Companion Species

person feeding three cows in an outdoor courtyard

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

a red fox standing on a car hood, staring through the windshield at a person

Thinking With Animal Companions: A Keynote

In this series keynote, professor emerita and historian Harriet Ritvo sets the stage for further investigation of "companion species." She ...

Two horses and their riders walk on a dir trail through a lush green forest.

Equine Companionship and the Multispecies Construction of Wilderness

Inspired by volunteering on equestrian trail crews in the Cascade Mountains, Kathleen Gekiere argues wilderness is a multispecies performance, embodied ...

orange, green, yellow, and brown samples in petri dishes that have the appearance of dried dirt or moss

How to Be More Like Biocrusts in Precarious Times

Lizzie Smith describes the oft-overlooked living skin of the desert: biological soil crusts or "biocrusts." Biocrust bundles show that deserts ...

dog looking out over mountain landscape

Love, Violence, & Respect in Animal-Human Companionship

Companionship across species is not always simple, nor always rewarding, but perhaps says something about respect for more-than-human beings. In ...

Black and white photograph of people hauling a giant net of fish.

Losing Touch with Herring in the Rappahannock River

Mara Dicenta Vilker, Micah Dill, and Elena McCullough explore herring as interspecies companions, bringing together herring restoration discourse with fishers' ...

A verdant landscape is intersected by ropes sectioning off the landscape from visitors.

Swampy Relations & Imperfect Restoration

There's a sinking swamp in the middle of Manhattan that has kept a host of species safe for millennia. Nat ...

illustration of a dog surrounded by human hands

Beastly Consent and Relationships Beyond Boundaries

Vita Sleigh investigates the connections between animal consent, interspecies erotics, and the (at times violent) power differentials that characterize commonly ...

a black and brown insect with eight legs crawling on a green leaf

My Strange Kinship with a Tick

What messages are shared through a tick bite? Maxime Fecteau explores his experience with Lyme disease, revealing how an undesired ...

four caribou walking through a snowy field with trees behind

Consensual AI? A Call for Indigenous-Led Caribou Conservation

Genevieve Pfeiffer explores human-caribou entanglements and how Indigenous relationships with them could guide future conservation efforts—avoiding past disasters like the ...

ocean water seen from a cliff, with dark clumps of leaves in the water

Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures

Lydia Lapporte traces how the project of kelp recovery in the Pacific Ocean connects to the mission of decarceration. Relational ...

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

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

Using the concept of captivation, Quinn Georgic unpacks human-animal interspecies relations by looking closely at mutual power that binds humans ...

two golden fish thrashing above water

Carp as Villains and Victims

Teri Harman considers resilience, fishy companionship, and the culpability of "invasive" carp in Utah Lake. Are carp villains or victims? ...

A gray axolotl resists atop a white hand that is slightly submerged in water.

Troubling Dualisms with the God in the Aquarium

God, pet, and research subject, axolotls transgress Western dualisms. Alex Ventimilla explores what these creatures tell us about science, companionship, ...

Purple mushrooms on brown tree trunk.

Rhizomatic Poetics for Our Plant Companions

How do we represent the complexity of plant companionship in a language marred by dualism? Jerald Lim uses twin cinema ...

Photograph of steers in a feedlot, staring toward the camera through the fencing.

Do Cows Appreciate Poetry? And Other Musings On Our Bovine Friends

In these poetic fieldnotes, Mia Werger reflects on befriending feedlot cattle, surviving our broken food system, living under constraint, and ...

Featured image: Woman feeding cows in India. Photo by Monthaye, 2019.