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Irus Braverman

University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Law, Faculty Member

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SUNY: University at Buffalo

Michigan State University

Veronika Bohac Clarke

University of Calgary

University of Colorado, Boulder

Bridget Nicholls

University of Windsor

The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute

Heron H J S G Gordilho

Federal University of Bahia

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Books by Irus Braverman

Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet - INTRODUCTION

Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet , 2020

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institution... more Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet.

Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans.

At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

Papers by Irus Braverman

Legal Tails: Policing American Cities through Animals

Social Science Research Network, Jul 18, 2013

Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals "hail" us to account f... more Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals "hail" us to account for the regimes in which they and we must live. We "hail" them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction.-Haraway 2003: 17 Armed with a baton, Chief Officer Michael Armatys cautiously walks to the back of the house and then toward the barking dog. "Hi doggie, good boy," he says reassuringly. The dog, for his part, is unconvinced. He seems ready to leap free of the flimsy rope that ties him to the tree. I keep a safe distance, just in case the rope doesn't hold. While doing so, I notice the body of a dead bird on the ground, a rugged mailbox barely screwed to the house overfilled with mail, tons of peeling white paint, and a few neighbors that have come out to watch the show. One of the neighbors shouts to us, "They come only at night, and the dog is out in the sun all day." Officer Armatys looks around one last time and then heads back toward the side door, where I am standing. "Will you seize the dog?" I ask. "Well, it's officer discretion," he says. "If the dog was hot and panting back there then it would be a no brainer: we would take the dog." "Although he had some water in a little container, the shelter is inadequate," he continues to explain as he tags a notice on the doorknob. "ESPCA: NOTICE TO COMPLY," reads the top of the notice in bold letters. A yellow highlighter marks that this is a violation of Article 26, Section 353-B of New York State's Agriculture and Market Law. We are in East Buffalo, a decaying urban neighborhood rife with abandoned houses. Officer Armatys-short, bulky, and dressed in a blue-and-white uniform adorned with badges and protected by a bulletproof vest-knows his way around the city's neighborhoods, pointing out the houses he has visited in the past. He has been doing this since 1973, he tells me proudly.

Living on Coral Time: Debating Conservation in the Anthropocene

Coral scientists are dealing with an existential crisis and are divided between hope and despair ... more

Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian/Latourian Perspective

We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the cit... more We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the city seems obvious, innocuous, natural. But, as is the case with most taken-for-granted "things" (Brown, 2011), some excavation is bound to reveal a more complicated and even ideological story. This study focuses on such a story: the story of the clandestine governance of nature and of humans by way of nature - all through the construction and regulation of city street trees. This story problematizes the mundane display of urban space in general, and of urban street trees in particular, as technical and apolitical, and instead promotes an understanding of nonhumans and humans as constantly negotiating spatial order and disorder through law.

Fish Encounters: Aquariums and their Veterinarians in a Rapidly Changing World

Introduction. The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely disc... more Introduction. The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely discusses aquariums. Despite their independent historical trajectory and unique characteristics and challenges, aquariums are considered by many as the younger sister to the more established terrestrial zoo institutions. This perception of aquariums can be explained in various ways: aquariums do not have quite the same controversial colonial history as zoos, they are fewer in number and smaller in size, and they exhibit animals that are less "like-us," and thus not as well-known to science. With the exception of certain marine mammals, aquarium animals have thus rarely been championed by animal rights campaigns, which have tended to focus more on captive zoo animals such as elephants and apes. Of 41,500 species assessed by the IUCN Red List in 2017, only 1,500 or so were marine species (Baylina, interview). Aquarium establishments also necessitate complex physical and technical undertakings: huge water filtration systems, for example, and distinct expertise for handling marine creatures, many of whom simultaneously serve as commercial products in food industries. Aquaculture, which accounts for about half of the seafood consumed worldwide, is the fastest growing sector in the food industry and generates 50 to 170 billion farmed fish every year (Gunther). As one of my interviewees from the aquarium world put it: "it's more complicated to explain conservation and protection and the need for sustainability and constraint in these contexts" (Baylina, interview). Also unlike contemporary accredited zoos, until recently many aquariums did not hire inhouse veterinarians. In fact, the marine environment was so alien to western medicine that early veterinarian expertise did not cover it. This situation is rapidly changing. The annual meeting of the International Association of Aquatic Animal Medicine, established in 1968, is now attended by hundreds of veterinarians and includes both marine mammal and fish experts. This article focuses on the novel profession of veterinarians in aquariums, discussing the challenges of this profession and the recent changes it has undergone. I draw on indepth interviews with aquarium veterinarians in various locations-including the United

