anything other than animals, must never be far from the surface of critical turns in both animal and disability geographies. Bringing to light these exploitative systems under which animals and humans live, and the attend unequal relations of power, can be achieved by animal and disability geographers working together.

Animals and disability lifeworlds: care, space, and place

Drawing on geographical work, and animal and disability studies, this section argues for increased research at the intersection of animal-disability geographies through a specific engagement with care, space, and place. Research between animal and disability geographers can be constructive through drawing on each other’s conceptual logics to address the spatialities, temporalities, and material affects of care between animals and disabled people. This literature builds on Milligan (2007, p. 138) proposal that geographies of care need to ‘extend beyond human boundedness to consider the relationship between animals, places and care … ’, thereby centring animals’ and disabled people’s experiences simultaneously. Drawing on examples of entangled animal and disabled human lifeworlds, set within particular spaces and places, may reveal the workings of human-animal relationships across multiple configurations of care. Gorman (2019) outlines three types of caring relations: parasitic, commensal, and mutual. By applying these ‘types’ to an analysis of relevant literature, the paper will critically analyse current caring configurations and outline spaces for future research.

First, parasitic relations of care are those that produce clear benefits to humans from a human-animal relation at the expense of the animals within these relationships: in a term deployed earlier, they are anthropocentric. Care farming is an example of parasitic care in action. It takes place in a particular space, the farm, and the animals ‘providing’ the care are not really seen as therapy animals, but as farm animals in which their capacity to provide a therapeutic service, simply by being present and viewable, is an extension of their daily lives. Care farms, in a substantive example of animal and disability geographies meeting, are used by a wide range of service users such as children and adults with learning disabilities, people with mental ill health, people with addiction problems, and people suffering with grief (Cacciatore et al., 2020; Hassink et al., 2017). The focus of much care farm literature is on the humans receiving the care rather than the animals providing the care. Gorman (2019, p. 4) explains that many care farms enact processes that ‘aim to make animals available for encounters, limiting animals’ mobilities and agency, and designing farm spaces to open up opportunities for interspecies relationships – paralysing and catalysing forms of parasitism’. In this sense animals’ ability to live their own lives is controlled by their allotted task of effecting a positive therapeutic impact on humans and ‘constitut[ing] experiences that are transformative [for humans]’ (Kaley et al., 2019, p. 18). This claim is further backed up through interviews in which care farm managers talk about chickens being trampled and increased animal handling leading to animals being more susceptible to illness. In these instances, ‘human needs and desires become dominant over animals’ as ‘animals’ health and well-being can become neglected in the pursuit of fulfilling positive and healthful relations for the human visitors’ (Gorman, 2019, p. 5).

Second, commensal care is where one actor receives a benefit (usually humans) that has no positive or negative impact on the other actors (usually animals). Charles and Wolkowitz (2019) explore the experiences of therapy dogs and their guardians, along with staff and students, at a UK university library. The presence of therapy dogs within university campuses is a ‘response to increasing stress levels amongst students’, with some universities ‘facilitating visits by therapy dogs to enhance “the student experience”’ (Charles & Wolkowitz, 2019, p. 303). In the university library space, the encounters between students and animals are highly routinized, the dogs’ bodies being controlled to be invisible in the main library space and not to mingle. The relationship is hence less about a two-way interaction between humans and animals, ‘but about making dogs’ bodies available to touch’ as a reward to the ‘compliant’ students and to help students study more effectively (Charles & Wolkowitz, 2019, p. 319). A therapeutic value is here placed solely on the somatic engagement rather than the development of any relationship. Alternatively, Robinson (2019) provides an example of commercialized therapeutic animal engagement by exploring healing through animal companionship in Japanese healing cafés. These cafés provide a place of refuge from the stress of everyday life where people can relax and develop positive affective relationships with animals who offer the ability to listen and physical affection. The space of the café becomes a therapeutic space differentiated from the stress of everyday life, contrasting with the functionality of the library where studying remained the primary activity. In the café the opportunity to create an affective human-animal relationship, compared to the library, shows the greater acceptance of animal bodies in these spaces: the animals were obviously present, their bodies part of the scene, although a critical animal geography might hesitate over the already (planned) availability of the animals as objects of human touch. While these examples differ, in both instances there are no overtly clear impacts for the animals present in these spaces: the animals are present, but their agency is limited.

Commensal care can also take place where animals are solely the recipient of care. Research here remains limited, but is also promising for further understanding relations of care and interaction between animal geographies and disability geographies. Franklin and Schuurman (2019) bring together engagement between animal and disability geographies to explore how end-of-life care is received by horses. They argue that the so-called equine retirement yards comprise a liminal space ‘of transition and transformation’ where the yard manager is in control of giving the horses ‘a good retirement’ (Franklin & Schuurman, 2019, p. 918). Good retirement – itself an anthropocentric notion – is based on a range of care practices undertaken by the yard manager, varying from grooming and cleanliness to medical care for arthritis. In the broader sense, the yard manager moves the horses from the domesticated and leisure lifestyle, tied to equestrianism, to become members of a herd, fundamentally readjusting their relationships with humans. This research opens a door to understanding the entanglements between animal and disability geographies through human care for ill and disabled animals. Expanding this research beyond retirement yards to other spaces, such as veterinary and small animal hospitals (Donald, 2018), animal sanctuaries and rehabilitation centres, may allow animal and disability geographers to work together to challenge the logics of ableism and speciesism.

