AAG 2027

NOTE: Papers from these sessions are being proposed for publication, so please also relay interest regarding the possibility of publication within the next year. More information here. 

In urban environments, encounters between animals and humans are frequently governed by conservation policy or narratives that render the species killable in the urban context, not necessarily because of ecological necessity, but through strategic, anthropocentric classification systems that prioritize human convenience and control. Viral individual animal stories sometimes expose a broader, largely unquestioned system in which even native species-such as raccoons, opossums, foxes, and coyotes-are routinely designated as "nuisance" and subject to lethal management when they appear in urban spaces (Johnston, 2026). This disjuncture reveals a critical inconsistency: the same species valued in conservation frameworks elsewhere are, in cities, stripped of protection through overlapping and often incoherent policies that, in practice, manufacture killability despite ambiguous or contradictory classifications.

Proposals are invited that examine how multispecies negotiations contribute to broader debates on nonhuman liminality in urban spaces (Johnston, 2024). Of particular interest are analyses that consider how policy founded on ideas of conservation ecology itself produces liminality that extends across populations and species, shaping the lives of both human and nonhuman actors. Nonhuman thriving in cities is all too often reduced to "nuisance" policies, with little attention given to the extraordinary social and cultural adaptations of these urban animal communities (Barrett et al., 2019).

Of special interest is identifying researchers from different global cities working on the same species in contexts of opposing classifications in the native/nonnative binary. For example, my work this year will focus on the Green Iguana in South Florida, so I am particularly interested in finding a collaborator who can share their research and iguana stories from an urban context where the species is classified as "native." 

This session builds on our opening discussion at AAG 2026, and aims to bring together myriad examples of different types of animals thriving in contested urban spaces. For example, Egyptian geese negotiate spaces of inclusion and exclusion in Frankfurt, Germany (Kornherr, 2025), and urban pigs caught in the middle of sociocultural, religious, and nationalist debates must navigate their position within the intersection of political economy and ecology in Chennai city, India (Narayanan, 2023). Feral cats have been reclassified as community cats, but they remain suspended in a state of liminality along with their caretakers in South Florida (Johnston, 2024). An entire special issue in Political Geography explores the abjectification of species in many types of spaces commonly conceived of as made-for-humans (Fleischmann, 2023; Fleischmann & Everts, 2024). Several researchers have dedicated pages to the charismatic albeit often hated pigeon (Jerolmack, 2008; Donaldson & Kymlicka, 2011; Nagy & Johnson, 2013; Hubbard & Brooks, 2021; Shcheglovitova, & Pitas, 2022; Pitas, 2022; Palmer, 2024).

While the theory of exclusion has been explored in many works, including those mentioned above, there remains a significant need to explore the mechanics and practice of exclusion these populations of urban species face as part of urban living, even more critically, thriving (Johnston, 2021; Franks et al., 2020; Sebo et al., 2024).

This session seeks to push the boundaries of multispecies ethnography, animal geography, political ecology, wildlife welfare, conservation, and urban planning. Priority is given to interdisciplinary approaches to unpacking the practice of lethal urban policies. Proposals might address similar cases in other urban contexts, draw on cross-city comparisons, or critically assess the political, ecological, and ethical stakes of how urban biodiversity is defined and managed, or address any of the following questions: 

• What does it mean to belong in urban spaces? Who, or what infrastructural, policy, or practices shape what it means to belong as an urban nonhuman resident? 

• Explorations of how interdisciplinary backgrounds and professional orientations shape the ways this question is answered, where perspectives overlap, and where points of tension emerge.

• Opportunities for understanding and reimagining more than human life in urban contexts.

• Research that explores the way "native" species are actively excluded from urban spaces as opportunities through which to explore how the logics of conservation biology break down in urban or anthropocentric spaces.

• Research that problematizes the logics of "conservation" in built/concrete urban spaces, particularly where certain species are vilified for their impact not on an "ecosystem" but rather their impact on urban infrastructure.

• Actively engages with policy rooted in conservation ideologies, but is applied to concrete or man-made spaces

If you are interested in furthering these discussions and sharing your research, please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Jacquelyn Johnston (jajohnst@fiu.edu). Please be sure to include a possible title, author(s) name, contact information, and plans to attend the Annual Meeting either in person or virtually. The modality (in-person or hybrid) will depend on participant availability, with priority given to content over attendance type. 

Sessions will be either in-person or hybrid, depending on interest. Informal idea pitches and conversations in advance are welcome! 

Please reach out with ideas and questions! 

Deadline for this CFP:                                         October 1, 2026

Notifications sent by:                                             October 5, 2026          

References

Barrett, L. P., Stanton, L. A., & Benson-Amram, S. (2019). The cognition of 'nuisance' species. Animal Behaviour, 147, 167-177.

