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This paper investigates the controversy around scallop dredging in Cardigan Bay, Wales. The area's scallop fishery was relatively small until the 1980s but has seen dramatic increases in catches in the past five years. Concerns have been raised about the effect of increasing fishing effort, especially for its potential impacts on the Bay's population of bottlenose dolphins, which were the basis of its designation as a Special Area of Conservation. I show that the controversy is not merely about human management of an endangered fish stock, but also involves the actions of scallops, dolphins, the sea, seabed, fishing technologies and regulatory practices. I also show that the events in Cardigan Bay frequently are co-produced by events and actions further afield. These topics are examined through the lens of assemblage theory, with which geographers have yet to widely engage. This emphasizes heterogeneity and emergence, and encourages a focus on processes of (de)territorialization. In the paper, I contrast the territorializing practices of regulatory regimes with the smoothing movements of dolphins, the sea and the seabed, showing how the actions of these nonhumans complicate attributions of environmental harm. Through this, the paper addresses the lack of attention paid to the sea by cultural geographers, particularly through a focus on materiality and multi-dimensionality.

This paper extends recent work that has called for greater attention to be paid to nonhuman difference. The burgeoning animal geographies literature has been very successful in dissecting the concept of 'nature' and in examining the myriad ways in which animal and human lives are intertwined. However, its focus is more often on collectivities, such as species and herds, than on individual animals. Through the brief case study of an octopus in The Deep, an aquarium in Kingston-upon-Hull, UK, the paper draws on and develops recently promoted notions of responsible anthropomorphism. It argues that future work might usefully pay greater attention to the lived experience of individual animals, and that further emphasis should be given to non-mammalian life forms. Doing so might not only shed light on these creatures' encounters with humans, but also help to give a greater sense of their lives beyond these direct encounters, challenging understandings of what it means to be 'animal'.

Robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) are novel technologies that take over the labor of dairy farming and reduce the need for human–animal interactions. Because robotic milking involves the replacement of ‘conventional’ twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, some claim robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. This paper examines how established ethical relations on dairy farms are unsettled by the intervention of a radically different technology such as AMS. The renegotiation of ethical relationships is thus an important dimension of how the actors involved are re-assembled around a new technology. The paper draws on in-depth research on UK dairy farms comparing those using conventional milking technologies with those using AMS. We explore the situated ethical relations that are negotiated in practice, focusing on the contingent and complex nature of human–animal–technology interactions. We show that ethical relations are situated and emergent, and that as the identities, roles, and subjectivities of humans and animals are unsettled through the intervention of a new technology, the ethical relations also shift.

This paper examines how freshwater anglers in northern England 'read' rivers as landscapes and work with them relationally, through various sorts of embodied knowledge-practices, as part of their angling activity: processes that they call 'watercraft'. We focus specifically on water as an environment that anglers encounter as a different world: unlike land and air, water is not an everyday medium in which humans (as terrestrial animals) live and breathe. We use this example of environmental engagement to go beyond visual engagement with landscapes, to show how people develop skills of environmental interpretation, mapping and nonvisual sense-making in ways that are particular to the water encounter. We conclude by arguing for a mutual and multisensory notion of environmental engagement that considers not merely human perception but also how environments, such as water, also shape that encounter.

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanization of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk.

Pesci's derogatory statement about African Americans shouts loudly about the racial hierarchy in our contemporary, white, \"supremacist\" culture (and even more so in the culture of the 1950s and 1960s when the story takes place); however, it also silently breathes out a noxious vein of something running much deeper in our acculturated white world that has been framed and crafted by our words, associations, and philosophies. Even in light of the Civil Rights Act, Brown vs. the Board of Education, desegregation and Affirmative Action, white America has to have someone it can place at the lowest point on the gradient of the hierarchy of oppression.

This paper studies how anglers in northern England invoke models of equilibrium and 'the balance of nature' in making sense of the water environments where they regularly fish, and how they use these models as norms or ideals when designing environmental management, alongside an emphasis on natural agency and unpredictability. Like other publics, anglers are shown to be a heterogeneous group in how they think about nature and their 'lay ecologies' reflect the problematic way in which equilibrium is normalised in science and policy more generally, showing similarities with professional environmental managers. But anglers are unusual publics, because their lay ecologies are put to work in collectively managing water environments, through stocking, culling and habitat management. Thus anglers' environmental knowledge practices co-produce the environments in which they develop their lay ecologies, making their models of nature and equilibrium important both conceptually and materially.

The author remembers taking a communication course during his early undergrad years. The course title was Interpersonal Communication and was taught by one of the professors from the Speech Communication Department. One of the basic aspects taught in the course was the concept of labeling. He remembers once seeing an animated video that graphically depicted how humans box themselves in by the labels they put on themselves and others. It's his opinion that this little cautionary tale reflects both the views of Buddhism and general semantics and the Buddhist teaching of the principle of inaction: this doesn't mean that no one ever does anything and simply sits down all our day on the meditation cushion. Rather, it means that people work at detaching from their own ego that wishes to take action all the time, gets the big head over his or her action, and strives to get whatever she/he needs to meet the ego's desires, cravings, addictions, obsessions with materialistic objects, and conditioned attachments.