Political Animals: To Live & Die in More‐Than‐Human Worlds

ABSTRACT What does it mean to live—and therefore die—in a more‐than‐human world? This review essay explores that question through reflections on teaching Political Animals: Species, Class, Race, and Gender, an undergraduate course that introduces students to scholarship on human‐nonhuman relations. Organized around four questions—What are the politics of connections in more‐than‐human worlds? What is health or well‐being when some multispecies relations can cause harm and death? Who counts as human? And how might the human‐animal “divide” be reimagined?—the course investigated how encounters and entanglements between diverse beings, as well as the boundaries between humanity and animality, are shaped by power, hierarchy, and enduring inequalities. Tracing how these debates unfolded in the classroom, I argue that multispecies scholarship, despite critiques that it sidelines social inequalities by supposedly bypassing the human, can instead offer new ways of thinking through race, class, gender, colonialism, and the contested meanings of being human. In doing so, I show how the classroom offers a distinctive vantage point from which to examine how anthropological ideas travel beyond academic debates. Teaching more‐than‐human relations becomes a way of preparing students to grapple with the political and ethical stakes of living—and dying—in a shared world.