ABSTRACT

This edited collection explores our often-surprising modes of co-inhabiting the cultural and aerial worlds of birds. It focuses on our encounters with non-captive birds and the cultural geographies of feathered flight.

This book offers a timely contribution to the more-than-human geographies of flight, space and territory. The chapters support an ethics of attention as a new basis for the conservation and cultivation of aerial habitats. Contributions adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the patterns of intrusion and escape that shape our encounters with birds and unsettle our traditionally terrestrial concepts of space. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of our shared lives with birds, ranging from scientific observation to the social media-enabled spectacle of co-habitation and spatial competition.

Written in a thought-provoking style, this book seeks to address a dearth of critical perspectives on the cultural geographies of flight and its implications for the ways in which we understand common spaces around and above us in the context of any effort at conservation.

chapter |17 pages

Learning to Live in Winged Worlds

Introduction

part I|67 pages

Out of sight, out of mind, and out of place

chapter 1|13 pages

Displaying displacement

Exhibiting extinct birds in natural history museums

chapter 3|16 pages

Migration at the limit

More-than-human creativity and catastrophe

part II|64 pages

Making sense of shared space

chapter 5|13 pages

Airborne

Experience and atmospheric movements in falconry practice

chapter 6|17 pages

Sonic habitats

Aerial nomadism and the sound of birds

chapter 8|15 pages

The public lives of pigeon passengers

How pigeons and humans share space on a train

part III|60 pages

Flights of fancy

chapter 9|11 pages

Birds as winged words

A reading of Aristophanes, The Birds

chapter 10|13 pages

Birds and Christian imagery

chapter 12|16 pages

Peregrine flights

The emergence of digital winged geographies