Abject lives: An introduction

Abstract

The special issue Abject Lives brings together five articles that attend to questioning the processes that render nonhumans as “abject others” (Kristeva, 1982), devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. By doing so, it centres animals and other nonhumans that rarely become subject to positive valuations or human sympathy, such as slurry, wolves, geese and other species that are classified as ‘invasive’ or as a ‘health threat’. Drawing on empirical case studies from Australia and Germany, each of the articles demonstrates how processes of abjection intersect with practices of state-making, governing and power; practices that extend towards nonhumans and that often work towards their violent erasure. In the introduction to the special issue, we review how the articles build from and contribute to a growing interest in more-than-human approaches within the subdiscipline of political geography.