Open research questions in Geographies of human-animal interactions

What the literature leaves open

• The paper argues that a social reproduction approach is necessary to understand crisis, but this approach is often lacking in existing research.

  Everyday crisis, everyday care: A feminist political economy from below · 2026 · DOI

• Conservation conflicts involving wildlife may arise when information is lacking, misunderstood, or perceived differently by different groups, which can be emphasized in contemporary media environments.

  Who gets a voice? Media polarisation and biased actor representation in the European Turtle-dove hunting conflict · 2026 · DOI

• The author argues that de-extinction is a form of nostalgia that distracts from the need to protect living species.

  Harry Potter shows mirror to dire wolf de-extinction: perils of chasing ghosts of species’ past · 2026 · DOI

• The research highlights the need to challenge the ableist framework that impairs humans' ability to perceive and establish alternative forms of relationship with farm animals.

  Discapacidad en los santuarios de animales: articulando posibilidades de resistencia animal/ista · 2026 · DOI

• Any newly designated protected or conserved areas need to be targeted towards documented areas of importance for biodiversity, such as Key Biodiversity Areas. The protection of threatened and rare species should be enhanced, and ecosystem services should be better identified, mapped and protected. The recognition OECMs will likely improve understanding of the status of coverage of these priority areas.

  Beyond moose: Curating boreal biodiversity through Swedish slow TV and digital highlights · 2026 · DOI

• The work identifies a gap in the way urban environmental sounds are perceived and used. The work identifies a gap in the way noise is transformed into information that actively guides behavior.

  Displaced Listening · 2026 · DOI

• The research is limited to the context of Chile, France, and Austria. The author acknowledges the fragility of the embodied experience of integration into metabolic cycles in the absence of political collectives. The paper does not provide a comprehensive analysis of the technical challenges associated with composting toilets.

  Com‐Passionate Composting: Excrement Management as Matter of Care · 2026 · DOI

• The research highlights the need for further study on the relation between composting and naturecultural relations. The author suggests that there is a lack of research on the embodied experience of integration into metabolic cycles.

  Com‐Passionate Composting: Excrement Management as Matter of Care · 2026 · DOI

• The difficulty of drawing clear moral boundaries in situations where animals are recognized as sentient and morally significant but still participate in forms of use that remain partly instrumental. The need to consider the implications of animal labour in ecological utopian narratives for our understanding of ethical responsibility and coexistence.

  Animal labour in ecological utopian literature: an animal ethics perspective · 2026 · DOI

• The limited examination of interspecies cooperation and shared activity in animal ethics and literary studies. The need to analyse how ethical responsibility, limitations, and coexistence are imagined in different contexts.

  Animal labour in ecological utopian literature: an animal ethics perspective · 2026 · DOI

• There is a lack of research on geolocated audio as a form of spatial computing. Prior studies have not fully explored the potential of geolocated audio to engage participants with non-monumental urban histories. The study aims to address this gap by examining the use of geolocated audio in the context of an audiowalk.

  “Town Built From Fleeting Matter”: Audiowalking San’ya’s Hidden Histories as Practice‐Led Spatial Inquiry · 2026 · DOI

• The paper identifies a gap in current sustainability research and practice, which is limited by dualisms that separate 'human' and 'nature'. It argues that a new ethics of being with the world is needed, one that acknowledges humans as part of nature.

  Thinking-Being With a Garden: Developing Ecocentric Ethics for Sustainable Organising · 2026 · DOI

• The lack of a methodological and ethical framework for understanding and addressing the Anthropocene as a patchy formation. The underexploration of the power and violence involved in forming patchy landscapes. The limited universal applicability of the monograph's restoration concept, which largely derives from civil-society contexts in Europe and North America.

  Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature · 2026 · DOI

• The paper identifies a gap in the understanding of socioenvironmental disputes, which are not just about interests, values, or representations, but also about what is considered real and how relations between humans and nonhumans are configured. It highlights the need to consider ontological politics in the governance of plant disease.

  Saving the Olive Trees? Ontological Politics and Plant Disease Governance in Apulia, Southern Italy · 2026 · DOI

• The gap between ethical critique and policy implementation that food-systems professionals need to navigate. The lack of consideration of the structural realities of animal agriculture, including its intensive land and water use, its central role in biodiversity loss and climate change, and its reliance on large-scale confinement, slaughter, and labor exploitation.

  John Sanbonmatsu: The omnivore’s deception: what we get wrong about meat, animals, and ourselves · 2026 · DOI

• It notes the challenge of balancing the need for public health with the need for animal welfare. The paper argues that there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of the complex relationships between humans and dogs.

