More-than-Human (Key Ideas in Geography)

This text offers the first book-length introduction to more-than-human geography, exploring its key ideas, main debates, and future prospects. An opening chapter traces the origins and emergence of this field of enquiry and positions more-than-human geography as a response to a set of intellectual and political crises in Western thought and politics. It identifies key literatures and thinkers and reflects on the varying usages and meanings of the idea of the more-than-human. Three subsequent sections explore cross-cutting themes that draw together the disparate strands of more-than-human geography: examining new materialisms developed in the field, analysing knowledge practices and methodologies, and finally reflecting on the political and ethical implications of a more-than-human approach. A final chapter examines the tensions between this approach and cognate work in environmental geography to review the strengths and the limitations of more-than-human geographies, and to speculate as to their near future development. Introducing the key idea of more-than-human geography, this book will be an important resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of human geography, environmental geography, cultural and social geography, and political geography.