
Companionship is one of humanity’s foundational tenets. Scholars have recently challenged the anthropocentric view of companionship, acknowledging complex relationships of care both across human-animal species lines and within other-than-human species. While the term “companion animal” is relatively recent and derives from the precarious merging of pet-keeping and veterinary practices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, animals have kept humans company for millennia, in culturally and historically situated ways.
However, animals are not humans’ only companions. This special series pushes beyond static understandings of the companion animal to explore a “bestiary of agencies, kinds of relatings, and scores of time” toward a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of companion species.
Such relationships are often surprising, causing humans to think in new historical or experiential ways about what constitutes a “companion” and what might qualify as a “species.” Although analyses of multispecies companionships commonly employ frameworks of care or love, beyond-human relationships span full emotional and affective spectrums—they can be frustrating, enraging, confusing, disaffectionate, bittersweet, or grief-stricken. Sometimes, such relationships fail or disappear altogether. Regardless of which sentiments define each relationship, companion species present complex, historicized, and culturally significant stories of life in more-than-human worlds.
Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer

Thinking With Animal Companions: A Keynote

Equine Companionship and the Multispecies Construction of Wilderness

How to Be More Like Biocrusts in Precarious Times

Love, Violence, & Respect in Animal-Human Companionship

Losing Touch with Herring in the Rappahannock River

Swampy Relations & Imperfect Restoration

Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries

My Strange Kinship with a Tick

Consensual AI? A Call for Indigenous-Led Caribou Conservation

Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures

A Cage of One’s Own? On Interspecies Captive-ation

Carp as Villains and Victims

Troubling Dualisms with the God in the Aquarium

Rhizomatic Poetics for Our Plant Companions

Do Cows Appreciate Poetry? And Other Musings On Our Bovine Friends
Featured image: Woman feeding cows in India. Photo by Monthaye, 2019.