Publications

Erica von Essen, Kieran O’Mahony, Marianna Szczygielska, Thorsten Gieser, Virginie Vaté, Aníbal Arregui, Ludek Broz. 2023. The many boar identities: understanding difference and change in the geographies of European wild boar management. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2023.2269312

Wildlife management across Europe is increasingly characterised by a ‘war on wild boar’. In response to epidemiological and economic threats to pig production and agriculture, state agencies, policymakers and hunting organizations have altered their management as they attempt to contain wild boar. Through a cross-section overview of eight European countries with differentiated strategies – the Czech Republic, France, Germany, ...

Erica von Essen, Martin Drenthen, Manisha Bhardwaj. 2023. How fences communicate interspecies codes of conduct in the landscape: toward bidirectional communication?. Wildlife Biology. https://doi.org/10.1002/wlb3.01146

The fence provides two functions in wildlife management. First, it physically blocks, deters or impedes wild animals from access to protected areas or resources. Second, the fence signals impassability, danger, pain or irritation to animals through both of these pathways: the actual blockade and the signal of no access both communicates to wild animals that they should stay away, producing area effects which constrain animal m...

Erica von Essen. 2023. The Virtual Animal in the Digital Anthropocene. The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003262619-16

A desire to know the secret lives of wild animals has innovated surveillance technologies in the twenty-first century. From drones, remote-controlled spy cameras, go-pros and sensors to trail cams, humans can now keep an eye on the wild and enrol wildlife into the Internet of Things. In this chapter, I examine the capacities of surveillance technology to empower, subjugate, individualise, massify, emancipate or control wild an...

Pablo Vajas, Erica Von Essen, Lara Tickle, Marlène Gamelon. 2023. Meeting the challenges of wild boar hunting in a modern society: The case of France. Ambio. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-023-01852-1

Modern hunting is an ambivalent practice, torn between leisure and labor. Nowhere are these conflicting dimensions better manifested than for wild boar—a simultaneous game and pest species in many countries. Here, we consider the sociological, political and cultural phenomenon of wild boar hunting from a change perspective, starting at its historical roots to future implications concerning the changing demographics, drivers, n...

Erica von Essen, David Redmalm. 2023. Social licence to cull: Examining scepticism toward lethal wildlife removal in cities. People and Nature. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10518

The public may sometimes resist orders to cull wildlife, even when these pose a biosecurity threat. Managers and researchers desire to know why this is so. Research overwhelmingly focuses on the role of the species in conditioning resistance but our approach also shows the circumstances, settings, people responsible and methods used that undermine the legitimacy of the cull. We bring these together and use a social licence to ...

Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, Oscar Hartman Davies, Jennifer Dodsworth, Pauline Chasseray-Peraldi, Erica von Essen, Henry Anderson-Elliott. 2023. Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance. Progress in Environmental Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/27539687221145698

Digital technologies increasingly mediate relations between humans and nonhumans in a range of contexts including environmental governance, surveillance, and entertainment. Combining approaches from more-than-human and digital geographies, we proffer ‘digital ecologies’ as an analytical framework for examining digitally-mediated human–nonhuman entanglement. We identify entanglement as a compelling basis from which to articulat...

Erica von Essen, David Redmalm. 2023. License to Cull: A Research Agenda for Investigating the Necropolitics of Countryside Culling and Urban Pest Control. Society & Animals. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10129

This paper proposes an empirical research agenda for investigating the practices of biosecuritization of wild animal threats in modern society. Previously mostly studied on the lofty biopolitical level of directives on combatting invasive species or culling pests, we outline the conceptual and methodological points of entry for bringing the on-the-ground work of culling out-of-place, unwanted, individual animals and population...

Erica von Essen, Michael Allen. 2023. Cow Releases as Staged Liberations in Agri-Tourism. Critical Animal Studies and Activism: International Perspectives on Total Liberation and Intersectionality.

Weaving together a diverse range of scholarly-activist intersectional voices from around the world, Critical Animal Studies and Activism: International Perspectives on Total Liberation and Intersectionality co-edited by Anthony J. Nocella II and Richard J. White makes a powerful contribution to knowledge and understanding. It is essential reading for environmentalists, animal advocates, social justice organizers, policy-mak...

Erica von Essen, Jonathon Turnbull, Adam Searle, Finn Arne Jørgensen, Tim R. Hofmeester, René van der Wal. 2023. Wildlife in the Digital Anthropocene: Examining human-animal relations through surveillance technologies. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486211061704

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitic...

Erica von Essen. 2023. Trophy Hunting. Conservation and Society. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_51_23