Saving Species, One Individual at a Time: Zoo Veterinarians Between Welfare and Conservation

The role of zoo veterinarians has changed significantly in the last several decades, reflecting a... more The role of zoo veterinarians has changed significantly in the last several decades, reflecting and revealing broader transformations in zoo culture, especially among North American accredited zoos. This article draws on several interviews with prominent zoo vets, as well as on regulations that pertain to their work, to highlight their current position at the nexus of animal health and welfare, on the one hand, and of species conservation, on the other hand. The transformation of zoos into conservation institutions in particular has resulted in the vets’ novel focus on the sustainability of populations and their intensified involvement in in situ wildlife management. The article will explore the everyday negotiations that zoo vets must undertake to balance between caring for the individual animal’s medical needs and for the long-term survival of her population and species. Despite the central role of the zoo vet in this institutional arena, very little has been written about this fi...

Is the Puerto Rican Parrot Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability

Nature as Spectacle

In today’s society of spectacles, an ancient institution such as the zoo still attracts millions ... more In today’s society of spectacles, an ancient institution such as the zoo still attracts millions of people. Why is that, and how were zoos transformed over the last century? In this essay, Irus Braverman reflects on the relationship between zoo design and the broader societal definitions of nature in order to find answers to these questions.

En-Listing Life : Red is the Color of Threatened Species Lists

Not all threatened species are created equally.-Mike Hoffmann, IUCN, interview The Cebu flowerpec... more Not all threatened species are created equally.-Mike Hoffmann, IUCN, interview The Cebu flowerpecker Dicaeum quadricolor is a native bird of the island of Cebu in the Philippines (BirdLife International 2014a). The species was listed as Extinct in the first bird Red Data Book in the 1960s and was placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species TM (hereafter, the Red List) in 1988. The bird's surprise rediscovery in 1992 resulted in the species' reassessment as Critically Endangered in 1994 (BirdLife International 2014b). Currently, the flowerpecker is believed to be one of the ten rarest birds in the world. Although the bird was observed in 2014, no one has seen one long enough to take a photograph, and not much other information has been recorded about the flowerpecker. There is, however, the long and convoluted history of this bird's listing. Errors in species listings are not uncommon, Thomas (Tom) Brooks, head of IUCN's Science and Knowledge Unit, explains in an interview. In this case, he continues, the incorrect Extinct listing "turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy," effectively producing what has been referred to by scientists as a "Romeo Error" (Collar 1998). "In giving up on it," Mike Hoffmann-Senior Scientific Officer at the IUCN Species Survival Commission-explains, "the species actually really does go extinct. Because once there is no attention to it, all those threats actually do wipe it out" (interview). "The assessment in the 1960s was wrong," Hoffmann continues. "If it had been conducted more carefully, it wouldn't have said that the species was extinct [when], obviously, it wasn't. The species would have then maintained attention and an effort towards safeguarding both the species and the biodiversity of Cebu over the past fifty years" (interview). As it is, however, the flowerpecker was most likely down-listed from the "extinct" category only to be re-listed in this category in the not so distant future.

Gene Drives, Nature, Governance : An Ethnographic Perspective

Social Science Research Network, 2017

Synthetic gene drives raise ethical, ecological, and legal questions that are sometimes difficult... more Synthetic gene drives raise ethical, ecological, and legal questions that are sometimes difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a singular form of life but the genetics of entire populations and species are currently both under-regulated and under-theorized. In place of state regulations, what seems to be emerging is a form of self-regulation by the gene drive scientists themselves. My chapter draws on in-depth interviews with several prominent gene drive scientists to explore their approach toward nature, animals, and the environment. My assumption has been that their approach impacts and regulates the way they work, and this assumption has been confirmed through the more personal stories that each of these scientists has generously shared with me. Although they have not contemplated these issues to the same degree, a few common assumptions about the role of nature and about animal-human relations did emerge from the interviews, most...

Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the... more Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and ...

The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists

Animals, Biopolitics, Law, 2015

Animal Mobilegalities

Humanimalia, 2013

The initial focus of “animobility” scholarship has been on the dynamic physical geographies of an... more The initial focus of “animobility” scholarship has been on the dynamic physical geographies of animals. This article extends the meaning of animobility to explore the ways in which animals are affected — and, in fact, constituted — by law, as well as the ways in which they affect and constitute law, which I call “mobilegalities.” Specifically, I ask how animobility in contemporary American cities translates into the animals’ legal mobility, and how laws can adapt to animobility and the ensuing mobilegality by setting “traps” that then immobilize the animals. This article demonstrates, finally, that law is not a static narrative that produces monophonic meaning, but a living process that feeds on, and depends upon, dynamic human-nonhuman assemblages. The different modes of classification discussed here — body, taxonomy, and law — provide a yardstick by which to think of the rigidity and flexibility of mobilegality itself, constituting a matrix for the mobilization of legality.

Nof kdumim: Remaking the ancient landscape in East Jerusalem’s national parks

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the ... more This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the landscape in Jerusalem. Nature never stands for itself; it is always an echo of a human presence and, in this case, of a Jewish past and its modern reunion. The project of imagining the natural landscape as one that embodies an ancient past—what Israeli officials have referred to in our interviews as nof kdumim—and the contemporary Jewish people as those who hold the key to its revival as such, is a central aspect of Israel’s colonial dispossession agenda in East Jerusalem and a prerequisite to the land becoming Jewish in practice. Focusing on the perspectives of Israel’s nature officials, this article highlights not only the imaginary but...

Governing the Wild: Databases, Algorithms, and Population Models as Biopolitics

Surveillance & Society, 2014

This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspect... more This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ and ex situ projects—and their respective elaborate administrative structures and models of calculation—are, in practice, increasingly bleeding into one another. The stories I tell here about the efforts to save the red wolf from extinction reveal the complexities of this integration. I also documen...

Zooveillance: Foucault Goes to the Zoo

Surveillance & Society, 2012

The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the governance of North American zoo an... more The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the governance of North American zoo animals. During this period, captive animal administration has transformed from a materially, geographically, and technologically limited enterprise – focused on the control of individual zoo animals within specific North American zoo institutions – into an ambitious collective project that encompasses all accredited North American zoos and that governs over a million zoo animals. Tapping into a sophisticated voluntary and collaborative self-monitored administration, zoos have been able to rely upon genetics and demography to achieve the ultimate goal of captive animal conservation. The essay frames this story of animal governance as surveillance. It identifies three layers that work interdependently to produce captive animal surveillance in North American zoos: elementary surveillance, which includes the naming, identifying, and recording of captive animals on the institutional level; dat...

Governing with Clean Hands: Automated Public Toilets and Sanitary Surveillance

Surveillance & Society, 2009

To anyone familiar with the story of urban decay in major American cities in the 1980s – and with... more To anyone familiar with the story of urban decay in major American cities in the 1980s – and with the subsequent abolition of toilets from city streets – the introduction of automated public toilets (APTs) to urban spaces sounds like very good news. This article explores the re-democratizing message that commonly accompanies the introduction of APTs to North American city streets as well as their on-the-ground manifestations. It focuses on two major components of APTs: privatization and automation. The process of privatization, which characterizes most APT operations in North America, carries with it various exclusionary effects that stand in stark contrast to the democratic aspirations of public space. Additionally, the APTs normally feature automated devices, and, most prominently, the auto-flush and the automated faucet and dryer. On the face of things, these devices eradicate the injustices that sometimes accompany human discretion. However, they also conceal the necessarily soc...

