Animal geographies: an international state of the field survey

ABSTRACT

The past 30 years have seen the steady development of the geographic subfield of animal geographies through an ongoing expansion of research methods, theoretical concepts, and topical and species focus. In 2021, we undertook the first international survey of the subfield with two goals: to survey practitioners about their work and to determine interest in establishing an international community. In this article we share the results of what 141 respondents from 24 countries self-reported in the areas of participant demographics, definitions of animal geographies, interest in an international community, and research as related to field sites, species, methods, and future themes. Our results indicate that a gap in intra and inter-cultural understandings of what constitutes animal geographies and a lack of an organized global structure are indeed potential limits to the subfield’s capacities to continue to grow; however, we found that a focus on capacity-building and cross-cultural facilitation could provide a pathway to more international diffusion of animal geographies-based research.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal geography
• multispecies studies
• human-animal relations

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Chris Philo and Krithika Srinivasan for organizing this special issue. We would like to thank Chris Philo and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful editorial comments. Finally, we are grateful to the survey participants for helping us with the survey and sharing their thoughts about animal geographies.

Disclosure statement

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