S7E1: Multispecies Health with Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan
Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan join Claudia to kick of Season 7 which is focused on “multispecies health.” They discuss human-dog relations and how multispecies health involves components of care, indifference and violence.
About Guillem Rubio-Ramon and Krithika Srinivasan
Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His research integrates more-than-human geographies and political ecologies to study the reciprocal influence of animals and humans on each other's socio-cultural, economic and political lives. He is currently involved in the Remaking One Health – Indiesproject, which explores everyday interactions between people and free-living dogs in India. His PhD research examined how nonhuman animals, particularly those involved in pig farming in Catalonia and salmon aquaculture in Scotland, can be understood as essential actors in the nation-making projects of these regions.
Krithika Srinivasan is a Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)
Featured:
Hybrid Publics of Human and Other-than-Human Life: Free-Living Dogs and the “Green” and “Healthy” City in India by Krithika Srinivasan and Guillem Rubio Ramon
Voice with Eva Meijer on The Animal Turn.
ANIMAL HIGHLIGHT:
Priyanshu Thapliyal kicks of this season of animal highlights focusing on Bella, a pregnant dog whose relations he observed in a rural marketplace in India. Watching how people responded to the birth of her puppies raised several interesting questions about the intersection of multispecies health and the lives of individual dogs.
Bella
"More importantly, in the society of risk we are living in, where scientific knowledge is a source of uncertainty, humans should no longer be considered as the sole repositories of knowledge imposed on nature. On the contrary, they must learn to collaborate with non-humans. This means changing our view of wildlife and domesticated animals, and not necessary consider them as passive objects, or in the case of health as victims of pathogens or guilty of transmitting them. Potentially, they are co-producers of knowledge on biodiversity. Recent developments in social science methodologies allow us to take the agency of animals and highlight the interdependencies of living beings in shared territories. This type of perspective sheds light on how social and ecological processes interact with each other and build precious ecological solidarity (including plants, animals, microbes, insects and other species) that can help prevent the next epidemic.” - (Lainé and Morand, 2020).
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work, Priyanshu Thapliyal for the Animal Highlight, and Christiaan Mentz for his audio editing. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.