Animals are everywhere. They inhabit our forests, our fields, our
imaginations, our dreams, and our stories. Making appearances in
advertisements, television programs, movies, books, Internet memes,
and art, symbolic animals do tremendous work for us selling goods,
services, and ideas, as well as acting as stand-ins for our
interests and ideas. Yet, does knowing animals only symbolically
impact their lived experiences? Seeing Species: Re-presentations of
Animals in Media & Popular Culture examines the use of animals
in media, tracking species from appearances in rock art and picture
books to contemporary portrayals in television programs and movies.
Primary questions explored include: Where does thinking of other
beings in a detached, impersonal, and objectified way come from? Do
the mass media contribute to this distancing? When did humans first
think about animals as other others? Main themes include examining
the persistence of the human-animal divide, parallels in the
treatment of otherized human beings and animals, and the role of
media in either liberating or limiting real animals. This book
brings together sociological, psychological, historical, cultural,
and environmental ways of thinking about nonhuman animals and our
relationships with them. In particular, ecopsychological thinking
locates and identifies the connections between how we re-present
animals and the impact on their lived experiences in terms of
distancing, generating a false sense of intimacy, and stereotyping.
Re-presentations of animals are discussed in terms of the role the
media do or do not play in perpetuating status quo beliefs about
them and their relationship with humans. This includes theories and
methods such as phenomenology, semiotics, textual analysis, and
pragmatism, with the goal of unpacking re-presentations of animals
in order to learn not only what they say about human beings but
also how we regard members of other species.
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