Our Lives Without Us : Urban Animals in News Reports and Social Media During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, photos and reports of animals making unexpected appearances in urban areas began to appear in social media and news outlets. These images and stories—from which humans were largely absent—included dolphins in the canals of Venice, a record number of flamingos in Mumbai, drunken elephants in the Yunnan province in China, wild boards in Barcelona, and undaunted urban foxes in central London. In the Nordic countries, the boundary between the urban and the rural was blurred by sightings of wild animals in city centers, challenging the myth of a wild Nordic nature, untouched by human hand. Many of the stories were proven to be either false or misleading, such as the Venice dolphins and the drunken elephants. The animals who allegedly showed up in, returned to, or overcrowded certain areas were in fact there all along, but had not gained attention until now. Although several of the stories are lacking in credibility, they can be seen as indications of humans’ understanding of themselves and their relations to nature and other animals. As such, they differ from typical romanticizations of a pristine nature untouched by human hand, as the depicted sceneries are human-built environments. Rather than a dream of a pure nature in a distant past, the images and reports imagine a future without humans. We suggest that lockdown fauna imageries express a happy misanthropy and an optimistic apocalypticism that capture human self-understanding in a society characterized by pandemic and environmental crises. However, these seemingly misanthropic imaginaries also contain fantasies of a future where humans coexist peacefully with other animals, and where the discomforts and inequalities of urban life have been eradicated.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialantropologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Anthropology (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Sociologi -- Socialpsykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Sociology -- Social Psychology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

The Ahuman

biosecurity

biopolitics

human-animal studies

necropolitics

urban studies

wildlife management

Working Life Studies

arbetslivsvetenskap

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