Animals and Law in the American City

Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature

Good Night, Zoo Children’s Guide to Humanimal Spaces

About the Destruction and Multiplication of World (with a Preface by Gerd Stern)

Children’s books interpellate their readers and listeners into a vision of nature in which bounda... more Children’s books interpellate their readers and listeners into a vision of nature in which boundaries and dualities begin to shudder and collapse. Braverman’s essay focuses on Peggy Rathmann’s story Good Night, Gorilla to show how images of city and wilderness, captivity and freedom, home and zoo, and human and nonhuman animality can become fluid, thereby opening up possibilities for other, novel spaces to emerge. This book’s liminal scheme sets up the stage for the surprising hybrids that can occur when species meet.

Powers of Illegality: House Demolitions and Resistance in East Jerusalem

Law & Social Inquiry, 2007

This article examines how techniques of illegality based in planning laws and policy are utilized... more This article examines how techniques of illegality based in planning laws and policy are utilized to dominate the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem. Although the demolition of homes is the most spectacular spatial mechanism of illegality exercised by Israel in East Jerusalem, my focus in the first part of the article is on more mundane techniques of illegality, such as mapping, filing, and arbitrariness. The second part of the article introduces the notion of resistance and explores the illegal building carried out by East Jerusalemite Palestinians as an act of spatial protest. In examining tactics of "everyday" resistance, I suggest that the study of illegality in the East Jerusalem context allows a nuanced understanding of the relations between bureaucrats and subjects, thereby offering a deeper understanding of the nature of power itself.

Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet - INTRODUCTION

Zoo Veterinarians: Governing Care on a Diseased Planet , 2020

Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institution... more Despite their centrality to the operation of contemporary accredited zoo and aquarium institutions, the work of zoo veterinarians has rarely been the focus of a critical analysis in the social science and humanities. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, mainly in Europe and North America, this book highlights the recent transformation that has occurred in the zoo veterinarian profession during a time of ecological crisis, and what these changes can teach us about our rapidly changing planet.

Zoo vets, Braverman instructs us with a wink, have "gone wild." Originally an individual welfare-centered profession, these experts are increasingly concerned with the sustainability of wild animal populations and with ecological health. The story of zoo vets going wild—in their subjects of care, their motivations, and their ethical standards, as well as in their professional practices and scientific techniques—is also a story about zoo animals gone wild, wild animals encroaching the zoo, and, more generally, a wild world that is becoming "zoo-ified." Such transformations have challenged existing veterinary standards and practices. Exploring the regulatory landscape that governs the work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians, Braverman traverses the gap between the hard and soft sciences and between humans and nonhumans.

At the intersection of animal studies, socio-legal studies, and science and technology studies, this book will appeal not only to those interested in zoos and in animal welfare, but also to scholars in the posthumanities.

Legal Tails: Policing American Cities through Animals

Social Science Research Network, Jul 18, 2013

Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals "hail" us to account f... more Today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals "hail" us to account for the regimes in which they and we must live. We "hail" them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction.-Haraway 2003: 17 Armed with a baton, Chief Officer Michael Armatys cautiously walks to the back of the house and then toward the barking dog. "Hi doggie, good boy," he says reassuringly. The dog, for his part, is unconvinced. He seems ready to leap free of the flimsy rope that ties him to the tree. I keep a safe distance, just in case the rope doesn't hold. While doing so, I notice the body of a dead bird on the ground, a rugged mailbox barely screwed to the house overfilled with mail, tons of peeling white paint, and a few neighbors that have come out to watch the show. One of the neighbors shouts to us, "They come only at night, and the dog is out in the sun all day." Officer Armatys looks around one last time and then heads back toward the side door, where I am standing. "Will you seize the dog?" I ask. "Well, it's officer discretion," he says. "If the dog was hot and panting back there then it would be a no brainer: we would take the dog." "Although he had some water in a little container, the shelter is inadequate," he continues to explain as he tags a notice on the doorknob. "ESPCA: NOTICE TO COMPLY," reads the top of the notice in bold letters. A yellow highlighter marks that this is a violation of Article 26, Section 353-B of New York State's Agriculture and Market Law. We are in East Buffalo, a decaying urban neighborhood rife with abandoned houses. Officer Armatys-short, bulky, and dressed in a blue-and-white uniform adorned with badges and protected by a bulletproof vest-knows his way around the city's neighborhoods, pointing out the houses he has visited in the past. He has been doing this since 1973, he tells me proudly.

