The Animal Turn
Animals are increasingly at the forefront of research questions – Not as shadows to human stories, or as beings we want to understand biologically, or for purely our benefit – but as beings who have histories, stories, and geographies of their own. Each season is set around themes with each episode unpacking a particular animal turn concept and its significance therein. Join Claudia Hirtenfelder as she delves into some of the most important ideas emerging out of this recent turn in scholarship, thinking, and being.
The Animal Turn
S6EB: Problematization with Claudia Hirtenfelder
Over the years Claudia has mentioned her PhD research and journey, in this episode Catherine Oliver takes over as host and interviews Claudia about her research. They dwell on the concept of problematization and why it is important for thinking politically about urban animals.
Date Recorded: 3 October 2023
Claudia (Towne) Hirtenfelder is an animal studies geographer and podcast producer and host. Claudia has a PhD in Geography from Queen’s University, and her research is focused on the significance of the problematization of urban animals. She is particularly interested in multispecies urban spatial governance. Claudia is also the founder and host of The Animal Turn and The Animal Highlight podcasts. In 2021, she was awarded the AASA Award for Popular Communication and in 2023 she was nominated for two International Women’s Podcasting Awards for her work with The Animal Turn. Contact Claudia via email (info@theanimalturnpodcast.com) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).
Catherine Oliver is a geographer and lecturer in the Sociology of Climate Change based at Lancaster University. Her research interests are animals, more-than-human theory, and urban studies. Currently, Catherine is researching the avian worlds of Morecambe Bay. Between 2020 and 2022, Catherine was researching the history and contemporary resurgence of backyard hens and their keepers in gardens and allotments in London, which she is writing about for her forthcoming book, The Chicken City. Previously, she researched veganism in Britain, and her book Veganism, Archives and Animals, was published in 2021 and her second book, What's Veganism For? will be published with Bristol University Press in 2024.
Featured:
- Cast Out Urbanites: The Historical Problematization of Cows in Kingston by Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder
- An Analytical Framework to Understand the Problematization of Urban (Historical) Animals by Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
- Finding Tr
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. It can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, LinkedIn, You Tube, and Instagram Learn more about the show on our website.
I think it's important. So often when we talk about animals, we think about the ways in which they've been objectified. Right. We'll often say that animals are objectified as property, they're objectified as commodities, for example, and that when we view them as these kinds of objects, as a commodity that can be bought and sold, as a piece of property that can be owned, we disavow the fact that they are sentient, experiential beings. Right, so that objectification does more than it's more than just a label. It's a way of kind of imagining the world and a way of also, I think, creating policy about how the world is structured. But another way in which I think animals are often objectified so there's commodities, there's property is as problems. I think very often in policy, animals only make an appearance as problems, and I think this is particularly the case when it comes to urban policy. Welcome back to the Animal Turn everyone.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:In this bonus episode there is a slight role reversal For a change. I am being interviewed. Instead of conducting the interview, catherine Oliver takes over as the host for the show to interview me about a concept called problematization, something I worked on and developed over the course of my PhD. As listeners of the show you have been, at least for me, a part of my PhD process, and so has the podcast. I've played with ideas during interviews and hinted at the work that I've been doing. In July 2023, I successfully defended my thesis yay and became this elusive, strange thing called a doctor, which I still find odd and can't quite find myself using. But since then I've been, you know, trying to secure a postdoc, which is immensely difficult and hard to do, and also trying to get out my ideas beyond the dissertation. Now, I delayed the release of this episode because I had a paper and a review that was unpacking some of the ideas that we'll be talking about today and I didn't want to get in the way of the review process. Luckily, that process is almost complete, so I don't think there is any harm in releasing this episode now. Now, I'm also attaching this as a bonus episode because it seems to fit in the politics season. This episode was done actually prior to many of the interviews done in the politics season, but both Catherine and I already kind of thought that it was well suited and placed there. So we do our best to kind of talk about problematization and how it's related and connected to politics. Now the reason Catherine is conducting the interview is because she knows my work really well. She read my dissertation and she was one of the examiners in my defense. She was a fantastic examiner. She was very generous and she really helped me to build on and think through my ideas in robust and interesting ways.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:If you don't know who Catherine Oliver is, I'm going to tell you a little bit about her now. She has been on the show before and I absolutely love, love, love talking to Catherine. Catherine Oliver is a geographer and a lecturer in the sociology of climate change, based at Lancaster University, and her research interests sit at the intersection of animals more than human theory and urban studies. So you can see we have a lot of clear overlaps in the work we do. She is currently researching avian worlds and between 2020 and 2022, she was researching the history and the contemporary resurgence of backyard hens and their keepers in gardens and allotments in London, and that's something we spoke about when we discussed urban metabolism during the urban season on the show. Catherine is currently working on some of this material to create a book called the Chicken City very, very cool and she's got an existing book called Veganism Archives and Animals, which was published in 2021 and is a fantastic read.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I really suggest you go and find it. So Catherine was a generous guest when she was on the show and she's a really generous host and interviewer in this episode. So it's a role reversal. I hope you enjoy hearing me in the seats and I hope that I'm somewhat intelligible as a guest instead of an interviewer or host. But yeah, I'm slightly nervous and I think I finally understand a little bit of what my guests go through. Okay, enjoy.