Donaldson, S., & Kymlicka, W. (2011). Zoopolis: A political theory of animal rights. Oxford University Press, USA.

Fleischmann, L. (2023). More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power. Political Geography, 107, 102949.

Fleischmann, L., & Everts, J. (2024). Abject lives: An introduction. Political Geography, 111, 103102.

Franks, B., Webb, C., Gagliano, M., & Smuts, B. (2020). Conventional science will not do justice to nonhuman interests: A fresh approach is required. Animal Sentience, 4(27).

Hubbard, P., & Brooks, A. (2021). Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city. Progress in Human Geography, 45(6), 1490-1511.

Jerolmack, C. (2008). How pigeons became rats: The cultural-spatial logic of problem animals. Social problems, 55(1), 72-94.

Johnston, J. (2021). Incongruous killing: Cats, nonhuman resistance, and precarious life beyond biopolitical techniques of making-live. Contemporary Social Science, 16(1), 71-83.

Johnston, J. (2024). Transspecies liminality: unpacking the politics and patchy legitimization of urban human-cat relations. Social & Cultural Geography, 25(6), 928-946.

Johnston, J. J. (2026). Insignificant otherness: Manufacturing killability of native animals living in Florida's urban spaces. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 25148486261437568.

Kornherr, E. (2025). Caring with abject urban animals: Tensions between exclusion and inclusion of Egyptian geese in the city. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 8(2), 536-556.

Nagy, K., & Johnson II, P. D. (Eds.). (2013). Trash animals: How we live with nature's filthy, feral, invasive, and unwanted species. U of Minnesota Press.

Narayanan, Y. (2023). Animating caste: visceral geographies of pigs, caste, and violent nationalisms in Chennai city. Urban geography, 44(10), 2185-2205.

Palmer, A. (2024). Digital animal deathscapes: The online circulation of animals killed for conservation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, e12733.

Pitas, J. H. (2022). Deathly storytelling in the ecological city: How pigeons became falcon food in Baltimore, Maryland. Social & cultural geography, 23(1), 29-46.

Sebo, J., White, A., & Sims, T. (2024). One Health and Multispecies Urban Infrastructure. One Health in the Law (Jane Kotzmann & Katie Woolaston eds., 2025).

Shcheglovitova, M., & Pitas, J. H. (2022). Deadly intersections: Living and dying with non-humans in everyday life. Social & Cultural Geography, 23(1), 1-9.

We are pleased to invite abstracts for this paper session on legal and political animal geographies, open to virtual and in-person participants alike.

As animals inhabit and move across material landscapes, they simultaneously traverse territories, jurisdictions, regulatory areas, properties, and an array of informal, liminal, and border spaces. In so doing, animals are subject to a variety of classifications constructed through the interaction between what kind of animal they are regarded to be and in what sort of legal geography they are found: an animal may thus become native, non-native, wild, domestic, feral, or invasive; a commodity, a companion, a nuisance, or a threat (Johnston, 2026; Kornherr, 2025; Srinivasan, 2013). These classifications help to determine which human–animal relationships become legally intelligible, such as that of ownership, authority, responsibility, or legal standing, and which remain unintelligible, such as that of companionship and care (Allen et al., 2025; Gillespie, 2016). All of this in turn can involve serious material consequences for animals, including confinement, exclusion, forced relocation, and legalized killing; alternatively, the law enables certain animals to be protected, rehabilitated, or liberated (Braverman, 2011; Collard & Dempsey, 2017; Neo & Ngiam, 2014; Ojalammi & Blomley, 2015).

But law does not straightforwardly produce the geographies of animal life; the spatial designations, animal classifications, interspecies relationships, and material consequences described above manifest unevenly across spaces and scales, as legal and political processes overlap, contradict one another, and are continually re-articulated through practice and encounter (Berseth & Matthews, 2021; Johnston, 2026; Ojalammi & Blomley, 2015; Stenseke Arup, 2025). Legal geographies are likewise produced through contestation in and over the spaces of animal life and death, including, at times, through the creation of new legal spaces, whether territorial designations or openings within legal process (Bollig, 2024; Brown et al., 2019; Kleibert et al., 2020). Contestation can take many forms, including claims for animals' legal rights: to space, mobility, freedom from sites of harm, or a place in the court of law (Fasel & Butler, 2023; Wise, 2018). Animals themselves participate in this contestation through embodied resistance that can reshape the structures that govern their lives, opening up the possibility of human action that supports rather than supersedes animal agency (Brown et al., 2019; Colling, 2020; Hribal, 2007). Legal animal geographies are often organized as jurisdictions, or 'scales of law,' which are often misaligned with the spatial extent of animal life, leaving resistance and contestation to operate at a lower scale than the structures they oppose (Lunstrum & Havice, 2025; MacKinnon, 2011; Robinson & Graham, 2018).

