The thesis deals with a relationship between humans and animals. In particular, it focuses on a trend of inclusion and exclusion of animals to/from society. Main research questions are designed to answer a question how the dynamics of this trend looks. A dynamic of moral status of animals, legal status of animals, symbolic status of animals and a status of another living being is examined on the European society from antiquity to the present. This time period is divided into 7 parts. The thesis explores not only the dynamics of the statuses, but also their interaction. The symbolic establishment of human - animal boundaries in the European history is considered as well. The thesis reflects essential turning points and tendencies which had the influence on the trend of inclusion and exclusion of animals to/from society. Reader should get the basic knowledge about the development of human - animal relationship through the history.

Global initiatives regarding environmental change have increasingly become part of political agendas and of our collective imagination. In order to form sustainable societies, education is considered crucial by organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. But how is the notion of sustainability imagined and formed in educational practices? What does sustainability make possible, and whom does it involve? These critical questions are not often asked in educational research on sustainability. This study suggests that the absence of critical questions in sustainability education is part of a contemporary post-political framing of environmental issues. In order to re-politicize sustainability in education, this study critically explores how education—as an institution and a practice that is supposed to foster humans—responds to environmental change. The aim is to explore how sustainability is formed in education, and to discuss how these formations relate to ideas of what education is, and whom it is for. This interdisciplinary study uses theories and concepts from cultural studies, feminist theory, political theory, and philosophy of education to study imaginaries of the unknown, nonhuman world in the context of education. The focus of the empirical investigation is on teacher education in Sweden, and more precisely on those responsible for teaching the future generations of teachers – the teacher instructors. With help from empirical findings from focus groups, the study asks questions about the ontological, political, and ethical potential and risk of bringing the unknown Other into education. / Utbildning har globalt fått en central roll i strävanden efter att skapa hållbar utveckling. Initiativ tagna av såväl Förenta Nationerna som Europeiska Unionen, där utbildning och hållbarhet kopplas samman, vittnar om att frågor som rör miljöförändringar har blivit allt viktigare både på de politiska agendorna och i våra kollektiva, kulturella föreställningsvärldar. Men hur formas begreppet hållbar utveckling när det ska göras undervisningsbart? Vilka framtider möjliggör hållbar utveckling i utbildningssammanhang och vem inkluderas i begreppet? Frågor av kritisk karaktär är ofta frånvarande i tidigare utbildningsforskning som rör hållbar utveckling. Denna avhandling tar sin utgångspunkt i att frånvaron av kritiska frågor kan ses som del i en samtida postpolitisk inramning av miljöfrågor i såväl utbildningssammanhang som i samhället i stort. Studien undersöker hur utbildningsväsendet, som är en central institution i fostrandet av framtidens medborgare, tar sig an frågor som rör miljöförändringar. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur hållbar utveckling formas genom utbildning samt att diskutera hur dessa formationer relateras till idéer om vad utbildning är och vem som ska utbildas. På så vis söker studien också efter sätt att re-politisera hållbar utveckling i utbildningssammanhang. Avhandlingen är tvärvetenskaplig och använder teorier och begrepp från kulturstudier, feministisk teori, politisk teori och utbildningsfilosofi för att studera vad utbildning som relaterar till natur- och miljöfrågor möjliggör. Empiriskt undersöks svenska lärarutbildare, som ansvarar för att utbilda framtidens lärare. Studien ställer frågor om ontologiska, politiska och etiska aspekter av att öppna upp utbildningen för det som ligger bortom mänsklig kontroll och kunskap. / Sustainable development as an area of knowledge

Using an exploratory approach, this master thesis aims to provide an understanding of the issues around wildlife films as possible study objects. In the first part, this is made by examining some perspectives of the recent field of the Human-Animal Studies (HAS), which seeks to provide an interdisciplinary look at the several issues affecting the vast range of ethical, emotional, symbolic interactions between humans and nonhuman animals. The research also tries to enumerate some of the main theoretical, formal and historiographical questions on this matter with an analysis of the documentary film and wildlife film genres. In its final part, this master thesis embarks on an examination of Jacques Perrin´s Winged Migration (2001) and Luc Jacquet s March of the Penguins (2005) with the assumption that they can serve to demonstrate the importance and the complexity of animal representation in film. / Este trabalho tem como objetivo oferecer, a partir de uma perspectiva principalmente exploratória e bibliográfica, um olhar para os chamados wildlife films, ou filmes de vida selvagem, enquanto objetos de pesquisa. Esse esforço é realizado em um primeiro momento com o auxílio do recente campo de pesquisa dos Human-Animal Studies, que buscam compreender de maneira interdisciplinar as diversas problemáticas que afetam a imensa gama de interações éticas, afetivas, simbólicas entre os humanos e os animais não humanos. A pesquisa também empreende, nesse bojo, um estudo do documentário e do subgênero em questão em uma análise teórica e na descrição de um breve trajeto historiográfico. Em seguida, em um segundo momento, é realizada uma análise, ainda dentro da proposta exploratória do estudo, dos filmes Migração Alada (2001), de Jacques Perrin, e A Marcha dos Pinguins (2005), de Luc Jacquet.

