Animal Geographies in the Time of COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

COVID-19 is, at its core, an environmental crisis borne out of imbalanced or unjust human-animal relations such as habitat destruction, the wildlife trade, and intensive livestock production. COVID-19 underscores the need for the subfield of animal geographies to help advance societal understanding of socio-ecological dynamics and crises as rooted in human-animal relations, yet animal geographers themselves are experiencing this unexpected and disruptive force in their daily work and home lives. So, what does COVID-19 mean for animal geographies? How might animal geographers make sense of this pandemic moment in the subfield’s history? This chapter directly engages animal geographers to reflect on these central questions through a broad-based survey of the Animal Geography Specialty Group of the AAG’s members (~n = 50) and follow-up interviews (n = 5) of a diverse cross-section of animal geographers. By exploring how the pandemic is shaping their professional practices (e.g., approaches to teaching and learning, research activities, activism and policy engagement), areas of research interest (e.g., topics, theories, methods), and perspectives on the role of animal geographies in the time of COVID-19, we document this pivotal moment to advance understanding of human-animal relations and our active pursuit of animal justice.