Bordering Europe through BIOSECURITY - Veterinary Fencing and the
More-than-Human Dimensions of Border-Making - Guest Lecture by Larissa
Fleischmann
This transdisciplinary lecture series features a distinguished group of
scholars, journalists, and activists who work on critical aspects of
contemporary dimensions of the European border regime.
Bordering Europe through BIOSECURITY - Veterinary Fencing and the
More-than-Human Dimensions of Border-Making - Guest Lecture by Larissa
Fleischmann - Dimensionen Europas
(uni-graz.at)
In this lecture, Larissa Fleischmann will look at the material bordering
processes that become visible in the context of animal diseases, in
particular, in the current handling of African Swine Fever (ASF). This highly
lethal virus, affecting both wild boars and domestic pigs, has spread across
Europe during the past years and is currently discussed as the most
threatening global animal disease of the 21st century as well as a major risk
for biosecurity in pig farms. With the intention to protect national pig
economies, several European states have reacted by erecting veterinary fences
along their national borders. Veterinary fencing as a biosecurity practice
originates in (post)colonial contexts outside of Europe and follows the
intention to block the 'risky' mobilities of wild animals - in the case of
ASF, wild boars, which are currently framed as a major reservoir and vector of
the disease. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork, the lecture will provide
insights into the shifting governmental rationalities behind veterinary
fencing in the German-Polish borderlands, where more than 500 kilometres of
fences were erected since 2020. By doing so, Larissa Fleischmann will
illustrate how veterinary fencing in the context of ASF is embedded into a
wider trend towards a re-materialisation of national borders within Europe.
She thus scrutinizes a more-than-human understanding of border-making, arguing
that borders are co-constituted by the complex relations between humans and a
number of nonhuman actors and forces, including animals, viruses, material
objects and technologies.
Larissa
Fleischmann is a
postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Department of Human Geography at
the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. In her ongoing research project
"Animals, Power and Space - More-than-Human Political Geographies of Animal
Health", which is funded by the German Research Foundation, she looks at
different governmental techniques in the handling of animal diseases, such as
fencing, zoning, mapping and killing. She conducted qualitative fieldwork in
the German-Polish borderlands and in Namibia, where she looked at the
postcolonial (dis)continuities in the handling of animal diseases. She earned
her PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Konstanz in
2019, for which she investigated the contested practices of solidarity with
refugees that emerged around the migration summer of 2015. Her research
interests include critical migration and border studies, more-than-human
geographies, as well as solidarity and living-together in migration
societies.
The lecture series is organized by the Cluster "Migration, Borders, and
Mobilities in, around, and across Europe" of teh Field of Excellence
"Dimensions of Europeanization".
Bordering Europe through BIOSECURITY - Veterinary Fencing and the
More-than-Human Dimensions of Border-Making - Guest Lecture by Larissa
Fleischmann - Dimensionen Europas
(uni-graz.at)
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