Deadly intersections: living and dying with non-humans in everyday life

Abstract

Social and cultural geographers have long-recognized the power of death to produce spaces, affects and values. This special issue explores intersections between social and cultural geographies of death, more-than-human geographies and political ecology. In this introduction, we situate non-human death as an everyday phenomenon that is part of cultural, material, discursive, organic and economic metabolic networks that transform space and produce value. We then summarize the papers in this special issue to highlight their contributions to everyday entanglements with non-human death. We conclude by introducing two concepts developed by the authors in this special issue, spectral presences and lively/deathly knowledges, to highlight how non-human death can produce immaterial artefacts that have lingering effects on human relationships with space long after non-human bodies are buried, eaten or decomposed.