Multispecies Scholarship and Encounters: Changing Assumptions at the Human-Animal Nexus

Changing attitudes towards animals in modern industrialised societies has triggered new lines of scholarly enquiry. The emergence of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is part of the turn towards animals within the social sciences. Although sociology is a relative newcomer to multispecies scholarship, more than three decades ago a sociologist anticipated that the discipline might benefit from attending to the ‘zoological connection’ (Bryant, 1979). Bringing to the fore what usually remains in the shadowy background, i.e. our symbolic and material relations with nonhuman animals, has started to unearth underexplored areas of social life. This is a noteworthy retrieval, because it reminds us of the multifaceted and entangled nature of interspecies interfaces, networks and encounters. This article suggests that seeing life through a multispecies lens not only allows scholars in cognate and non-cognate disciplines an opportunity to engage in innovative scholarship, it also lays the groundwork to animalise the sociological imagination and sociologise HAS.