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Crows can be found almost everywhere that people are, from tropical islands to deserts and arctic forests, from densely populated cities to suburbs and farms. Across these diverse landscapes, many species of crow are doing well: their intelligent and adaptive ways of life have allowed them to thrive amid human-driven transformations. Indeed, crows are frequently disliked for their success, seen as pests, threats, and scavengers on the detritus of human life. But among the vast variety of crows, there are also critically endangered species that are barely hanging on to existence, some of them the subjects of passionate conservation efforts.
The Wake of Crows is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world. He explores contemporary possibilities for shared life emerging in the context of ongoing processes of globalization, colonization, urbanization, and climate change. Moving among these diverse contexts, this book tells stories of extermination and extinction alongside fragile efforts to better understand and make room for other species. Grounded in the careful work of paying attention to particular crows and their people,
The Wake of Crows is an effort to imagine and put into practice a multispecies ethics. In so doing, van Dooren explores some of the possibilities that still exist for living and dying well on this damaged planet.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Worlds with Crows
Experimenting1. Interjecting Crows: Enacting Multispecies Communities. Brisbane, Australia
Stealing2. Spectral Crows: Conservation and the Work of Inheritance. The Big Island, Hawai'i
Cooperating3. Unwelcome Crows: Hospitality in the Anthropocene. Rotterdam, Netherlands
Fumigating4. Recognizing Ravens: Becoming Subjects Together. Mojave Desert, United States
Gifting5. Provisioning Crows: Cultivating Ecologies of Hope. Rota, Mariana Islands
Afterword: In the Wake of Typhoons
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Thom van Dooren is associate professor at the University of Sydney. He is the author of
Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia, 2014) and coeditor of
Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (Columbia, 2017).
Summary
The Wake of Crows is an exploration of the entangled lives of humans and crows. Focusing on five key sites, Thom van Dooren asks how we might live well with crows in a changing world.
Additional text
The Wake of Crows demonstrates yet another way that the humanities are integral to resisting species loss and plotting practices of living well together...holding open more inclusive ways of being at the edge of extinction requires the brave and urgent scholarship that animates [this book].
