Performance and Human–Animal Entanglements

The volume explores how nonhuman animal lives are entangled with human interests, conflicts, and desires, highlighting the role of performance in these interactions. Drawing on diverse case studies, it unfolds across four thematic sections: Training Animals, Show Machines, Artistic Experiments, and Political Conflicts.

The book benefits readers by sharpening ethical and critical awareness of how animals are entangled in human culture, from circuses and museums to art, games, and social media. Its key features are a strongly comparative, interdisciplinary approach and a focus on less-studied regions and practices. It delivers these benefits through carefully structured thematic sections and rich case studies that reveal hidden mechanisms of representation, exploitation, and interspecies exchange. The book can be read as a coherent whole, tracing different dimensions of human–animal entanglements, but each chapter also functions as a self-contained case study.

The book is aimed at scholars, students, and activists in cultural and animal studies, performance and media studies, and related fields, as well as anyone interested in ethics and human–animal relations.

Anna Wieczorkiewicz is the co-editor of the volume and the author of two texts included in it: "An Octopus Performs Human–Animal Entanglements" i "Sharik the Dog and Stepan the Cat in Wartime Scenes: Transformations of the Idea of Heroism Performed by Animal Protagonists".