Listening to the zoo : challenging zoo visiting conventions
Abstract
In academic discourse, zoos have often been conceptualised as places of spectacle, with scholars focusing on the ways in which these institutions enable the viewing of other-than-human animals by human publics. This article, however, describes a set of guided listening visits conducted at two UK zoos. The visits were designed to question, disrupt and offer alternatives to ingrained zoo visiting conventions. They were also used to generate data on how sound mediates, or has the potential to mediate, relations between zoo visitors and zoo animals. The article describes the visits, reflects on their conceptual underpinnings and discusses themes emerging from participants’ experiences. It demonstrates the relevance of listening walks as a research methodology and illustrates the complexity of sound as a form of multispecies entanglement in the zoo context. The listening visits are also shown to indicate potential directions for wider changes in zoo visiting culture.
Citation
Rice , T , Reed , A , Badman-King , A , Hurn , S & Rose , P 2021 , ' Listening to the zoo : challenging zoo visiting conventions ' , Ethnos , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2021.1966070
Publication
Ethnos
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0014-1844Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
Description
This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) under Grant ES/R009554/1.Collections
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