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Through a series of encounters with parakeets and other denizens in London, this paper expounds the concept of the feral and explores its purchase for an anthropological inquiry into urban life. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I specify ecological, cultural and political connotations of ferality. I show how ferality impinges upon evaluations of what counts and is allowed to flourish as metropolitan nature. Whilst constructed through nativist and racial taxonomies, ferality simultaneously refashions the city into a postcolonial formation, sparking both xenophobic and hospitable responses in urban dwellers. The paper draws attention to new ecological associations that parakeets trigger as they enter into relations with other avians. It argues that feral ecologies signal possibilities for a more just politics of postcolonial nature and prise open novel ways of doing urban anthropology.

Understanding the social and political in relation to fabrications of earth/life has been one of geography's most enduring concerns. Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum essay, subtitled ‘a biogeographical study’, is an early exposition of how relations between the bio and the geo are politically molten. Yet his oeuvre, whilst of interest to political geographers, has been overlooked in the recent proliferation of work on the earth/life nexus in more-than-human geography. To this end, this commentary asks what it might mean to read Ratzel's essay in light of attempts to articulate and specify the cartographies of life. Three key themes are highlighted that resonate with contemporary more-than-human approaches: the spatial ontologies of animal life, animals' mobilities and cartographies of the living world. More specifically, this commentary expands upon Ratzel's notion of the oecumene and argues that it offers up critical purchase for diagramming animals' ontologies in ways sensitive to geographical concerns with nonhuman difference, lifeworlds and movement. A brief conclusion identifies avenues for future research and engagement.

This paper maps into geographies of ‘lively commodities’, commodities whose value derives from their status as living beings. In an era where life itself has become a locus of capitalist accumulation, picking apart the category of ‘liveliness’ underpinning commodification has important analytical and geographical stakes. To this end, by tracking historical geographies of commodifying lions in political economies of ecotourism in India, this paper shows how more-than-human labour and lively potentials affect commodification and influence accumulation, not simply through recalcitrance, but as active participants within political economic organisation. The paper advances and develops a triad of relational concepts – nonhuman labour, encounter value, spectacular accumulation – through which the political economic potency of lively commodities might be articulated and grasped. It concludes by discussing the analytical potential of this approach and its future purchase for rethinking commodity geographies.

Rendering nonhuman life for sale is a fundamental facet of contemporary capitalism. Political economy extensively examines how nature is commodified but fails to analyse the difference liveliness of animals makes to processes of commodification. Drawing upon empirical work on lions and elephants in the political economies of tourism and biodiversity conservation in India, this paper proposes analytics for understanding commodification and accumulation in relational and less humanist terms. First, it develops Haraway’s concepts of ‘lively commodities’ and ‘encounter value’, foregrounding animal ecologies to rework political economic categories of the commodity, labour and production in more-than-human terms. Second, it examines how lively commodities and encounter value configure political economies, mapping their specificities and economic potential. The paper advances potential diagnostics and vocabularies through which ecology and non-dualist accounts of agency might be integrated into the nature-as-resources approach of political economy.

In September 2021, the Government of Assam announced what are to be India’s longest “wildlife friendly” flyovers (Anon. 2013). Purpose-built to mitigate the adverse effects of traffic on animal movement, these elevated structures will cost a staggering US$353.5 million. The contracts for the flyovers, designed to aid animal mobility, went to two private national engineering companies (Chakravartty 2021).