  Veterinization at the Dog-Human-Health Interface Reconfiguring Interspecies Relations in India and the UK · 2026 · DOI

• It notes that the current paradigms of interspecies health are limited by their focus on human health goals. The paper argues that there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of the relational aspects of interspecies health.

  Veterinization at the Dog-Human-Health Interface Reconfiguring Interspecies Relations in India and the UK · 2026 · DOI

• In addition to breaking new ground on a hitherto under-explored topic, these papers rebut assumptions about the triviality of animals during the Holocaust, revealing how studying the relationships between humans and animals exposes new dynamics of mass violence and personal and group experiences of the Holocaust.

  Introduction: Animals and the Holocaust · 2026 · DOI

• It highlights the risk of fungal infections and the need for effective techniques to mitigate these risks. The paper also notes the challenge of balancing the benefits and risks of fungi in beer production, particularly in terms of harnessing their benefits while minimizing their risks.

  Liquid Bread and Invisible Worlds—Beer, Fungi, and the Origins of Microbial Control · 2026 · DOI

• It highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between beer production and public health, particularly in relation to fungal infections. The paper also identifies a gap in our understanding of the ways in which brewers have historically negotiated with fungi to create a stable and safe product.

  Liquid Bread and Invisible Worlds—Beer, Fungi, and the Origins of Microbial Control · 2026 · DOI

• Future research could explore the application of participatory mapping in other socio-ecological landscapes. Further study could investigate the effectiveness of integrating diverse perspectives, such as Indigenous knowledge, citizen science, and children's observations.

  “When your participants cannot speak”: Exploring the potential for participatory mapping to represent the geographies of more‐than‐human actors · 2025 · DOI

• There is a gap between theoretical developments in more-than-human geographies and their practical landscape-level applications. The study identifies a need for practical insights into the methodological and ethical complexities of representing more-than-humans.

  “When your participants cannot speak”: Exploring the potential for participatory mapping to represent the geographies of more‐than‐human actors · 2025 · DOI

• It notes the challenge of balancing ecological conservation challenges with the need for less anthropocentric ethnographic methods. The study highlights the challenge of anticipating what kinds of interspecies relations, identities, and communities will take shape between different publics and wild animals.

  Magnetic landscapes of multispecies activity in the Digital Anthropocene · 2025 · DOI

• Environmental justice is rarely addressed in SES studies on human–wildlife conflict.

  Environmental justice gaps in human-wildlife conflict research from a social-ecological systems perspective · 2025 · DOI

• By focusing on those who audit, the ostensibly ‘powerful’ actors who are rarely studied in audit literature, I examine the ways that inspectors negotiate farmer, animal and their own welfare through the veterinary‐audit gaze.

  Change the world farm by farm: The moral care of audit and the paradox of animal welfare inspection in Europe · 2025 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Geographies of human-animal interactions

• Place-identity: Physical world socialization of the self · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 1983 · 2,093 citations
• The Human Footprint and the Last of the Wild · BioScience · 2002 · 1,952 citations
• Editorial: Mobilities, Immobilities and Moorings · Mobilities · 2006 · 1,637 citations
• Street Phenomenology · Ethnography · 2003 · 1,519 citations
• The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place · Applied Geography · 2010 · 842 citations
• Mobility and Proximity · Sociology · 2002 · 670 citations
• Emotions and affect in recent human geography · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2009 · 665 citations
• Beyond house and haven: toward a revisioning of emotional relationships with places · Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2003 · 651 citations
• Editorial: Emotional geographies · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2001 · 626 citations
• A single day's walking: narrating self and landscape on the South West Coast Path · Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers · 2005 · 541 citations

Most recent work

• Modes of Killability: Individuals and Flocks as Patients in Veterinary Diagnostic Practices for Production Animals · Sociologia Ruralis · 2026
• Exploring Galápagos children’s place attachment, local ecological knowledge, and pro-environmental behaviour · Oxford Review of Education · 2026
• A feminist approach to sporting mobilities: affect, intimacies and embodied movement · Mobilities · 2026
• PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN LONELINESS : City Paths Toward (Un)common Lifeworlds · International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2026
• Topophobic Terrains: Fear, Abandonment and the Affective Politics of Urban Space · Antipode · 2026
• The Nine Lives of Trap-Neuter-Return in the Canary Islands · Social Studies of Science · 2026
• Roaring mountains, sentient landscapes: a more-than-human ethnography of Tibetan pastoral cosmopolitics amidst Himalayan climate shifts · Frontiers in Climate · 2026
• Digital nomadism: transforming places, contesting spaces · Tourism Geographies · 2026
• "Fauna City": A data-literacy Activity for Introducing Children to Digital Footprints and Data Types · 2026
• Curated darkness: Cold War bunkers and affective geographies of nuclear tourism · Tourism Geographies · 2026

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