What boundary? What whale? Whose responsibility? - Governing Transboundary Waters: Canada, the United States, and Indigenous Communities - page 168

ongoing discussions exploring “hybridity” within critical animal geography. The
case reinforces the arguments presented on the social construction of borders
(Balibar, 2004; Fall, 2005, 2010; Agnew, 2007; Popescu, 2012) and enriches this
line of reasoning with insights from animal geographies. I conclude by arguing
that greater attention to the “agency” or “fleshiness” of the being helps to cut
through the conceptual pitfalls of the constructed, but very real, boundaries.
Theorizing the edges through animal geographies
Over the past 20 years, the field of animal geography has made progress in
exploring the boundaries between, and the dynamic relationship of, animals and
humans . 4 Notably, Wolch and Emel's (1998) insights were pivotal in the develop-
ment of contemporary animal geographies. Their argument that animals have been
so interwoven into the basic affairs of human life and so indispensable to the
scaffolding of “progress” that humans have not been able (or willing) to fully see
them remains valid today. Disentangling “animal rights” from “agency”, for
example, helped to show how seemingly progressive environmental groups, whose
efforts aim to champion animal rights, tend to commodify animals rather than give
them agency. Since their groundbreaking work, other scholars have explored the
power dynamics/ethics associated with the process of “othering” animals and
creating a hybrid-relationship between animals and humans in which animals are
left without agency (Whatmore, 2002; Bear, 2011; Sundberg, 2011). Recent
scholarship extends the work in animal geographies away from the “collective” or
“herd” to the “individual ” animal (Bear, 2011). This subtle difference provides
space to challenge what humans conceive as animals.
As part of this reframing, scholars from across disciplines have found Foucault's
work on biopower applicable to human-animal relationships (Holloway, 2007;
Haraway, 2008; Cadman, 2009; Holloway et al. , 2009; Shukin, 2009; Collard,
2012). In particular, Collard's (2012, p. 29) article on the “entanglements” between
cougars and humans in Vancouver Island, Canada, helped advance the idea “that
interspecies relationships produce space and are expressed biopolitically”. Further-
more, Lulka's (2009) conceptualization of “thick hybridity” provides space to
explore the reflexive relationship between animals and humans, and articulate the
agency of animals in these relationships. Looking at the interspecies relationships
between Luna and the many actors surrounding him, illuminates how dynamics
change when the dominant discourse, which normalizes the placement of animals
in society, is called into question.
Thus, this chapter widens the focus of transboundary water governance found
in the previous chapter a nd contributes to the burgeoning discussions on animality
and materiality in human geography (e.g. Haraway, 2008; Panelli, 2010; Bear, 2011;
Sundberg, 2011; Collard, 2012) by arguing that greater sensitivity to power-
dynamics is needed for the governance of animals between diverse cultural
frameworks and across bounded geographic spaces. This contributes, particularly,
to Sundberg's (2011) work, which advanced the need to account for nonhumans
as political actors and (re)conceptualize agency through a posthumanist framework.