Catherine Oliver:Welcome to the Animal Turn podcast. I'm Catherine Oliver and today I'm interviewing Claudia in a turn of events. So welcome to your podcast, Claudia. It's great to see you and to be invited to do this. I'm really excited to talk about your research today.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thanks so much, katie. I'm like I'm grinning from ear to ear because I can see we're both kind of excited and happy. Yeah, this is going to be fun. I've never been interviewed on the Animal Turn podcast, so, yeah, I'm looking forward to the role reversal.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, it's great. It's great to be here For some context. I recently was the external examiner on Claudia's PhD, which she passed with no corrections quite recently, or maybe not that recently anymore. I think the summer's passed since then. So congratulations, claudia, it was a brilliant experience to examine you and read your PhD. And, to kick things off, I guess I'm going to ask you for some information or some background about how you got interested in animals and animal studies.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, thanks and thank you for being. You're a great examiner and going through the examination experience was. You know, everyone tells you before you go to the exam that it's more of a celebration of your work and an opportunity to really just have a good conversation with people that have, I think, engaged with your work deeply, and that's exactly what it was. I really so appreciated the opportunity to speak deeply about a project I've worked on for many years my journey to animal studies. Yeah, it was an interesting one. Actually I wasn't involved. So I've got several degrees. I've got, you know, a BA in journalism, I've got a degree in political science and one in gender studies and another in tourism and management, and in none of these degrees did I focus on animals, but the one on tourism.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I was doing a master's based on ecotourism and an ecotourism lodge in Botswana and I was interested in how gender is used in policy and it's almost used as a kind of like a fix. How do we fix X problem? By like almost putting like a gender band-aid on it, if you will. So, for example, tourism industries will often say, oh, as long as we just hire more women, then we'll fix all of our gender problems, for example and I'm dumbing things down now, being a little bit quick with the words, obviously it's a lot more complex, but in effect I was trying to understand how ecotourism policies mobilize gender relations and whether or not in practice they actually challenge existing gender relations in the ways they say they do. And while I was doing field work in Botswana I was doing interviews with you know, villagers and I was doing interviews at an ecotourism lodge and I was doing a whole host of observations and something that emerged during the course of that work was kind of these really intimate relationships with cows and how that's a really important part of men's identities in Botswana. And even then. So I did an entire master's degree. It was a really wonderful experience and I learned a great deal. And it was kind of an organizational analysis.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Cows didn't really feature prominently, but they not as beings at least. They were kind of like a subject and this or an object even and this is what sparks my interest in thinking about animals a bit more. But then I forgot about it. I moved to South Korea, I was teaching English, I'd kind of taken a bit of a beat from you know, doing academia, and then I became vegan. And when I became vegan, all of a sudden the cows in that analysis meant something different to me and I started to think more deeply about cows and animals and animal studies. And that's why I went to my PhD program and I was very clear from the beginning that I wanted to do research on animals and I was hoping to actually do research in Southern Africa. But COVID rendered those ideas kind of impossible at the time.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I think you've got a really interesting background and an interesting way into academia and it's really nice to have someone quite well known and doing different things in animal studies with that different background into academia. It's lovely to see and we share that commitment. I think I started doing research with animals because I became vegan, so we share that commitment. I think I started doing research with animals because I became vegan, so we share that. I guess I wonder how you find that commitment to veganism that's never wavering, like mine is unwavering with doing animal studies. What are some of the challenges, I suppose, between those two different commitments?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's a that great question because, you know, I didn't anticipate there being as many challenges as there are, I think, when I first became vegan in my personal life so this was in South Korea, you know, it's a relatively small kind of foreigner slash expat community and we were quite nervous about, you know, going vegan and whether we'd be ostracized. But we never really experienced much ostracization. However, you say that in our personal lives In general, I think, while people sometimes ask questions and they poke fun and sometimes that poking fun is, you know, not done actually with the best of interests in general people have been really, I think, understanding and appreciative that you know our vegan journey is part of respecting animals and not wanting to be part of violent industries. So I experienced in academia, though, I think, a combination of two things. One I still don't think it's really taken seriously. I think it's understood as being this like outsider thing and you know, when you're in a department or you're at conferences and you're almost the only person that's kind of speaking about animals as sentient beings and saying that this is important, I find that so often it's kind of seen as, oh, that's interesting, or it's not as politically significant or important and I think that's frustrating, right? Because for me, this is one of the most important things in my life and, I think, one of the most important things that the world should be focused on.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Secondly, I think when I did go to spaces where there were a lot of animal studies people, I became aware of this kind of divide between animal studies and critical animal studies, that you could have folks that were very much interested in animals and doing really interesting research on animals but not really see the political significance of not hurting them or of speaking about these kind of violent systems and trying to have those conversations with people who care about animals but aren't really, let's say, committed to the politics of veganism or discount your ideas because you're vegan, right?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The second you hear you're vegan. Somehow your scholarship is not as important or as significant, and yeah. So those are some of the challenges I found, and I don't know if they're self-imposed. For all I know this is like a self-imposed fear I have of how others interpret me. But there is, yeah, I think. Yeah, I think there are just some divides that are tricky to navigate, but on the other side those are challenges. On the other side, I think there are also opportunities, because I do think that animal studies scholars and critical animal studies scholars are at the forefront of methodological inquiry, theoretical inquiry, ethical inquiry, and I think that we are in the right space asking important questions.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I agree, are in the right space asking, asking important questions. Yeah, I agree, and I've been through similar experiences of how do you navigate spaces with where you're vegan but almost your veganism makes you like less serious in some ways, like you're not really serious because you can't separate yourself from animals, but I guess our work, or animal studies work, has always asked us not to separate, or much asked us not to separate from animals. So, yes, it is interesting to talk about these things and how they seem to be shared across different countries and institutions and conferences and academic spaces, the concept, I guess. I'd like to invite you to offer any reflections, regrets, opportunities, excitements about your experiences of doing a PhD, like would you go back and do it again? Are you glad you did?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:it. What's the? Yeah? How has the journey been for you? That's a good question. So, yeah, it's a conflicting experience.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I absolutely loved doing my PhD and I would do it again. I love research and I really appreciate it being given opportunities to teach. I love love teaching and connecting with the people at Apple. You know Will Kimlick, sue Donaldson, you know a whole host of. We've got a really good community at the university. They're like finding your community, who are also people who are politically aligned in many ways but who come from a variety of different disciplines, whether it's environmental sciences or philosophy or geography, and that was extremely rewarding.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I can say that at the end of my PhD I've left knowing my position on many things, not everything. I feel more equipped to have the arguments that I want to have and I've made some really incredible connections. And doing the research itself was illuminating because I went into doing methods and asking questions I've never done before. So I really did step away from kind of the ecotourism questions and the gender questions, both of which were quite organizational and labor focused, to doing historical analysis and a geographical analysis. So I've learned a lot and I think in many ways I am an interdisciplinary scholar through and through.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But and I think I said this during my examination as well is I think it has to be said that the experiences of international students at Canadian universities is it's really difficult. For the first two years of my career there, we were fighting the unequal fees at our university, so international students were paying twice the fees and getting the same funding packages as domestic students, and domestic students are living below the poverty line and are struggling to pay. So there was one point early on in my PhD career where I was working five jobs and doing a PhD and you're just like, how are you producing good content? And the short-sightedness of it is really frustrating because you end up being mobilized as a graduate student worker instead of someone who can actually produce really enticing and exciting content. So you end up engaging with your supervisors and your mentors, talking about money and finances instead of talking about ideas. So you end up being kind of I don't know again seen as like a welfare case instead of someone who can academically and rigorously contribute, which I'm sure people saw me as both, but it's just, it's a frustrating experience. So Canada and at least Ontarian government kind of funding structure disappointed me, I think, in terms of how international students are treated and and this is a fight that continues today. So international students and graduate students in general are pushing back against the government to say you know some of the biggest.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Anyway, I could go on and on about this because it's really. It's really. It took up a lot of my PhD time is actually resisting and fighting this and that's actually how the podcast started was part of my international student advocacy. I did a mini podcast about international student advocacy and I realized I could podcast and I was like well then, I'm gonna do it about animals too. Anyway, those are some, some reflections. I got many reflections, but those are. Those are some.
Catherine Oliver:I think that's yeah. It's really not nice to hear your experiences, but I had similar experiences working several jobs through my PhD and here in the UK we've been on strike for years and years over deteriorating conditions and I think a lot of our animal studies colleagues experience precarity in institutions across the world and I think it's not. I think it's important not to separate that from our work. Right, the conditions we're working in are important and I guess it's almost like I planned this segue. But to move us around to the politics and the political discussion we're having today, those politics of institutions aren't separate from the kind of work we do and how we do it and who's able to do it right. So I think, yeah, so, so I think to move us on a little bit, today we are going to be talking about some work.
