Editors' introduction to the special issue “Privilege, vulnerability and care: Interspecies dynamics in rural landscapes”

Animals are central actors within rural societies but remain largely invisible within both our empirical and theoretical analyses. Approximately 20 years ago in the pages of this journal, Tovey (2003) pointed to the significance of animals in effectively defining rurality: They are central to the rural economy and society and foster a sense among rural residents that they are organically embedded in an interspecies world. Thus, our shared relations with animals are key to understanding rural social relations and their underlying inequalities and hierarchies. Tovey suggested that it was therefore necessary and appropriate that rural sociology should develop its own approach to including animals in theorising rural society. We believe that such an approach is yet to emerge. The aim of this special issue is to outline what such an approach might look like and to present a diverse range of articles to get it underway. In what follows, then, as editors and contributors, we collectively explore the role and significance of human–animal relations in shaping rural society via a particular focus on relations of privilege, vulnerability and care. There has been a significant and far-reaching 'animal turn' across the social sciences. In geography, for example, an increasing focus on 'animal spaces' and 'beastly places' (Philo see also Buller, 2014; Hovorka, 2018). Similarly, within history, taking animals seriously helps us develop more complete histories and also challenges basic assumptions of the discipline such as the historian's epistemic authority (Domanska, 2017; Fudge, 2017). Thus, Swart (2010) suggests that including other species in understanding the past is not an esoteric occupation but a radical challenge to the discipline as a whole; it represents another way of 'doing history' that recentres a marginalised group within the disciplinary line of sight. Sociologists have been slower to take up the animal challenge, partly because of their reluctance to consider animals as an oppressed group (Arluke, 2003) and 'society' as a more-than-human phenomenon (Peggs, 2013). Carter and Charles (2018, p. 81) argue that 'sociology has had a fraught relationship with biology, that it is based on assumptions about human exceptionalism and that its emergence as a discipline has to be understood in the context of industrialisation and urbanisation'. Nonetheless, in recent years, we have brought animals into the sociological study of alienation (Stuart et al., 2013), violence (Cudworth, 2015), work (Dashper, 2020), sustainability (Wadham, 2020) and technology (Latimer Kjærnes et al., 2022), animal husbandry (e.g., Bassi et al, 2019; de Krom, 2015), conservation (e.g., Evans Soini et al, 2012) and animal diseases (e.g., Cassidy, 2012; Naylor et al., 2018). However, even where they do feature, animals are not necessarily visible as social actors in their own right but take on the role of background extras in an otherwise human story, often subsumed under broad labels (e.g., farm animals) or reduced to their value to humans (e.g., meat). Sociology is about societies in all their complexities, and it must therefore recognise that our lives are 'infused with nonhuman animals and … embedded in multifaceted life worlds' (Peggs, 2013, p. 603). Given the centrality of animals within rural life worlds in particular, then, interspecies relations should concern rural sociology broadly. This special issue aims to integrate animals fully and theoretically into our understanding of rural society and to place rural sociology in the centre of wider discussions about human–animal relations. A notable example of the kind of interspecies approach for which we are advocating is provided by Stuart et al. (2013), who apply Marx's concept of alienation to dairy cows. They find that even where robotic milking systems enable them to have greater control over their lives and work, cows (and people) will continue to be alienated in a system that prioritises profits. Similarly, drawing on Bourdieu's types of capital, Butler and Holloway (2016) point to a 'hybrid' capital, which brings together people, cows and technology in a way that changes the day-to-day lives of people and animals alike and effectively shifts the power relations that permeate their shared labour. The influence of these articles within and beyond rural sociology demonstrates the usefulness of acknowledging 'species' as a sociological category like race, class or gender rather than just 'adding animals in' to our existing analyses (Swart, 2010; Wilkie, 2015). There is a growing recognition and acknowledgement across the social sciences that agency extends beyond the human world that other animals can and do shape human societies (Dashper, 2017) and that humans and human societies cannot be understood as separate from other animals (Ogden et al., 2013). We thus encourage rural sociologists to embrace the multispecies nature of the rural and the often messy entanglements between humans and other animals within rural spaces, practices and communities, recognising other animals as actors in interaction with each other, with humans and the environment. In order to do this, we must also be open to a range of methodological approaches. One particularly influential approach is that of new materialism, which includes the actor-network theory (e.g., Latour, 2007; Law, 2004) but also the ideas of Barad (2007), Ingold (2008) and Whatmore (2002), among others. These new materialist approaches deny any 'a priori ontological assumption of human superiority' and promise to rethink the social world and the place of people, animals and other actors within it (Taylor, 2011, p. 212). The 'social' does not exist prior to interaction but rather emerges through interactions between diverse actors including humans, animals, objects, ideas and technology. This implies a wider shift away from those doing the relating (i.e., the human subject who has the capacity to act intentionally) towards the relational webs and practices that connect humans and other actors (Wadham, 2021). It has therefore been enthusiastically embraced by human–animal scholars. A slightly different relational approach to the agency of animals aims at being sensitive to their actions and experiences in interaction with humans (e.g., Birke et al., 2004; Buller, 2014; Karkulehto McFarland Schuurman, 2021). Much of this work draws on Haraway's (2008) writings about becoming with a significant other of another species, especially focusing on her relationship with her dog Cayenne. Another notable example includes the sociological study by Despret and Porcher (2015) on sheep farming, where the rigid dichotomy of human/animal is bypassed in favour of an analysis of how some farmers are attentive to the sheep as willing co-workers with their own competences and knowledge production. Often embracing the practice of multispecies ethnography, interdisciplinary methods and insights are drawn on to explore the 'contact zones' between humans and other animals that try to create 'qualitatively rich and trustworthy accounts of naturecultures and the relations between humans and animals' (Madden, 2014, p. 290; also see Kirksey domesticated, including the farm animals in both Holloway, Mahon, Clark and Proctor's research and Wernersson and Boonstra's ethnography; and liminal animals, which could include the mice in Randell-Moon's article—are to rural societies. Second, an interspecies approach enables us to recognise the farm as just one important site for rural interspecies interactions and encounter animals in many other rural spaces, such as homes, gardens, fields, forests, roads, horse yards, villages, national parks, industrial areas, harbours and so on. If we take seriously the proposition that the rural is a truly multispecies phenomenon, then all rural spaces provide important settings for investigating interspecies encounters. This leads to a third expansion in our thinking, namely, at the level of theory. An interspecies approach enables us to rethink categorical boundaries, reflecting on what it means to be a farm, companion or wild animal. By focusing on this broader range of categories, we might also expand our theoretical understanding. A focus on farm animals leads to a particular (and understandable) concern with concepts like welfare, biosecurity and breeding, for example. By contrast, turning to companion animals might open up new perspectives on other topics like the way family or friendship is understood and experienced in rural contexts. Likewise, a greater emphasis on wild animals might illuminate our understanding of the politics and practice of sustainability or mobility in rural areas. A critical lens to the construction of animal categories would also create an opportunity to explore the friction between human-induced roles for animals and their own agencies and experiences. As a consequence, it would be possible to explore in depth the fluidity of categorical boundaries as well as animals that occupy liminal positions in the anthropocentric world (Franklin & Schuurman, 2019). This special issue is a call to action to rural sociologists to heed Tovey's (2003) call and (re)position animals as integral to understanding rural societies. The articles that follow illustrate some of the complex, messy and often unexpected entanglements between humans and other animals in different rural spaces and start the process of finally embracing the 'animal turn' in rural sociology. This work was supported by the Academy of Finland under Grant 316856. This research received no external funding. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. N/A N/A N/A Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.