This session invites work on the many dimensions of legal and political animal geographies, including how they are produced, negotiated, enforced, and resisted; the role of human-animal relations in such processes; how animals figure not merely as objects upon which law operates, but as active participants in shaping it; and the material stakes involved, along with their implications for justice, liberation, and flourishing. We understand law broadly, including not only formal animal law and policy, as well as other forms of law that affect animals, but also the everyday and exceptional practices, relations, processes, and encounters through which it operates on animal lives. Work situated in wild, urban, industrial, domestic, or other settings is equally appropriate. We are especially interested in analyses grounded in specific contestations. Contributors whose work has not previously been framed as legal animal geography, but who see an opportunity to draw out these connections, are encouraged to do so here. Early-stage projects and developing ideas are welcome.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to Martin Sinel (msinel@uwo.ca) by October 9, 2026. All abstracts must also be submitted to the AAG portal by October 15. Feel free to reach out in advance with any questions or ideas.

References

Allen, D., Arathoon, J., & Walliss, J. (2025). An exploration of dog‐related policy through a legal animal geographies lens. Geography Compass, 19(9). https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70047

Berseth, V., & Matthews, R. (2021). How "wild" are hatchery salmon? Conservation policy and the contested framing of nature in Canada and the United States. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 1077–1098. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620945315

Bollig, M. (2024). Wildlife corridors in a Southern African conservation landscape: The political ecology of multispecies mobilities along the arteries of anthropogenic conservation. Anthropology Southern Africa, 47(2), 216–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2024.2327467

Braverman, I. (2011). States of exemption: The legal and animal geographies of American zoos. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 43(7), 1693–1706. https://doi.org/10.1068/a4420

Brown, K. M., Flemsæter, F., & Rønningen, K. (2019). More-than-human geographies of property: Moving towards spatial justice with response-ability. Geoforum, 99, 54–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.12.012

Collard, R.-C., & Dempsey, J. (2017). Capitalist natures in five orientations. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 28(1), 78–97. https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2016.1202294

Colling, S. (2020). Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era. Michigan State University Press.

Fasel, R. N., & Butler, S. C. (2023). Animal Rights Law. Bloomsbury.

Gillespie, K. (2016). Nonhuman animal resistance and the improprieties of live property. In I. Braverman (Ed.), Animals, biopolitics, law: Lively legalities (pp. 116–132). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315672731-7

Hribal, J. C. (2007). Animals, agency, and class: Writing the history of animals from below. Human Ecology Review, 14(1), 101–112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707647

Johnston, J. J. (2026). Insignificant otherness: Manufacturing killability of native animals living in Florida's urban spaces. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486261437568

Kleibert, J. M., Hess, M., & Müller, F. C. (2020). Sites of contestation in global fur networks. Geoforum, 108, 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.11.009

Kornherr, E. (2025). Caring with abject urban animals: Tensions between exclusion and inclusion of Egyptian geese in the city. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 8(2), 536–556. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241302587

Lunstrum, E., & Havice, E. (2025). Introducing jurisdiction. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 115(5), 1005–1028. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2467326

MacKinnon, D. (2011). Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics. Progress in Human Geography, 35(1), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132510367841

Neo, H., & Ngiam, J. Z. (2014). Contesting captive cetaceans: (Il)legal spaces and the nature of dolphins in urban Singapore. Social & Cultural Geography, 15(3), 235–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2014.882974

Ojalammi, S., & Blomley, N. (2015). Dancing with wolves: Making legal territory in a more-than-human world. Geoforum, 62, 51–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.03.022

Robinson, D. F., & Graham, N. (2018). Legal pluralisms, justice and spatial conflicts: New directions in legal geography. The Geographical Journal, 184(1), 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12247

Srinivasan, K. (2013). The biopolitics of animal being and welfare: Dog control and care in the UK and India. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38(1), 106–119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00501.x

Stenseke Arup, G. (2025). A legal geography of wolves in Swedish landscapes: A morphogenetic approach. Journal of Property Planning and Environmental Law, 17(2–3), 118–130. https://doi.org/10.1108/jppel-01-2025-0003

Wise, S. M. (2018). The struggle for the legal rights of nonhuman animals begins – The experience of the nonhuman rights project in New York and Connecticut. Animal Law Review, 25(3), 367–393. https://lawcommons.lclark.edu/alr/vol25/iss3/6/