An Endangered Menagerie
Alongside the incredible loss of plant and animal lives in the 2019-2020 bushfire season, a range of endangered species were pushed closer to the edge of extinction. As the impacts of climate change intensify into ...
Birds and extinction
Multispecies Care in the Sixth Extinction
A new collection of short essays in “Theorizing the Contemporary” on the Cultural Anthropology website, edited by Ursula Münster, Thom van Dooren, Sara Asu Schroer, and Hugo Reinert.
Crows removing ticks: helpfulness, opportunism, or something else?
If you’ve spent much time at all watching YouTube videos of corvids, you’ve likely come across some of the numerous examples of them engaging in the seemingly helpful act of removing ticks and other ectoparasites ...
Educating ravens, and other stories/essays
I published a short article today in The Atlantic on “educational” approaches to conservation that aim to teach “problematic” animals new ways of living – rather than fencing them out or killing them. This article ...
Curating with care: A response to Michael Wang’s “Extinct in the Wild”
This blog post is the text of a short article written for the magazine of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, focused on Extinct in the Wild, an incredible project by the American artist Michael Wang.
New Book : Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations
I’m delighted to announce that our new book is now out: Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations. This collection was co-edited by Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew and myself, and published by Columbia ...
Multispecies Studies (edited collection)
This week our new special issue on “Multispecies Studies” appeared in Environmental Humanities. The issue was co-edited by six of us: Thom van Dooren, Ursula Münster, Eben Kirksey, Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew and Anna ...
Two exciting French translations
I’m very happy to announce two recent French translations of my writing.
A few photos from a recent research trip to the Mariana Islands
In May and June of 2016 I travelled to Guam and Rota in the Mariana Islands on a research trip. My focus was the critically endangered aga or Mariana Crow (Corus kubaryi). During the trip ...
Ethics in the Field: How far should we go to bring back lost species?
Translocation, captive breeding, somatic cell nuclear transfer (cloning), back-breeding, gene and seed banking—the list goes on. Today, there are a whole range of different technologies and techniques aimed at holding on to, or even resurrecting, ...