animawiki

https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/people/turnbull/
https://twitter.com/jonnyjjt

PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, Department of Geography and King's College

Cultural and environmental geographer interested in the human-animal relations emerging in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone; canids in particular. Conceptually, he is interested in more-than-human and animal(s') geographies, new and historical materialisms, post-humanism(s), digital ecologies, and the 'weird'.

“My research explores the more-than-human geographies of care and contamination in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and investigates the human-animal relations that have emerged in the Zone since the 1986 nuclear disaster. I primarily focus on the lives and material ecologies of two especially charismatic members of the Canidae family – dogs and wolves – to reflect on 'the nature of Nature' in the Anthropocene.

I use Chernobyl as an intense and localised example at one extreme of a continuum of contaminated environments in which wildlife is increasingly forced to live. I do this to reflect more broadly on the politics and ethics of care, environmental flourishing, and the interconnected materialities of life and matter in the novel and weird ecologies that emerge as a result of anthropogenic change and (capitalist) industrial pollution.

The project is empirically grounded through (multispecies) ethnographic work alongside a range of human groups that research, care for, and are interested in the wildlife at Chernobyl. I work with conservation biologists, radio-ecologists, tourists, and an NGO – the Clean Futures Fund – amongst others, to reflect on and bring into conversation conceptual ideas surrounding Nature and Society, animals, contamination and the Anthropocene”.