Catherine Oliver:You've done your thesis, but we'll be talking more broadly than that, I think as well. And the concept we're going to focus on is problematization, and in your thesis you explore problematization with the urban cows of Kingston. I guess problematization before in your thesis you explore problematization with the urban cows of Kingston, I guess problematization before I read your thesis wasn't a concept I actively thought about. I wasn't like. It was just like a phrase almost taken for granted. In some ways that might be my disciplinary background. It might just be that you know that isn't a phrase that I was thinking about in that way. So so I guess let's open by why think about problematization? What does it mean? What is that concept?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, I think problematization is really, really I think it's important. So often when we talk about animals, we think about the ways in which they've been objectified. Right. We'll often say that animals are objectified as property, they're objectified as commodities, for example, and that when we view them as these kinds of objects, as a commodity that can be bought and sold, as a piece of property that can be owned, we disavow the fact that they are sentient, experiential beings. Right, so that objectification does more than it's more than just a label. It's a way of kind of imagining the world and a way of also, I think, creating policy about how the world is structured. But another way in which I think animals are often objectified so there's commodities, there's property is as problems.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think very often in policy animals only make an appearance as problems, and I think this is particularly the case when it comes to urban policy. So if we've got, let's say, a whole host of regulation or policy and the way in which we view a particular species or a particular group, it doesn't necessarily happen across species lines. You could, for example, have strays, which could include both cats and dogs and a variety of other animals. But when they're kind of legislated, I think, as being problems. I think this creates opportunities for them to act and it forecloses opportunities for them to act, and them I mean both the regulators and the animals. So I think when imagine it as yourself, right Like, imagine someone in a school and you have been labeled as a problem child, whatever the problem is Maybe it's a learning difficulty, maybe been labeled as a problem child, whatever the problem is, maybe it's a learning difficulty, maybe it's a behavioral problem.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The second you get labeled as being a problem, different actions come into play. The principal gets involved. Different rules are put in place. Maybe you broke some rules and now you have to go to detention, so different kind of policing mechanisms get put in place. The second you get labeled as a problem or problem child, and not only are the regulations different, your choices to act become different. So now you've been labeled as a problem child and you have to go to detention.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So this is a claim on your ability to move, it's a claim on your autonomy right, and a lot of this is to do with the fact that you've now been, in some regards, objectified as a problem. So there's this tension between objectification and subjectification. Once you become objectified as a problem, the ways in which you can be a subject or respond or be in the world changes and it opens some opportunities and it closes some opportunities. So just to bring it back to animals, the reason I think problematization is so, so important is because if the only or one of the primary ways we view and understand and epistemically think about animals is as problems, I think we miss out on a lot of other ways of viewing them and we kind of we delimit the ways in which they can live in the world, if that makes sense yeah, that makes, makes total sense and it opens up new avenues.
Catherine Oliver:Right for thinking. If we think about how animals are conceptualized as problems, we can rethink them beyond that commodity or property, which is the traditional way of thinking about. Actually, how does becoming a problem change things? Which, I guess, leads me. It leads me to ask you to kind of offer a offer, a summary or an introduction to your thesis, because obviously I've read it. So I'm asking questions with pre-existing knowledge and most of the listeners, I'm assuming, won't have read your thesis yet, but they should. So so will you give us a kind of introduction or a summary of the work you did for your thesis?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah. So I mean I will say that there are many ways. But before I go into that, there are many ways in which animals can be objectified right. Another is food, like commodity property, food and problems is just one array, but I think a significant one.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But one of the thinkers who I used in my dissertation, carol Blackie, has focused a lot on problematization. She doesn't look at animals but she focuses on problematization and its power and policy. Right? This kind of idea of creating problems and solutions, and for her, problematization is not only kind of a practice and a policy, in a way of viewing the world, but it's also a method. It's a way in which you can methodologically understand the emergence of something. So how, let's say, stray dogs are all of a sudden a problem in X city? If you were to quote unquote, as Carol Bakke says, think problematically. You could try and track back the policy to try and understand at what point do dogs emerge as a problem or as a stray population, right? So for her, thinking problematically requires going back in time, looking historically at how specific ideas and actions emerge and how something goes from being normal to becoming a problem. So I was really enticed by this idea and my dissertation was born of actually a class.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I wanted to continue my research in Botswana, originally when I started at Queen's, and then I was given a class assignment where we could do a walking tour of our city and, with my interest in cows now ignited, I wanted to do a walking tour about cows in Kingston. And there were no cows in Kingston. There are no large mammals like that in Kingston anyway. But I decided to try and do it. I was trying to actually be provocative. I thought maybe I could find like a milk dealer or someone and then tie back the city to cows. I wasn't anticipating finding that so many cows were actually in the city itself, that in 1838, when the city was first or the town at the time was first made a town, that there were more cows there than horses. And this really disrupted my imagination, the idea that there were so many cows.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:For me cows were not urban animals in the kind of traditional sense and of course, the more I did my research I learned that this was ill-sighted of me. But I did this walking tour and this kind of startling realization that the city was once home to many cows and fast forward, you know, 150 years later and there's no trace of them. Not only is there no trace of them, there's very little imagination that they were ever there. So this got me interested and excited and originally I was going to do a comparative research project between Cape Town and Kingston because I wanted to understand how the relationships between urban animals like cows changed over time and I was really interested in how they became invisible. So this is all to say that a lot of my project was to understand, I guess, how animals go from being normal to invisible and how this can be understood using this idea of problematization. So I looked at over a hundred years of policy and municipal documents.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So COVID rendered me going to Cape Town unfortunately impossible and I had to pivot really quickly to figuring out a new strategy. So originally I was going to do comparative urbanism but that was no longer possible. So I decided to dive deep into Kingston and I stayed in the archives. The Queens University archives a shout out to them are absolutely amazing. People who jumped on the idea. They were excited. They had never thought about animals in the archives before and this has led to a whole bunch of different indexing strategies and stuff for them at the archives as well, and this has led to a whole bunch of different indexing strategies and stuff for them at the archives as well. Anyway, I digress. My main project was to try and understand how, between 1838 to 1938, cows became problems in Kingston and how cows went from being visible to invisible, and originally I wanted to see how they disappeared. But they're still in Kingston today. We just don't think of them as being in Kingston, and I looked at 100 years of municipal documents to to do that.
