Pigeon Tales : An Exploration of Humanimal Entanglement in Urban Spaces

Sammanfattning: This thesis is an exploration of the humanimal entanglements between humans and pigeons in the urban setting. It traces human-pigeon histories from pigeons’ domestication forward to the contemporary conceptions of pigeons as a pest animal. Pigeons are made visible in all of their cultural, socio-political, and symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, exposing their deep entanglements with humans across space and time. Using a combination of multi-species ethnography through ‘flaneur’ walks in Uppsala, Sweden and conceptual frameworks drawn from post-humanism, philosophy, and animal studies, pigeon-human relationships are problematized. The pigeon's ability to interrogate dualistic paradigms of nature/culture, wild/domestic, and human/animal are explored. It is argued that pigeons are active in the co-constitution of the urban space alongside humans, and are participating in reciprocal humanimal relations - they are not simply objects to be acted upon but have their own agency. From pigeons we can learn valuable stories about ourselves, and the more-than-human world.