New York City is home to nearly nine million people—but humans are only some of the New Yorkers whose lives are shaped by the city’s buildings, parks, waterways, transportation systems, policies, and changing environment. This webinar invites AAG members to encounter New York as a multispecies city, exploring how wild animals inhabit, navigate, and adapt to urban spaces created largely around human needs. A special focus of the talks is Central Park, a large-scale urban park at the heart of the city that embodies both the contradictions and possibilities for people and wildlife to coexist in the city.
Drawing on animal welfare science, history, environmental studies, and human-animal relations, the webinar will ask what animals can reveal about the city we have built—and what it might mean to imagine more desirable urban futures in which human and nonhuman flourishing are considered together.
Jacquelyn Johnston (moderator) is visiting assistant teaching professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Her current research intersects biopolitical analysis and more-than-human geography, focusing on how political classifications for nonhuman animals (such as “ferality,” or “nonnative invasive”) affect public policy governing nonhuman animals, including animal welfare debates and eradication programs.
Dawn Biehler is a professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is author of Pests in the City: Flies, Bedbugs, Cockroaches, and Rats; and Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History. Her articles about mosquitoes, green space, residential space, and environmental justice in Baltimore have appeared in numerous publications. She lives with her multispecies family in Washington, DC, and does research and teaching in Baltimore and New York.
Becca Franks is an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at New York University whose interdisciplinary research bridges animal welfare science, animal behavior, environmental conservation, and human-animal relationships. She directs NYU’s WATR Lab and co-directs the university’s Wild Animal Welfare Program, where her work examines how scientific knowledge about animal lives can inform more ethical relationships between humans, other animals, and shared environments.