Catherine Oliver:It's incredible the amount of research you've done and that there was just so much work, and I think that this project was born of necessity as well. It's really interesting, right, covid shut down so many opportunities and had a particular effect on grad students. I mean, a lot of grad students left or haven't been able to complete, et cetera, et cetera. But it also forced your hand to do this really deep engagement work with the place that you were and it's really interesting to think about. I guess, guess missed other paths, but the project you ended up with was so exciting and, like you say, has inspired more work from archivists and more there'll be more work from yourself, I'm sure. So I wanted to to kind of talk about those methods. So you talk about problematization as a method and approaching things problematically, almost to think with problems. But that isn't the only method you used, right? You used loads of different methods and loads of different ways of writing. So tell us more. Tell us more about how you found the cows.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, so thank you so much for this question, because it actually ended up being, I think, one of my most exciting things is as I was reading.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Right, I was reading more and more about cows and the history of cows in North America in particular, but around the world.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The more I read histories and I think I've said this on the podcast several times but the more I kind of engaged with histories, the more frustrated I became with how animals were represented in those histories. While animals are often written about, I think, the ways in which they experience those historical events are often neglected, it's kind of viewed as this impossible. How could we ever possibly represent what animals experienced or try to grapple with what they experienced? And I just grew increasingly frustrated, I think, with how animals become very objects that we are trying to understand. So cows or pigs or dogs in histories were often still framed as problems right, without, I think, disrupting and thinking about the policies and the practices that had framed them as problems in the first place or thinking about what such problematization meant for their experiences. So this prompted me to try and think a bit more creatively, like how can I actually position cows and think about how cows experience the world? And this required, as you say, finding the cows in the archives, and this meant looking at lots and lots and lots of documents and every kind of trace. So I followed Etienne Benson here with thinking about traces of animals and every kind of trace of a cow I came across I took seriously. So first I started counting city assessments. So in city assessments these are tax rolls that I went through and I counted every time someone was listed as owning a cow so that I could get, I think, a real sense of how many cows were there as well as what their property relations were. Right. So most people owned one or two cows. These weren't large herds of cows.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But then I still wanted to tell a specific cow story and I came across this pleading letter from Corbett, who was the jailer working in Kingston at the time. And he writes this incredible letter to the city council saying like please, please, please, just let me have my cow and let my cow graze on the courthouse grounds. And it seemed as though the cow had been grazing there for some time and it hadn't been a problem. But now, in 1879, it was all of a sudden a problem and I used this letter as a prompt for myself to try and think about what that cow experienced when the city council said no. So I was like what does it mean to be a cow who's used to going to a specific space and experiences a specific space and then wakes up the next morning and has to go somewhere else. So I developed a story and I can probably page through this and read the story for you if you like.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But I developed a story where I tried to position the cow and think about what they experienced. And I tried to think both geographically and physiologically about what they experienced. And I tried to think both geographically and physiologically. So I thought about Kingston and I thought about where the courthouse grounds were. I thought about what other animals the cow might've been experienced while standing there, what kind of. I even thought about where the light comes from relative to the courthouse.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But I also thought physiologically how do cows experience the world? So, using some of the knowledge we have today, how do they smell, how do they see, how do they taste some of the knowledge we have today? How do they smell, how do they see, how do they taste? And I incorporated all of these into something of a kind of yeah, a bit more of a creative text. And someone might just think that, oh, it's creativity. You know it's just folly. But no, this was really informed text and it was informed by the archives, by geography and by physiology. But I didn't just have these as kind of like speculative vignettes at the front of every chapter, I wove them through the analysis. So I jumped between kind of traditional analysis and then speculative vignettes and I did this as an active way of trying to make cows visible in the analysis and if you want I can find the one. I can find that story, if you like. I think.
Catherine Oliver:While you find it, I'll just say it was. It's a. It was a really beautifully written thesis and these speculative in for these informed speculative stories were novel and they were innovative and I actually recommended them to one of my MA students this year who was inspired by them and tried out something similar in her master's dissertation, and I thought you'd like to know that. But it looks like you found it, so I'll hand over to you to read the story.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:That's really that's so cool. Yeah, I need to. There's several papers I want to write about this and I need to get it out now that the idea is out there in the world. But yeah, so, yeah. So this is the story about the courthouse cow.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It was late May 1879, and the weather was mild. As the afternoon wore on, it began to cool, so she ambled across to where she saw a slither of sun. It felt nice to stand in its warmth. She knew this field well. She'd been here many times. It was quiet, peaceful. Sometimes horses came down the street dropping off men at the building. Other times small groups of pigs darted along the field's fence. Most of the time she was here alone, sometimes with him checking in, even though it was fenced. She could decide where to eat in the field and for now the slither of sunlight looked perfect.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:A week later, however, she would be constrained further, tied up and unable to move. She would have to watch as the light disappeared, and I use footnotes to kind of intersperse through this that I know that pigs were darting across the field. Later on, I take her to another pasture that was nearby, and, using these speculative vignettes and thinking about her movement, brought a whole bunch of spaces of the city that have been invisible in the city's history to the foreground. So a lot of Kingston actually had pasturage in it Kingston's history. No one has noted that the city was home to a very, very big commons and that just to me seems completely strange that this is absent from the city's history when it took up so much of the city's land. But focusing on cows' experiences and thinking through how they might have had to move to a new pasture illuminated all of these different spaces to me. And yeah, this is one of many kind of of the vignettes throughout it's.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I have loads of questions to ask you, but I suppose what I, what is interesting in particular is you have these like speculative stories, but they're they're not story, they're not made up, because they are rooted in literature and rooted in history speculative histories, let's call them and they foreground the cow or foreground cows and footnote the scientific knowledge, whereas pre-animal studies or outside of animal studies, the cow would be the footnote right and the scientific knowledge would be what's important in quote marks and the cow would be footnoted, what's important in in quote marks and the cow would be footnoted and what you're reframing, or you're twisting it round and reversing it and actually centering how cows are not footnotes, they're not additions, they're actually like really integral to kingston's economy, society, politics, spaces and that almost, yeah, role reversal of like footnoting knowledge and foregrounding individuals is quite radical, like a quite a radical thing to do and I suppose my question I was sort of reflecting on that I'm thinking of a question at the same time but is why does it matter politically to do that Like?
Catherine Oliver:Why is that? Why is that important? Why did you do it?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I love that Cows are not footnotes. I think that's a, maybe that's the title of the paper I'll eventually write Cows are not footnotes. I think it is political. And another kind of political thing that I tried to do throughout was I unwaveringly wrote about cows and the humans in the stories were shadowed a little bit. So I often mention like here I mentioned Corbett and I mentioned a little bit about his jailing history as a jailer, then I mentioned a little bit more in the appendices, but he is not my main subject in the telling of the story. He is a bit kind of in the background and I think a lot of people had excited, were excited about the kind of use of footnotes and speculative vignettes. I think they could see what I was doing and I think they could see that it was done robustly right, especially the chapter where I focus on slaughter.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I use a lot of actually industry science for how slaughtering takes place and I think again it was political because it made it emotional and a lot of people shy away from the emotions but I made these cows and the effects of big things, big life events like slaughter, but also what seemed to be mundane events for us, like moving to another pasture significant, that these kinds of ideas that you can just move animals wherever you want or that you'll just close a field and that they won't have impacts on the animals involved is short sighted. And I'm not saying that you can't move animals or that you don't have to shut down a specific pasture or that you shouldn't be testing herds for diseases. But what I am trying to do is say that these experiences are significant for the animals involved and they deserve to be given kind of historical and sensitive attention when these histories are written, because far too often they're not, they're kind of just mentioned oh, and the cows had to move somewhere else. And the significance of this for the individuals involved, such as Corbett's cow here, but also for their multi-species communities. The types of relationships that they could have with pigs, for example, were very much disrupted when typhoid became a problem or tuberculosis.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:The experiences that they can have with their owners change and their herd experiences, the experiences that they can have with other cows. So I think it's political to answer your question, to make it's political and it's analytically exciting to put them in the center, because different relations come to the fore, different spaces come to the fore and I think we start to see the world in a much more multi-species way when we literally de-center the humans. We speak about de-centering the, the humans, but you have to do this in your writing, I think, to to really chart a different imagination, if that makes sense yeah, in.
