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.

Prof. Anna Wieczorkiewicz is a cultural anthropologist at the University of Warsaw, Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology. Her interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of anthropology, philosophy, sociology, and literature. She is the author of books exploring representations of the body in museums, bodily practices, representations of cultural diversity, the cultural history of monstrosity, travel and tourism practices, and travel writing.Sylwia Siedlecka is a literary scholar, cultural studies researcher, and writer, Assistant Professor at the Institute of Western and Southern Slavic Studies, University of Warsaw. Her work focuses on the cultures of Central Europe and the Balkans, with an emphasis on cultural performances, social imaginaries, cultural transfers, and the history and cultural metaphors of the circus.