Living on Coral Time: Debating Conservation in the Anthropocene

Coral scientists are dealing with an existential crisis and are divided between hope and despair ... more

Order and Disorder in the Urban Forest: A Foucauldian/Latourian Perspective

We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the cit... more We pass by street trees everyday. Their existence as well as their particular location in the city seems obvious, innocuous, natural. But, as is the case with most taken-for-granted "things" (Brown, 2011), some excavation is bound to reveal a more complicated and even ideological story. This study focuses on such a story: the story of the clandestine governance of nature and of humans by way of nature - all through the construction and regulation of city street trees. This story problematizes the mundane display of urban space in general, and of urban street trees in particular, as technical and apolitical, and instead promotes an understanding of nonhumans and humans as constantly negotiating spatial order and disorder through law.

Fish Encounters: Aquariums and their Veterinarians in a Rapidly Changing World

Introduction. The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely disc... more Introduction. The extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely discusses aquariums. Despite their independent historical trajectory and unique characteristics and challenges, aquariums are considered by many as the younger sister to the more established terrestrial zoo institutions. This perception of aquariums can be explained in various ways: aquariums do not have quite the same controversial colonial history as zoos, they are fewer in number and smaller in size, and they exhibit animals that are less "like-us," and thus not as well-known to science. With the exception of certain marine mammals, aquarium animals have thus rarely been championed by animal rights campaigns, which have tended to focus more on captive zoo animals such as elephants and apes. Of 41,500 species assessed by the IUCN Red List in 2017, only 1,500 or so were marine species (Baylina, interview). Aquarium establishments also necessitate complex physical and technical undertakings: huge water filtration systems, for example, and distinct expertise for handling marine creatures, many of whom simultaneously serve as commercial products in food industries. Aquaculture, which accounts for about half of the seafood consumed worldwide, is the fastest growing sector in the food industry and generates 50 to 170 billion farmed fish every year (Gunther). As one of my interviewees from the aquarium world put it: "it's more complicated to explain conservation and protection and the need for sustainability and constraint in these contexts" (Baylina, interview). Also unlike contemporary accredited zoos, until recently many aquariums did not hire inhouse veterinarians. In fact, the marine environment was so alien to western medicine that early veterinarian expertise did not cover it. This situation is rapidly changing. The annual meeting of the International Association of Aquatic Animal Medicine, established in 1968, is now attended by hundreds of veterinarians and includes both marine mammal and fish experts. This article focuses on the novel profession of veterinarians in aquariums, discussing the challenges of this profession and the recent changes it has undergone. I draw on indepth interviews with aquarium veterinarians in various locations-including the United

Saving Species, One Individual at a Time: Zoo Veterinarians Between Welfare and Conservation

The role of zoo veterinarians has changed significantly in the last several decades, reflecting a... more The role of zoo veterinarians has changed significantly in the last several decades, reflecting and revealing broader transformations in zoo culture, especially among North American accredited zoos. This article draws on several interviews with prominent zoo vets, as well as on regulations that pertain to their work, to highlight their current position at the nexus of animal health and welfare, on the one hand, and of species conservation, on the other hand. The transformation of zoos into conservation institutions in particular has resulted in the vets’ novel focus on the sustainability of populations and their intensified involvement in in situ wildlife management. The article will explore the everyday negotiations that zoo vets must undertake to balance between caring for the individual animal’s medical needs and for the long-term survival of her population and species. Despite the central role of the zoo vet in this institutional arena, very little has been written about this fi...

Is the Puerto Rican Parrot Worth Saving? The Biopolitics of Endangerment and Grievability

Nature as Spectacle

In today’s society of spectacles, an ancient institution such as the zoo still attracts millions ... more In today’s society of spectacles, an ancient institution such as the zoo still attracts millions of people. Why is that, and how were zoos transformed over the last century? In this essay, Irus Braverman reflects on the relationship between zoo design and the broader societal definitions of nature in order to find answers to these questions.