Catherine Oliver:In many ways it reminded me of the Andrew Arnold's cow and the kind of filming on the British dairy farm and what that would feel like for a cow. And I just want to pick up on something you said there that I found really interesting, which is that thinking about herd experiences and this was this was part of your research and how when you take a cow away from the cows, they know they have to reconfigure their relationships. It's the same with chickens in my own work. Right, those relationships aren't just pick a chicken up, put them in a flock, they'll be fine.
Catherine Oliver:It doesn't work like that, and I think in animal studies we've really pushed towards thinking about individual experiences as opposed to species level. But actually what's in between those is there are collectives of animals, there are flocks, herds, whatever of animals and those experiences matter as well as individual ones, and not just because they shape individual experiences, right, because they are their kinship networks or their ties and they shape the, the experiences of the animals and the flock and understanding animals beyond individuals. That was quite important to some of your vignettes and those relationships with the yeah, the multi-species spaces of Kingston. So it was about cows, but it's not just about cows. Is that a fair comment?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:yeah, I think, I think I think that's fair. But I think for me, like I did, use, I think, almost the individual as a centrifugal I hope centrifugal is the right word here but a centrifugal going outward kind of spiral force. Because I think when I positioned a specific cow, so in all of the chapters I did use specific cow stories and even trying to find these specific cows is a challenge, right. So but I think I put in the work, and a lot of hours of work, of finding specific cows, because that methodologically meant that I could reflect more on some of these collectivities that you're talking about and these relations you're talking about, because sometimes when we tend to focus, I think, on collectives, we tend to lose sight that there are individuals in those collectives.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But methodologically I thought looking at a single and trying to understand their numerous connections was analytically more useful for the storytelling and the speculative vignettes. But it also kind of gave me, I think, more nuance in trying to unpack cows' histories and also showing the complexity of it's not just individual herd species, right, it's not just individual herd species, right, like it's also conflicting relationships with owners. You know where you're in a relationship of domination, but you might still love the owner and it's yeah, it's everything from like subtle forms of violence to really really overt forms of violence and I think using an individual and their many connections and their many diverse types of relationships helped to bring these to the fore. Yeah, I agree with you that, like herd and stuff is important. I just think the individual really does help to show that importance yeah, exactly, exactly.
Catherine Oliver:And also I remember, I think, probably when we first met, I remember you telling me about what you were doing in the archives and I just remember thinking like how much work that was like what you were doing to find individual cows going through like piles and piles of stuff, really like deep archival work. I just remember being like how Like how you do that, it's like so and it's obviously's paid. I mean, it's obviously paid off. But to get from there to kind of these speculative vignettes, it's, it's a real journey and it's really a lot of work. And I think, oh, all credit to you for doing that work and getting to this place. And I kind of want to, I kind of want to broaden it out now and ask if not disciplinary questions and kind of broader questions around, why and we've talked a lot about history, but your thesis was in some ways interdisciplinary, it was historical geography, I'm gonna say. Would you agree?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:yeah, I mean I never know where to put myself, but yeah, I would say like, because I would be like urban, animal, historical geography, but then there was economic geographies there was also so like it really crossed in.
Catherine Oliver:In that way geography often does right. It crossed so many different sub-disciplines of like, say, the urban, economic, the social, the political, uh, the historical. I guess the question I want to ask is why? Why does it matter to study animals historically and specifically, why does it matter to study animals historically and specifically, why does it matter politically to study animals historically?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah. So I think, for the reason I mentioned earlier as well about this idea of animals being objects right, and I think this goes for all writing, but in particular historical. You know people today that are doing animal studies have the benefit of possibly doing direct observations of animals, and I think you've got people like Katie Gillespie and Yemini Narayana who do really incredible ethnographic work and they write what they see in a way that's really quite evocative and it's robust scholarship. But it's a way in which, if you're reading this and you're not getting a sense of the pain and the anguish that animals are going through, then I don't know. I don't know, I don't know what you're doing. But as a historical geographer or someone with history, you don't necessarily have the luxury of doing an ethnographic observation, and maybe even today there are people where you shouldn't be doing direct observations.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the fact that we can't do direct observations, does this mean that the beings with which we are concerned with are devoid of complex experience and emotion? And I think that that's certainly not the case. So one I think it's political to take seriously Cows today and cows 100 years ago are not the same cows, and cow A and cow B are not the same cows and I think to take seriously the fact that these numerous animals that just get kind of co-opted into species categories or into large numbers have real experiences. There are real animals that really experience being in the world. And if we're going to de-anthropomorphize no, that's the wrong word If we're no longer going to be anthropocentric in our telling of history and we're going to appreciate that all of the animals who are on the world today, at this moment in time, have histories, how did they come to be here at this moment in time? How did we come to have specific cows in West Africa and different cows across North America? These are historical questions and I think when you start to unpack the history, the kind of massive industries, the massive structures, the massive violences that have shaped the world come to the fore. And I think taking seriously what those have meant, not only in terms of economics but in terms of animals' lives, is a political act and it's something that people don't take seriously.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Like we mentioned, it's something that can be fobbed off, I think, as being silly maybe, but it's not silly If we're going to understand why there are dog farms in some part of the world and no dog farms in other part of the world. This is a historical question how did it come to be accepted in one place and problematized in another? Or if we look at why seagulls are becoming a problem in Brighton, right, how did they become problems is a historical question and it's part of their story and they are. We might not like the answer, but they are of the world. All of these animals the dogs, the seagulls, the cows, whoever they are they have their own stories and histories and I think the people that get to write history are often the victors. Right, you get to control the narrative and we need more stories that really, I think, tell animals' heritage and history, and I think that that's political.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I guess when we think about animal histories, that's animal history or animal histories is seen as a subfield of history. But actually animals have different kinds of histories. So animals have cultural histories, animals have political histories, animals have biological histories and what you just said. There is cows today and cows 100 years ago are not the same cows and I wonder if you could expand a little on that that's not unfair.