Donkeys have been useful helpers to people especially at transporting burdens and in agriculture for thousands of years. Nowadays they make livelihoods of rural as well as urban inhabitants over all continents easier. The use of donkeys in agriculture and transport is vanishing in developing countries due to the mechanization. We know only little about how and why people keep breeding of donkeys in developing countries. Theoretical part of the thesis tries to summarize previous basic knowledge about breeding and using donkeys. It focuses on domestication of donkeys, their use in history in different parts of the world, current position of donkeys and partly on relations between men and animals from the view of Human-Animal Studies. A research in a part of Polabí lowland is added. The main practical aim of the thesis is to take a look at the phenomenon of breeding donkeys in the Czech Republic in the present and bring any findings about why do people breed donkeys in modern times in this developing country. Research finds how are donkeys bred, what reasons lead breeders to get donkeys and what their real use is. The thesis contributes to popularization of this theme among experts and laymen and suggests methodology for research of breeding donkeys in other areas as well.

This essay concerns the relationship between humans and animals during the Late Iron Age, 450-1050 AD, in the Nordic region. The archaeological and osteological material studied is animal style ornamentation and inhumation and cremation graves. The essay is based on a human-animal perspective and is inspired by Human-Animal Studies (HAS). This perspective shows how an anthropocentric worldview and human exceptionalism have come to influence the previous research regarding humans and animals. From this perspective, the animal's agency becomes central, which means that the animal acts as its own subject that mutually affects people and each other. Several parallels between the animal style ornamentation and the osteological material are also apparent both within the previous research and within my own analysis. In the previous research, a secondary view of animals abounds, and the focus is on human agency. But in the study's analysis, it becomes clear how the animal's agency is present. In both materials examined, bodies are mixed and assimilated in different and unique ways. The interpretation of the material is that people during the Late Iron Age thought "with both people and animals" and that people wanted to be influenced by animals. There was a world view were all living beings were a transversal unit, a so-called zoe. Both humans and animals were becomings initiated in a process of eternal co-creation.

As humanity grapples with its significant global footprint in this era, there is a growing fascination with delving into the experiences and viewpoints of other animal species. This juncture offers an opportune moment to delve into the aesthetics of non-human animals by using diverse interdisciplinary methods and viewpoints. Insights of feminist aesthetics demonstrate how traditional understanding of aesthetics and aesthetic experience are heavily influenced by cultural assumptions about gender. Aesthetics as a humanistic discipline has determined the portrayal of non-human animals as beings with no capacity for aesthetic sensibility. In this thesis, I aim to bring to emergence the connection between human exceptionalist assumptions about aesthetics and the production of scientific knowledge about non-human animals. I defend the necessity of recognizing birds as beings with surprising and complex aesthetic sensibilities. Currently most scientists favor the adaptationist idea that the perception of beauty is influential in non-human animal lives only insofar as it serves to advertise fitness, and favor the reproduction and survival of the species. By weaving together insights from feminist philosophy of science and post-humanist studies of the human-animal bond, I present a framework capable of challenging human exceptionalist accounts of aesthetics. Particularly, I promote a methodology sensitive to the construction of gender in scientific portrayals of birds and their aesthetic preferences. I intertwine feminist critiques to pinpoint and challenge adumbrations of androcentrism in both animal sciences and aesthetics. Finally I examine, through an ungendered framework, instances of bowerbird behavior, and pinpoint aesthetic agency as an ability that we share in orchestration with other non-human animals. I conclude by proposing new avenues for research of non-human animal aesthetics.