This paper seeks to rethink the urban as an ecological formation. It argues that contrary to an emphasis on the built environment, articulated through refrains of capital, planning and design, cities are lived achievements, emerging through fabrications between human and other-than-human forces. Ecological formations are fleshed out in three modes: ecologies that involve the cultivated, feral and the wild. There are distinct forms of urban governance affiliated with each, taken as hybrids of biopolitical and vernacular practices. Rethinking cities as ecological formations enables a more radical understanding of the difference and heterogeneity of urban worlds than those on offer in urban theory. It signals a shift from animating urban geographies towards understandings of how other-than-human geographies are constitutive of urban worlds., European Research Council Horizon 2020 Starting Grant (uEcologies; Grant No. 759239)

The relation between the bio and the geo has been amongst geography's most enduring concerns. This paper contributes to ongoing attempts in human geography to politicise the dynamics and distribution of life. Drawing upon postcolonial environmental history, animal ecology, and more-than-human geography, the paper examines how humans and elephants cohabit with and against the grain of cartographic design. Through fieldwork in northeast India, it develops a ‘dwelt political ecology’ that reanimates landscape as a dwelt achievement whilst remaining sensitive to postcolonial histories and subaltern concerns. The paper conceptualises and deploys a methodology of ‘tracking’ through which archival material, elephant ecology, and voices of the marginalised can be integrated and mapped. It concludes by discussing the implications of this work for fostering new conversations between more-than-human geography and subaltern political ecology.

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation between geography and ethology. Firstly, the conversation provides insights into what urbanisation might entail for animals. Secondly, it assays ways in which non-human knowledges enable rethinking what expertise counts in urban governance. Thirdly, the conversation foregrounds other spatial topologies of the urban that become evident when animals’ lifeworlds are taken into account. The paper advances efforts to animate urban political ecology in registers yet inattentive to non-human lifeworlds. It concludes by reflecting upon the purchase of such etho-geographical conversations generate for political ecologies of urbanisation.

Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. They had been absent for 70 years and were unknown to the elk, which grazed, slept and moved in the absence of an apex predator. The return of the wolf fundamentally changed elk behaviour. They now avoid areas of low visibility. They gather in smaller herds. They are more flighty, watchful, and anxious. Ecologists speak of an ‘ecology of fear’ (Ripple and Beschta, 2004), in which new animal behaviours have had cascading, landscape scale effects on wildlife. Some domestic dogs have learnt to predict and detect epileptic seizures and diabetic low blood sugar. These ‘service animals’ tune into shifts in human behaviour and the chemistry of their environment. They are trained to warn their companion of their symptoms with a nudge, or by whining, pawing, or anxious barking. If their owner is incapacitated they can trigger an alarm (Rooney et al, 2013). The sounds and smells of urban environments are conditioned to govern the behaviour of dogs. Adaptil manufacture a ‘dog-appeasing pheromone’. It is sold in a home diffuser and emits a ‘strong signal of security’ (Adaptil, 2016) to reassure dogs in new or stressful settings. The Dazer is a handheld device that emits an unpleasant high frequency sound to deter aggressive dogs. PestBye offer wall mounted, bark-responsive ultrasonic technology designed to silence ‘nuisance dogs’ in the immediate neighbourhood.

How might urban mental health be understood when animals reconfigure human wellbeing in the lived city? Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork on people and macaques in New Delhi and forging novel conversations between urban studies, ecology and psychiatry, our ontology of urban mental health moves from lived experience of the built environment to those configured by dwelling with various interlocutors: animals, astral bodies and supernatural currents. These relations create microspaces of wellbeing, keeping forces of urban precarity at bay. This paper discusses mental health ecologies in different registers: subjectivity being environmental, its scale being relational rather than binary, enmeshed in the dynamics of other-than-human life, and involving conversations between medical and vernacular practices rather than hierarchies of knowledge.

Relations between nature and capital have been a longstanding concern in the social sciences. Going beyond antinomies of posthumanist and political economic enquiry, this paper advances a set of relational analytics for incorporating liveliness into critical analyses of capital. Firstly, developing the concept of animal work, it shows how metabolic, ecological and affective labour become a productive economic force. Secondly, animating the commodity, it demonstrates how lively forces influence commodification and exchange, enabling or hindering accumulation. Thirdly, tracking animal circulation, it examines the logics of rendition that transform nonhuman life into capital. In conclusion, the paper develops a relational grammar for anatomizing the nature-capital dynamic, one that reorients the economic to be co-constituted by the ecological from the outset.