Catherine Oliver:Expand a little on what you mean, because obviously they're literally not the same cows. Cows don't live 100 years even if they weren't killed. But they're not the same breed, they're not like yeah exactly.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think biologically they're not the same. People tend to think about domestication as being a kind of single process. No, domestication is an ongoing process, right? So a Holstein cow today and a Holstein cow 150 years ago. They might have the same breed title, but the cow's bodies and physiologies are substantially different. The amount of milk a body has to now hold and produce today is far greater than what it was 150 years ago. The ways in which they're allowed to have babies and reproduce has changed, and so even just these two things their actual constitution, the physicality of their body and the way in which they can reproduce are no longer the same right. So to try and associate kind of cow's experience, I think of reproduction today even though there are similarities cows, calves have, especially dairy cows.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Their calves have almost always been taken away from them in a kind of competition, but the ways in which they've been taken away have changed over time. So physiologically they're different. I think spatially they're also different. I think trying to understand how Holsteins are a Dutch breed, right, holstein Frasians how did this come to be the most represented cow across the world and the most dominant in the dairy industry, where it was just one of many breeds? Then again you've got other cow breeds that are going extinct. There are breeds of cows that are like heritage breeds that are going extinct. So I think geographically and historically these are not the same cows.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And then you mentioned culture there. You know you might have had small herds in Kingston. You would have had cows in and again. So this is coming back to the urban dimension of it. People would have one or two cows in Kingston in their backyards. Most of the dairy was in the back of their yards and there were some people that would have smaller dairy herds. Right, you might get up to 30 cows or 50 cows. Today in the same country you've got dairy herds that are hundreds and thousands right, and these would be considered sometimes smaller herds.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:This is a different way for the cows to interact with one another and the humans with which they're engaged, and it's a different way of getting dairy. And to understand the change from backyard cows in Canada to massive industrial feedlots and dairy production in Canada, you have to understand changes in technology. You also have to understand changes in terms of how cows have been, I think, objectified, changes in the history of disease, changes in the raw milk and pasteurization movement and yeah, anyway, I'm going off here on a tangent, but I think these are just, they're very different cows, very different moments in time and we can't conflate them. I think to do so is to. I mean, we're not the same humans as humans 150,. We share many things, but my experience as a human in Kingston or in Vienna today is not the same experience of a human in Kingston or Vienna 150 years ago.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, and I think, I think that's exactly it right when we think about a cow or any animal or human. But over that time span you can't apply the same kinds of analysis, which makes my next question not redundant, but maybe, maybe illogical. But but my next, my question is because you have this historical and I've done this historical analysis and you have that in, you're informed in that way. When you look at cows today, what has changed? What are the problems of or problems, what are the problems cows are made into today?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:oh so I mean, I think it's interesting because I think and this is going to sound different to what I've just said, but I think many of the not the experiences many of the ways in which they're understood are the same. They're still understood as commodities, they're still understood as property and they're still understood as beings that kind of can produce other commodities, like milk, for example. And I think, because of this kind of property status and this object status, cows have always been used, but the ways in which they've experienced that use has changed. And I think cows today, I think their bodies, I think physiologically they experience an intense amount of pain because of breeding. I think they experience an intense amount of anguish because of the repeated cycles of having their babies taken away from them. At least dairy cows, meat cows, often are allowed to stay with their young and I think that the scale of operations has meant that their ability to form cohesive bonds is often disrupted because animals are taken and removed and added and removed. But I think historically many cows faced because you can't remove right. I don't want to create a hierarchy here where I'm saying that the cow's experience of pain and anguish today is worse or better than cow's experience of anguish 100 years ago, because when you're going through whatever pain or anguish or experience, it's your pain or anguish or experience. But I think it's important to understand though, in terms of comparing the differences between today and the cows I was concerned with in my thesis is the ways in which they're being thought of as problems has changed significantly.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So the ways in which they're used are sustained, but cows 150 years ago in Kingston were thought of as problems because of the ways in which they're used are sustained. But cows 150 years ago in Kingston were thought of as problems because of the ways in which they disrupted property relations, because people wanted to kind of start developing private property in cities, the ways in which they were concerned with regards to flows of disease and pathogens and this was mainly related to like a conflict between the raw milk movement and pasteurization. And of course, they were kind of understood as problems because there was a lot of waste that comes from keeping animals in the city, both in terms of killing them and keeping them. There's just a lot of waste, and this happened at a time in history when the sanitation movement was really taking hold. So cows and many other domesticated animals were easy targets for becoming problems, very specific urban problems, and this, I think, fostered an imagination that cows are animals that deserve to be on farms out there somewhere, and it created this illusion of a separation between, I think, livestock animals like cows and cities. Today, I think, cows are still problematized, but in a very different way, and I know you've written a bit about this yourself.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Cows have become climate villains of a sort right. They've become the poster child. Literally they're on all of the posters for what climate change problems are, except for those that deny that animal agriculture is part of the problem. Now, those who acknowledge that animal agriculture is part of the problem put cows and issues of methane front and center. So cows, I think, have become this poster child as a problem for climate change, and this has led to different responses.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Some people saying, well, we should stop eating meat and we should stop participating in these industries, and others saying, okay, well, if there's a problem, and if the problem is too much methane, how do we reduce methane? And this has led to interventions into cows' bodies that wouldn't have happened 150 years ago, like creating holes in their abdomens so that their stomachs can be monitored in terms of what they're eating or attaching inflatable balloons that can capture their methane, and just the lengths we'll go to to try and solve this kind of problem of methane production. Yeah, so I think they're facing similar but different interventions on their lives because of how they've been problematized, but they continue to be used. It's their property status and their commodity status that can kind of sustain these interventions.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, and I think that really speaks to how your work on problematisation of cows can travel and can be taken up in other places, including today, because, exactly as you're saying, cows are still constructed as problems or they're constructed as part of solutions to problems, which is another kind of problematization. I think I'm going to now ask you to read a quote. I think you should have a quote prepared for me, so over to you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I do so, I think before, if I might, before going into the quote, I think I just wanted to say that, when it came to problematization as a kind of framework, what I was trying to do is it's not just like a loose framework, kind of theoretically. I have these three different states at which I'm trying to understand problems and I think we focused a lot here on kind of how they become objects of thought, and I think that that's really important, how they've become objects of thought, and I think that that's really important In terms of analyzing problematization. Something I put forward and it's very much like inspired by Foucault and a lot of Carol Bakke's work, is, I think, space and geography. And I know today we've focused a lot on history, but I think space really helps us and geography really helps us to telling these histories in a more sensitive way. And what I do in my work is I say well, there are these kinds of in order to make animals visible, those that are often rendered invisible in our histories and in our analysis.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think writing is an important strategy, but theoretically, I think it's important to focus on these three kinds of spaces, and I say one is spaces of configuration, I think the spaces where they are literally configured as problems or configured as commodities. And I think policy or the archives or history books are these kinds of spaces where they are configured as problems. But I also think, in order to tell these in a sensitive way that highlights experience, you also have to look at material spaces of governance. So, like I mentioned pastures or the dairy houses, you have to think about materially where they were governed and the kind of spatial movements that that required. But and also what you mentioned right at the beginning is kind of institutional and social space. Whose interests is it in to, you know, intervene into cows' bodies in these ways? Whose interest is it in to move cows from one pasture to another? And I think you have to look at these three almost all together spaces of configuration, the material spaces of governance, as well as institutional, social space, to try and grapple with tulling a cow's history in a sensitive way. And that's just a bit of a precursor to the quotes and I'm going to like I'm doing what all my guests do is I've got two quotes it always happens and but the one so the one kind of speaks to Carol Bakke, who I mentioned earlier, and I think it speaks to problematization as a method and the second speaks to why I think placing them as subjects is so important. So this one from Bakke says, and I quote problematization as a method.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thinking problematically involves studying problematized objects and the historical process of their production. It involves standing back from objects and subjects presumed to be objective and unchanging in order to consider the conditions of emergence and hence their mutability. So this is a lot of what we've been speaking about, I think, here today, like how do you stand back and consider how something becomes a particular object? You disrupt this idea that that's the way it's always been and the reason. I think that this is important and I borrow here from Catherine Gillespie.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:In my third chapter I speak about practices of slaughter and the interrelationship between death and waste, and I use a quote from Catherine Gillespie where she's speaking about dairy cows at a market and she says they cows are living and not living, experiencing keenly these last days, hours, moments before they are sold once more, their bodies reduced to living flesh sold by the pound.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:One of the consequences of commodification, of materially and conceptually rendering animals as commodities and even writing critically about their commodification, is that who they are as living, feeling social beings, who they are in spite of and exterior to their commodification, can easily be obscured.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So, yes, they are soon to be dead, living dead and future corpses, but they are not only that, and keeping this tension in mind may help to avoid the persistent erasure of their still aliveness and their suffering, an erasure that is so easily accomplished through the commodification process.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And I think something similar happens when we write about animals as property or we write about them as problems is we forget about the fact that they experience this and we obscure that. And I think that that's, I think it's analytically a problem and I think it's politically imperative that we find ways to take seriously animals' experiences and to hold intention. You know, I said throughout the process of writing this dissertation I'm not doing a meat or milk history, I'm doing a cow history, and for many people this is, you know, writing about the history of markets is not the same as writing about a cow's history. But people create this conflation constantly because it's a lack of imagination, it's an, it's an inability to think about animals as something other than how we've positioned them in our kind of, as as objects, in our ways of understanding the world. So yeah, those are my, my quotes I think they're great, quite different.
