Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the issue of relationality but locates the encounters in place and space. It also contributes to an understanding of encounters between humans and animals as products of their practical actions in particular settings - in other words, enactments of human-animal space. It provides a re-reading of animals, their space, and performativity in Anna Sewell's 1877 novel Black Beauty, a classic text promoting animal welfare through popular culture. The book presents a multispecies ethnography addressing the situatedness of human-horse relationships where both the material and the mental play a role in the making of the relationship, the human-horse dyad, in movement. It also examines the construction of animal subjectivity and agency through four case studies. In an attempt to fulfil the specific requirements of human-animal studies, Dalke and Wels draw on methodological insight generated by scholars in the field of disability studies.