Geography Commons^™

Captive: Zoometric Operations In Gaza, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization …

The Regulatory Life Of Threatened Species Lists, Irus Braverman

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 1 in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities, Irus Braverman, ed.

“The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists” explores a prominent technology for the legal regulation of nonhuman life: the threatened species list. I argue that threatened species lists are biopolitical technologies: they produce and reinforce underlying species ontologies by creating, calculating, and governing the boundaries between various nonhuman species. Such a differentiated treatment of the life and death of nonhuman species through their en-listing, down- and up-listing, multi-listing, and un-listing translates into the positive protection and active governance of such species. Listing threatened species thus becomes a …