Catherine Oliver:But I think there is some connection between I was actually reading that Gillespie paper last week and I was I think I'd read it before and then reread it last week and I was like, oh yeah, that's it right, that's that's it, and I somehow missed it on the first read of that, like once living soon to be dead or that kind of distinction. But I think in the first quote in the back you quote, you talk about standing back and looking for conditions of emergence and I always think of Gillespie's work as getting close, and maybe that's just my interpretation of like getting close to animals and undoing erasure or looking beneath the curtain. So I wonder if you have any reflections on that like kind of standing back and or if it's not something you noticed between the two.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Yeah, no, that isn't something I thought about. But, as you said, I mean I take Catherine Gillis I mean not Catherine Carol Backey's idea of standing back as a move, of assuming disrupting the taken for grantedness right. So often I think when we're presented with a problem or a condition, it just is the way it is right. This is the problem. And I think when we're presented with a problem or a condition, it just is the way it is right. This is the problem. And I think when she's saying stand back, I think it's literally like a spatial move of standing back because it wasn't always a problem.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So I view that not as a kind of like standing back in the objective kind of quote unquote sense, but more a standing back to say, because often we do and I think people who work with history know this is that we tend to focus on very specific moments in time and we think, oh, this is the way it always is. But the second you stand back and you put on a slightly bigger historical lens or you bring in a bigger timeframe, you start to realize, oh wait, there were actually tons of options for how the future could have been. We could have come to where we are now in many different ways. So what created the conditions for the emergence of where we currently are today and I think that's how I understand Carol Bakke is it's not, and I think that standing back in terms of time, opening up time, allows you to really understand that things don't have to be the way that they are. We can think differently.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Whereas I think you're right, katie Gillespie focuses a lot on intimacy, like she comes close, and I think that these two stand in tension with one another, but I think that that's a fruitful tension. I think being intimate with cows and finding out ways to tell intimate stories on these massive timescales and on these massive geographical scales is really it's important work if we're going to, if we're going to challenge, I think, some of our most dominant structures, that that hurt animals I wonder if we could reflect on tension or friction, because I think it's something we both.
Catherine Oliver:It's obviously as we've seen today, it's obviously really fruitful, but it can also be something we shy away from, like we don't, or maybe we like tension in our work but maybe not tension in our practices. And I wonder kind of if you have any thoughts about the usefulness of tension in our thinking and practice and if we as animal studies scholars should be foregrounding that and actually not shying away and seeking it out. And I think actually animal studies does quite well, but you know yeah, that's a cool question.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:It's cool being on the receiving end. You realize like whoa, come up, come up with something, um no, but I think tension is really. It's important in a number of ways and I think being honest about the tension is important. You don't have to always smooth over tensions. So I wrote a paper with Carolyn Prowse and we both looked at milk markets but we came from pretty different. She's an economic geographer and I'm obviously a critical animal studies scholar and we looked at a foreign direct investment into a milk market in Kingston with infant formula and we realized kind of towards the end we agreed with the analysis but kind of what our final stand should be. At the end we realized that we actually met. We were slightly different in terms of how we wanted to phrase and do this and both of us were quite politically committed to our respective stands. And then we us were quite politically committed to our respective stance. And then we sat and we're like well, this is a tension we need to actually write about. We've written across different kind of commitments, her as a decolonial scholar and me again as a critical animal study scholar. We realized that there are some deep tensions between these two different fields and we hadn't spent a significant time across the paper kind of unraveling those. But still at the end of the paper we kind of stated our commitments and we noted that there is a tension between these. But still working together across the tension gave us a lot of insights into understanding this foreign direct investment, and I think the same is true kind of throughout the dissertation.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I'm dealing with the tension of creativity and analytical, like traditionalism right, like traditional analytical stuff, and I think juxtaposing those does some work. I don't you don't always have to kind of give these neat conclusions. You can juxtapose the tension and just show that there's a tension, and I think that that does work in and of itself. But I think it takes time to sit with these kinds of conceptual and theoretical tensions. I am inclined to say you shouldn't turn away from it. But maybe if it's so, if it seems completely irreconcilable these two ideas, then it requires time to think through why they're and this is the work of philosophers, right, this is what philosophers do they're like why can't these two ideas sit next to one another? And I think that that's really important work.
Catherine Oliver:I think that you said we don't have to smooth out tension. I think that's a really nice way to think about metaphor, metaphorically and kind of literally of like we don't, we don't have to, we don't have to all agree. If we all agreed, then you know, job done, let's go home, not not do it anymore, but but that kind of impulse to make things smooth and I've noticed it in like my co-authoring as well, which I'm still relatively new to a co-author some stuff, but a lot of my work I do alone is like you want to produce a smooth narrative but actually that isn't the case. That isn't the case in history, it's not the case in writing, it's not the case in research. And showcasing that tension is something we should perhaps do more, and I kind of it's something I say when I teach as well as, like you know, the finished product, finished product net, didn't always look like the finished product. How do we make that tension important?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:But then to add to this whole tension thing is I think this is not to then say that and maybe this is controversial, but it's not to say that all opinions are equal, and I know that that's a hard thing, but some people have done more research, and not to say that you have done more research and not to say that you've done more research, you're not, like people, understand the world.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:And it's this kind of like tricky balance of trying to respect the diversity of views and the diversity of ways in which something can come to be known, which I think we don't, we're not very good at and we should be better at While at the same time appreciating the kind of significance and importance of expertise and of people and expertise can come in many shapes and forms, right? It's not just someone who has a random piece of paper because they've done a PhD. It's, it's people with life experiences and people who have spent like hobbyists, who spend hours upon hours upon hours in specific places, oftentimes know a lot more than academics who have sat in offices and written the papers, right? So how to be respectful of the different knowledges, I think, but also not to collapse these knowledges as all being equal. So I think tension is to highlight that there are different knowledges, they're not the same. And what work do these knowledges do, I suppose? And what work?