En-Listing Life : Red is the Color of Threatened Species Lists

Not all threatened species are created equally.-Mike Hoffmann, IUCN, interview The Cebu flowerpec... more Not all threatened species are created equally.-Mike Hoffmann, IUCN, interview The Cebu flowerpecker Dicaeum quadricolor is a native bird of the island of Cebu in the Philippines (BirdLife International 2014a). The species was listed as Extinct in the first bird Red Data Book in the 1960s and was placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species TM (hereafter, the Red List) in 1988. The bird's surprise rediscovery in 1992 resulted in the species' reassessment as Critically Endangered in 1994 (BirdLife International 2014b). Currently, the flowerpecker is believed to be one of the ten rarest birds in the world. Although the bird was observed in 2014, no one has seen one long enough to take a photograph, and not much other information has been recorded about the flowerpecker. There is, however, the long and convoluted history of this bird's listing. Errors in species listings are not uncommon, Thomas (Tom) Brooks, head of IUCN's Science and Knowledge Unit, explains in an interview. In this case, he continues, the incorrect Extinct listing "turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy," effectively producing what has been referred to by scientists as a "Romeo Error" (Collar 1998). "In giving up on it," Mike Hoffmann-Senior Scientific Officer at the IUCN Species Survival Commission-explains, "the species actually really does go extinct. Because once there is no attention to it, all those threats actually do wipe it out" (interview). "The assessment in the 1960s was wrong," Hoffmann continues. "If it had been conducted more carefully, it wouldn't have said that the species was extinct [when], obviously, it wasn't. The species would have then maintained attention and an effort towards safeguarding both the species and the biodiversity of Cebu over the past fifty years" (interview). As it is, however, the flowerpecker was most likely down-listed from the "extinct" category only to be re-listed in this category in the not so distant future.

Gene Drives, Nature, Governance : An Ethnographic Perspective

Social Science Research Network, 2017

Synthetic gene drives raise ethical, ecological, and legal questions that are sometimes difficult... more Synthetic gene drives raise ethical, ecological, and legal questions that are sometimes difficult to grasp. What is clear, however, is that the power to directly alter not just a singular form of life but the genetics of entire populations and species are currently both under-regulated and under-theorized. In place of state regulations, what seems to be emerging is a form of self-regulation by the gene drive scientists themselves. My chapter draws on in-depth interviews with several prominent gene drive scientists to explore their approach toward nature, animals, and the environment. My assumption has been that their approach impacts and regulates the way they work, and this assumption has been confirmed through the more personal stories that each of these scientists has generously shared with me. Although they have not contemplated these issues to the same degree, a few common assumptions about the role of nature and about animal-human relations did emerge from the interviews, most...

Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2021

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the... more Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and ...

The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists

Animals, Biopolitics, Law, 2015

Animal Mobilegalities

Humanimalia, 2013

The initial focus of “animobility” scholarship has been on the dynamic physical geographies of an... more The initial focus of “animobility” scholarship has been on the dynamic physical geographies of animals. This article extends the meaning of animobility to explore the ways in which animals are affected — and, in fact, constituted — by law, as well as the ways in which they affect and constitute law, which I call “mobilegalities.” Specifically, I ask how animobility in contemporary American cities translates into the animals’ legal mobility, and how laws can adapt to animobility and the ensuing mobilegality by setting “traps” that then immobilize the animals. This article demonstrates, finally, that law is not a static narrative that produces monophonic meaning, but a living process that feeds on, and depends upon, dynamic human-nonhuman assemblages. The different modes of classification discussed here — body, taxonomy, and law — provide a yardstick by which to think of the rigidity and flexibility of mobilegality itself, constituting a matrix for the mobilization of legality.

Nof kdumim: Remaking the ancient landscape in East Jerusalem’s national parks

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2019

This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the ... more This article explores two national parks in East Jerusalem and their legal administration as the focus of contradictory and complementary attempts at preservation, colonization, and normalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and observations of, officials from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and others, I expose the Judaizing of the landscape in Jerusalem. Nature never stands for itself; it is always an echo of a human presence and, in this case, of a Jewish past and its modern reunion. The project of imagining the natural landscape as one that embodies an ancient past—what Israeli officials have referred to in our interviews as nof kdumim—and the contemporary Jewish people as those who hold the key to its revival as such, is a central aspect of Israel’s colonial dispossession agenda in East Jerusalem and a prerequisite to the land becoming Jewish in practice. Focusing on the perspectives of Israel’s nature officials, this article highlights not only the imaginary but...

