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Kendra Coulter, Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity (New York: Palgrave MacMillan 2016)
Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity covers a vast intellectual terrain by bringing contemporary work and labour issues together with thinking about animals, nature, and social relations. In this compact and innovative work, Kendra Coulter makes a unique contribution to a subfield that is only just emerging. The book challenges us to question the separation of the human and natural world, and through the lens of work and labour processes, to begin to think about how animals' lives are interwoven with various forms of human social relations. Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity employs a range of research methods, ranging from policy analysis to ethnographical participant observation to make an argument for the importance of conceptualizing interspecies labour. Coulter proposes "a multifaceted and contextual approach to understanding work involving animals, one that is genuinely multispecies and that takes both human and animal well-being seriously." (2) Coulter's work, and the broader field of critical animal studies, seeks to extend the scholarship of social justice and "engaged theory" beyond the realm of humans. This book is an ambitious effort toward that objective.
The book begins with an impressive introduction that will be helpful to readers unfamiliar with research in animal studies. Coulter makes a convincing case for broadening the approach of labour studies to include animal work and humannonhuman relations, and outlines how she will pursue this throughout the book. She divides the three chapters of the book into "The Work Done With/For Animals" (Chapters 1 and 3), and "The Work Done By Animals" (Chapter 2).
Chapter 1 deals with "Daily Work and Labor Processes." Here Coulter reviews literature from the tradition of symbolic interactionism that focuses on ethnographically observing animal-human relations in the context of work, as well as labour process theory that includes animals in discussions of how work is organized and structured. She seeks to connect the insights drawn from these two influences to better understand labour processes involving animals. The...