Catherine Oliver:do these knowledges do I suppose? So talking about tension, I think, leads us back to the question of the episode, the question of the series which is in politics, or thinking about the political, we often see tensions and I wonder if we could kind of begin to wrap up by thinking about why problematisation and politics and animals matters Like why is this important to think about?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Okay, so I think problematization is really important to the discussion about animals and politics because, coming back to the beginning, because of how ubiquitous animals are positioned as problems in policy and because of how irregularly I think they are discussed as experiential sentient beings in analysis generally and in kind of, I think, historical analyses in particular, and I think also it's important because problems are not, they're not retractable. I think we're caught in something of this kind of loop of problem solution, problem solution, and I think, if you look back and you think about how we respond to problems, sometimes our solutions and our responses to problems have created even bigger problems. It's kind of like the spiral outwards, you know. You think about what happened in Australia oh, let's respond to these grubs with introducing cane toads. Oh, no, now cane toads are a problem. So now we have to do X, y.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:So we sometimes, I think, because we neglect to think about animals as beyond being problems, we have solutions that are not sensitive to the experiences of all involved. And I think if we start to introduce ethics into thinking about this, the ways in which we'll politically respond to what we perceive to be problems will change dramatically. I think killing of animals so quickly will not be as much of a solution and I think what is actually the problem will change quite substantially. You can think about this in terms of roaming cats being framed as problems for wild birds. You think you extrapolate from that and you're like, okay, well, why are they roaming cats? Why are bird life populations plummeting in general? And you start to get much more like anthropogenic kind of questions here and questions about domestication. So I think focusing on how problems evolve and how problems emerge is really important, and focusing on how animals and their relationships are represented as problems in policy is important because it literally changes how we and animals can act and our opportunities to do so.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I think that's really, yeah, really put it together nicely. And I just have one more question, actually, which is a kind of meta question. So obviously this is series six of the animal turn and the the series theme is politics. So again, again, a big question. But why? Why does politics still matter to animals and animal studies? Why do a series on politics?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I guess is the question this is a there's a question I should be asking the guests in this season, but you know, you know, I think for me, I think a lot of it comes down again to policy and regulation. I think politics and politics is much broader. I think throughout this whole season we've spoken about politics in a variety of different ways. You know, you can think about, you know, structures of domination, for example, and these are political. You can think about the personal as political. There are a variety of ways in which politics can be construed. But if we just think about politics in terms of governance here, right, and how our lives are governed by laws and policy and regulations that are made by the people who we elect and we choose, so I'm almost thinking about politics here in the most traditional sense of the word.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:I think that this is really important, because anyone who's had a rub up against policy or regulation and I had this pretty recently in trying to move to Austria, so my husband's an Austrian citizen and I'm from South Africa and it took about two years of fighting immigration stuff and trying to justify that as a married couple we deserve to be together and you don't realize, I think, how much law and policy change and shape the way in which you can live, until you find yourself rubbing up against it and then you realize that the policy and the governance structures that we have in place greatly shape our lives. They greatly determine what we can and cannot do and the norms of our society, and I think that they are imperative to changing the world. I think that if we're going to create a different world, we need to develop better. Does it end with policy? No, but we need to develop better policy because it's kind of the bedrock.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Governance and having politicians and having people that buy into creating a fairer world for humans and animals is essential to creating a better world. So I think politics is really important. You can't really understand society without understanding the governance structures that we've put in place, and if animals are absent from those governance structures, then I think we're missing out on a massive part of our societies. So that's why I think animals and politics is so important. Yeah.
Catherine Oliver:Yeah, I think everything, like you said, everything is shaped by politics and everything isn't just human right. As we know, animals' lives are totally shaped by these politics as well. This has been an amazing conversation, as always when I talk to you, claudia, it's been brilliant and I really appreciate you inviting me to interview you. It's been, it's been weird being on this side of the screen. So it's a to kind of conclude, then. I think we'd all love to know, we're all excited to know, what you're working on next, what's next for you?
Claudia Hirtenfelder:yeah, and I was telling you in the green room that the post PhD life is strange. You finish your PhD and everyone's like congratulations, well done, and you do feel elated and happy, but it's also it's a weird time of looking for work and trying to find your place. So I'm going to stay in Vienna. This much I much I know. I've been privileged enough and lucky enough to have moved a lot in my 20s and early 30s and now I'm staying put. So I'm staying in Vienna and I'll see what job opportunities emerge.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:While here I'm writing, I'm hoping to turn what we've been talking about today into a book. I need to get on that, but I think it would be an exciting book. So I'm working a bit on that and developing some journal articles, so primarily around the theory we spoke about today. And, yeah, I'm kind of starting to develop a new project I'm thinking about. I don't know. I want to either continue with looking at urban animals, because I really do think urban geography is one of the most important and pressing issues. But I'm increasingly interested in international relations as well, because I think animals, the ways in which animals are problematized, doesn't only happen at municipal levels. It happens in kind of international forums and of course, animals' bodies are moving across borders constantly and this kind of cross-border movement, I think, is quite interesting. So the short answer to your question is I'm not too sure I'm playing around and I'm figuring that out, but I am continuing with the Animal Turn podcast, so this will continue regardless of what comes next.
Catherine Oliver:I think we'll all be pleased to hear that and I think I can speak on behalf of myself and all the listeners and say congratulations again on producing a brilliant thesis, and we'll all be eagerly awaiting the book to kind of get this scholarship more broadly out there further into the world, and we'll be excited for what. Whatever you do next, I'm sure the future is very bright for you as kind of one of the emerging and leading voices already of animal studies. So it's all thank you.
Claudia Hirtenfelder:Thank you for your kind words. I have to get, I have to get someone to agree to a book first, so I'm not, I'm not, I'm just putting the tentative there. So she said there'd be a book. Yeah, yeah, exactly, aka, contact me. You know where to find me. But, katie, thank you so much for also hosting today. It was really so much fun and I love having conversations with you and yeah, so, thank you. Thank you so much for indulging me and giving me space to talk about my own work. It's very narcissistic of me, but I really appreciated it. So thank you.
Catherine Oliver:It's been great. Thank you, claudia. Thank you, claudia, for more great iRule podcasts, visit iRulePodcom. That's I-R-O-A-R-P-O-D dot com.
