Roadkill Encounters and Affective Solidarity: Exploring Multispecies Fellowship through Disgust, Pain, and Mourning
Roč.19,č.1(2022)
Climate Action: Transforming Infrastructure, Cultivating Attentiveness, Practicing Solidarity
This article examines visual images of roadkill and the bodily affects they invoke. Exploring specifically the affects of grief, disgust, and pain, I suggest they are important modalities in the act of mourning the unmourned, changing the perception of roadkill as merely collateral damage. I explore encounters with roadkill through an analysis of photographs by Steve Baker (2011) which capture animals’ corpses on country lanes in the UK. Drawing on a multidisciplinary apparatus, I utilise various tools from affect theory and photography in social and cultural studies. I demonstrate how affective encounters offer an intervention into the prevalent unconcern and indifference to nonhuman suffering and ecological damage – a dynamic of address and rejection that enables possibilities of solidarity and creaturely fellowship.
grief, affect, pain, disgust, creaturely poetics, photography, automobility
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