This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD. / Denna avhandling utgör ett bidrag till feministiska laboratoriestudier och är en kritisk analys av naturvetenskaperna. Närmare bestämt är det en feministisk studie av forskning om Alzheimers sjukdom, dess biokemiska verkningar och dödliga relationer utifrån ett års fältarbete som labbtekniker i ett fluglabb. Naturvetenskaperna har under decennier fascinerat genusforskare. Dessa discipliner formar kunskapen om vad som räknas som natur och naturligt, hälsa och sjukdom, normalt eller inte, och de har gjort så med stor samhällelig auktoritet genom Europeisk modernitet. Forskare inom feministiska teknovetenskapliga studier har länge hävdat att vetenskap också är social praktik med politiska implikationer. Begrepp som natur, djur, mänskligt eller kropp, kön och livet självt kan inte tas för givna utan formas också i laboratoriets naturkultur. Med utgångspunkt i sådana feministiska teknovetenskaplig teoribildningar och metodologiska utgångspunkter bearbetar denna avhandling frågor om hur vetenskapliga fakta om Alzheimers sjukdom skapas i laboratoriet idag. Vilka kroppar, verkligheter och etisk-politiska förhållningssätt aktualiseras? Vem får leva och vem får dö i vardagliga laboratoriepraktiker? Teoretiskt bygger avhandlingen framför allt på Karen Barads agentiella realism när den diskuterar sammanvävningen mellan mänskligt och icke-mänskligt, samt det som kallas posthumanistisk performativitet, i relation till Alzheimers sjukdom som den förkroppsligas i transgena fruktflugor (Drosophila melanogaster) i laboratoriet. I särskilt fokus står relationerna som skapas inom den biokemiska forskningen kring död, biologiskt avfall och kroppslighet.

Magical realist fiction is marked by a striking abundance of animals. Analysing magical realist novels from Australia and Canada, as well as exploring the influence of two seminal Latin American magical realist narratives, this thesis focuses on representations of animals and animality. Examining human-animal relationships in the postcolonial context reveals that magical realism embodies and represents an idea of feral animality that critically engages with an inherently imperialist and Cartesian humanism, and that, moreover, accounts for magical realism's elusiveness within systems of genre categorisation and labelling. It is this embodiment and presence of animal agency that animates magical realism and injects it with life and vibrancy. The magical realist writers discussed in this dissertation make use of animal practices inextricably intertwined with imperialism, such as pastoral farming, natural historical collections, the circus, the rodeo, the Wild West show, and the zoo, as well as alternative animal practices inherently incompatible with European ideologies, such as the Aboriginal Dreaming, Native North American animist beliefs, and subsistence hunting, as different ways of positioning themselves in relation to the Cartesian human subject. The circus is a particular influence on the form and style of many magical realist texts, whereby oxymoronically structured circensian spaces form the basis of the narratives‟ realities, and hierarchical imperial structures and hegemonic discourses that are portrayed as natural through Cartesian science and Linnaean taxonomies are revealed as deceptive illusions that perpetuate the self-interests of the powerful.

This thesis, Birdpoetic Worlds: Sensing the more-than-human worlds through Nina Södergren’s bird poems, analyses a selection of poems by Swedish poet Nina Södergren (1924–2015) from the collection Högt ärade trana: Nya dikter och urval av tidigare poesi* (2012),  through the lens of ecocriticism and animism. The aim is to identify and explore how her bird poetics can function as an invitation to sense a relational experience and interconnectedness with the more-than-human world, especially through attentiveness. Examples of bird poetry by a small selection of different poets will be explored to provide a broader context of the genre. The analyses will be followed by reflections about going beyond the written human language, transitioning from reading to listening, immersing in nature’s soundscapes, and experiencing it attentively firsthand. It explores the different linguistic, poetic, and embodied approaches, and what these mean for interconnectedness will be discussed. The entrance point to the contextual review is The Bird Symphony by Nils Aslak Valkeapää. * Translated: Highly honored crane: New poems and a selection of earlier poetry. / Denna uppsats, Birdpoetic Worlds: Sensing the more-than-human worlds through Nina Södergren’s bird poems, analyserar ett urval av dikter av poeten Nina Södergren (1924–2015) från samlingen Högt ärade trana: Nya dikter och urval av tidigare poesi (2012), genom en ekokritisk och animistisk lins. Syftet är att identifiera och utforska hur hennes fågelpoetik kan fungera som en inbjudan att känna en relationell upplevelse och samhörighet med den mer-än-mänskliga världen, särskilt genom uppmärksamhet. Som en kort bakgrund presenteras exempel på fågelpoesi av olika poeter. Efter analysen finns en reflektion kring att gå bortom det litterära mänskliga språket, genom övergången från att läsa till att lyssna och fördjupa sig i naturens ljudlandskap, att uppmärksamt uppleva dem på egen hand. Den utforskar de olika språkliga, poetiska och förkroppsligade tillvägagångssätten och vad dessa betyder för samhörigheten diskuteras. Ingången till den kontextuella genomgången är Fågelsymfonin av Nils Aslak Valkeapää.