Governing the Wild: Databases, Algorithms, and Population Models as Biopolitics

Surveillance & Society, 2014

This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspect... more This essay draws on interviews with conservation biologists to reflect on two interrelated aspects of the in situ – ex situ divide and its increasing integration: database systems and population management models. Specifically, I highlight those databases and software programs used by zoos in ex situ conservation settings, and the parallel, traditionally distinct, in situ databases and risk assessment models. I then explore the evolving technologies that integrate wild-captive databases and population models and, in particular, emerging metapopulation and meta-model approaches to small population management. My central argument is that, while still viewed by many as separate, the in situ and ex situ projects—and their respective elaborate administrative structures and models of calculation—are, in practice, increasingly bleeding into one another. The stories I tell here about the efforts to save the red wolf from extinction reveal the complexities of this integration. I also documen...

Zooveillance: Foucault Goes to the Zoo

Surveillance & Society, 2012

The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the governance of North American zoo an... more The last three decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in the governance of North American zoo animals. During this period, captive animal administration has transformed from a materially, geographically, and technologically limited enterprise – focused on the control of individual zoo animals within specific North American zoo institutions – into an ambitious collective project that encompasses all accredited North American zoos and that governs over a million zoo animals. Tapping into a sophisticated voluntary and collaborative self-monitored administration, zoos have been able to rely upon genetics and demography to achieve the ultimate goal of captive animal conservation. The essay frames this story of animal governance as surveillance. It identifies three layers that work interdependently to produce captive animal surveillance in North American zoos: elementary surveillance, which includes the naming, identifying, and recording of captive animals on the institutional level; dat...

Governing with Clean Hands: Automated Public Toilets and Sanitary Surveillance

Surveillance & Society, 2009

To anyone familiar with the story of urban decay in major American cities in the 1980s – and with... more To anyone familiar with the story of urban decay in major American cities in the 1980s – and with the subsequent abolition of toilets from city streets – the introduction of automated public toilets (APTs) to urban spaces sounds like very good news. This article explores the re-democratizing message that commonly accompanies the introduction of APTs to North American city streets as well as their on-the-ground manifestations. It focuses on two major components of APTs: privatization and automation. The process of privatization, which characterizes most APT operations in North America, carries with it various exclusionary effects that stand in stark contrast to the democratic aspirations of public space. Additionally, the APTs normally feature automated devices, and, most prominently, the auto-flush and the automated faucet and dryer. On the face of things, these devices eradicate the injustices that sometimes accompany human discretion. However, they also conceal the necessarily soc...

Animals and Law in the American City

Environmental Law and Contrasting Ideas of Nature

Good Night, Zoo Children’s Guide to Humanimal Spaces

About the Destruction and Multiplication of World (with a Preface by Gerd Stern)

Children’s books interpellate their readers and listeners into a vision of nature in which bounda... more Children’s books interpellate their readers and listeners into a vision of nature in which boundaries and dualities begin to shudder and collapse. Braverman’s essay focuses on Peggy Rathmann’s story Good Night, Gorilla to show how images of city and wilderness, captivity and freedom, home and zoo, and human and nonhuman animality can become fluid, thereby opening up possibilities for other, novel spaces to emerge. This book’s liminal scheme sets up the stage for the surprising hybrids that can occur when species meet.

Powers of Illegality: House Demolitions and Resistance in East Jerusalem

Law & Social Inquiry, 2007

This article examines how techniques of illegality based in planning laws and policy are utilized... more This article examines how techniques of illegality based in planning laws and policy are utilized to dominate the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem. Although the demolition of homes is the most spectacular spatial mechanism of illegality exercised by Israel in East Jerusalem, my focus in the first part of the article is on more mundane techniques of illegality, such as mapping, filing, and arbitrariness. The second part of the article introduces the notion of resistance and explores the illegal building carried out by East Jerusalemite Palestinians as an act of spatial protest. In examining tactics of "everyday" resistance, I suggest that the study of illegality in the East Jerusalem context allows a nuanced understanding of the relations between bureaucrats and subjects, thereby offering a deeper understanding of the nature of power itself.

The Ethics of Captivity

The Ethics of Captivity, 2014