Animal Studies and Posthuman Sociology

For most of its history, sociology treated nonhuman animals as peripheral to social life — background objects rather than participants in the making of society. That began to change in the late 1990s with what scholars now call the 'animal turn.' Drawing on feminist philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, and ethology, researchers argued that human societies are in fact thoroughly entangled with other species, and that sociology's traditional anthropocentrism left large domains of social life unexamined. Pets, livestock, laboratory animals, wildlife, pollinators, and pathogens all shape human institutions, emotions, and identities, and humans shape their lives in turn.

Clinton Sanders's early sociological work on dog owners (Understanding Dogs, 1999) and Leslie Irvine's If You Tame Me (2004) treated companion animals as genuine interaction partners whose subjectivity could be studied ethnographically. In Britain, Adrian Franklin's Animals and Modern Cultures (1999) traced shifts in human-animal relations across industrial modernity. By the 2000s a recognizably interdisciplinary field of 'Human-Animal Studies' (HAS) had formed, with its own journals (Society & Animals, Humanimalia), handbooks, and sections within professional associations including the American Sociological Association.

The field intersects with but is not reducible to animal ethics. Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975) and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983) provided philosophical foundations, but sociologists of animals have generally resisted purely normative framings. Their question is not whether animals should have rights but how specific human-animal relationships are organized, what work those relationships do in the broader social order, and how they might be transformed. As Arnold Arluke and Clinton Sanders argued in Regarding Animals (1996), the same society can simultaneously revere certain animals (pets) and industrially slaughter others (livestock) without experiencing the contradiction as such — a sociological puzzle in its own right.

Related work in science and technology studies has emphasized the active role of nonhumans in producing scientific facts and technologies. Bruno Latour's actor-network theory treats nonhumans as 'actants' whose agency must be followed in any account of how knowledge, infrastructure, and institutions come into being. Climate science, vaccine development, fisheries management, and pet genetic testing all exhibit this entanglement. The animal turn and the STS turn reinforce each other: both insist that 'the social' cannot be studied in isolation from the more-than-human world.