Animal Agency in Human Society

Animals have provided humans with nutrition, shelter, workforce and companionship for millennia and thus they have agency in forming society. Humans, animals and the physical environment all co-exist and form an entity that consists of highly complicated interrelations. Our research focuses on human-animal relations during the era of Finnish industrial and post-industrial society from the 1890s to the 2040s. We focus particularly on urban pets, the agency of assistance animals in the future, the interaction between wolves, reindeer and herding dogs and the agency of iconic wild animals in Finnish society. We also examine the relationship between wildness and tameness and argue that the lives of animals we perceive as wild are in many ways entangled with those of humans and vice versa. Read more »