Third, mutualistic relations are those in which there are benefits for all actors alike (human and animal). For example, Bolman (2019) explores the potentials for wellbeing in multi-species care between traumatized parrots and former soldiers at a Veterans Affairs (VA) Medical Centre in Los Angeles. The programme is aimed at a form of mutual care that can overcome the wounds of war and acts of abandonment causing shared suffering, as Bolman (2019, p. 306) articulates:

Humans care for wounded parrots, and the multispecies relationships they develop become a reciprocal care for wounded humans. By placing the psychic trauma of both beings in parallel, the VA programme provocatively troubles not simply traditional notions of healing and care, but also the very human-specificity of trauma itself.

Unlike other instances of therapeutic care discussed, the veteran-parrot relationship is built on mutuality, on care being bidirectional rather than of solely human benefit. The medical centre becomes a multi-species space of therapeutic engagement for both, human and animal, with mutuality and relationship-building at its core. Mutual care is also the case for Eason’s (2020) research, investigating how dogs are trained to alert their human partners, through scent detection, when their partners’ symptoms of hypo- or hyperglycaemia are worsening, so that preventative treatment can be obtained. Additionally, Taylor (2017, p. 223) reflects on her own life with her service dog, who is also disabled, describing themselves as ‘[t]wo vulnerable interdependent beings of different species learning to understand what the other one needs. Awkwardly and imperfectly, we care for each other’. On the other hand, McKee (2015) ethnographic research with ex-racehorses and prisoners in Kentucky USA offers a critical insight into multispecies entanglements of care and healing through the narrative of ‘redemptive capital’. Bringing animal and disability geographies together can help geographers explore the entanglements of human and animal lifeworlds, and the spatialities, temporalities, and material affects of care that characterize shared lifeworlds. Furthermore, in returning to ideas of speciesism and ableism, exploring the partnership between disabled humans and (disabled) animals, can challenge ideas of ableism and speciesism, and can reveal a richer multi-species understanding of lived experience, which is vital to both animal and disability geographers.

Conclusion: futures and justice

There are many synergies between animal and disability geographies, namely: both challenge traditional knowledge on the boundaries of what it means to be human and animal; both seek ways to challenge the dominant systems of power and oppression that subjugate both humans and animals; and both seeks ways to go beyond these exploitative tendencies to create a socially just world. Given these interconnections, I encourage animal and disability geographers to explore greater how both these subfields can work together to challenge ableism, speciesism, and anthropocentricism and the role they play in the lifeworlds of animals and disabled people.

The aim of this paper was to bring together animal and disability geographies, outlining what they can offer each other and why there is a need to bring these subfields together. The outcome has been to raise more issues and concerns for debate rather than solve them. But I think animal and disability geographers can help each other in some keyways. First, I maintain that bringing together both fields are vital for generating fuller socio-cultural histories that can better account for geographies of difference. Second, bringing the two subfields together can build a stronger, critical geographies of justice by: i) highlighting ableism within animal studies; ii) highlighting speciesism within disability studies; and iii) highlighting the potential for constitutive relationships where both are brought to bear on an issue/conceptual resources.

Additionally, I argue that the above agenda can help animal and disability geographies move towards, and enact, questions of justice and liberation within their research. Jampel (2018, p. 125) argues, disability justice is about collective justice, and ‘includes a commitment to addressing multiple forms of oppression’. Tying this to the intersectional challenge of this paper then, and following, Taylor (2017, p. 146), I argue, ‘we cannot have disability liberation without animal liberation – they are intimately tied together’. This raises the opportunity not only for examining the entanglements of animal studies and disability studies, animals and disability, but also acts as a call for researchers to work together to sharpen their ethics and contributions to a wider sense of justice that cut across many different axes.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Chris Philo, Hester Parr, and Daniel Allen for their encouragement, support, and comments on this work. I would also like to thank the editor, Helen Wilson, and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful constructive feedback which has helped greatly improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) under Doctoral Scholarship [ES/P000681/1].Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is debate amongst many disability studies scholars and activists on whether to adopt person first terminology i.e., ‘people with disabilities,’ which was originally used to move away from more stigmatizing and dehumanizing language, or whether to use phrases such as ‘disabled person’. Like Shildrick (2020) I use ‘disabled person’ as I feel it is better suited at denoting the social, cultural, and political processes of embodiment that many disabled people face. I must note however, my judgment on this use of terminology as a ‘able-bodied person’ should not be taken as universal.

2. Like L. White (2021), I think there is a blurring of AS/CAS and AG/CAG, as those who occupy AS/AG can do ‘critical’ work and not consider themselves as CAS/CAG scholars. Additionally, like L. White (2021) I agree that Wolch and Emel’s (1998) original plea was couched in what CAS/CAG would call ‘critical geographies’.

3. While this challenges speciesism, I recognize that there are some tensions here from a disability geographies standpoint. I think there can be dilemmas in blurring the human-animal boundary and ‘going beyond’ the human and animal, when, for (some) disabled people, they have violently been restricted from the category of the human. It is thus important to note that I do not seek to erase difference but seek the value in difference.

4. Care farming is a nature-based activity that takes place on participating farms that aims to promote healing, mental wellbeing, and social and natural education. Care farming may involve agriculture, horticultural, and animal-based activities with a range of different services users.