Chimeras & other animals. The cultural imagination and conceptualization of human and non-human animals

Abstract

This dossier demonstrates how humanities scholarship can make valuable and specific contributions to rethinking (and perhaps altering) the relationship between humans and non-human animals, and the moral status and political voice of non-human animals. Using concrete examples, the authors show that this relationship and our ideas about it are always mediated and shaped by images and concepts. Changes are reflected in different representations and concepts, and vice versa, new images and conceptual frameworks can stretch the imagination and establish  different views on multispecies cohabitation – views that, we hope, are more ecocentric.