Alex Lockwood | University of Sunderland (original) (raw)

Books by Alex Lockwood

John Hunt Publishing, 2019

Arriving at midlife with a string of failed jobs behind him, Anthony Fahey knows he’s lucky to be... more Arriving at midlife with a string of failed jobs behind him, Anthony Fahey knows he’s lucky to be given a last chance as a radiation monitor at HMNB Clyde, where Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons are kept.

Struggling to keep his marriage together after the death of his wife’s father, Anthony finds himself at the centre of an emergency when an accident on a Trident submarine throws the base into crisis. As the situation worsens old memories from childhood reach into the present, and Anthony begins to understand that it isn’t only radiation that has a half-life.

Inspired by real events, The Chernobyl Privileges depicts the traumatic experience of surviving disaster. Both heart-warming and tragic, it explores the consequences of decisions we are forced to make and that shape our lives.

The Pig in Thin Air

Published with Lantern Books in April 2016, this is an account of how the author came to terms wi... more Published with Lantern Books in April 2016, this is an account of how the author came to terms with his destructive habits and changed his relationship with his own body. The Pig in Thin Air critically explores the relationship of the body to animal activism; looking at academic scholarship and animal advocacy organizations, the book explores the dimensions of embodiment from the author's own body to those of the animals he bears witness to, from bodies of knowledge and those who place themselves in the way of the machinery of death, through to our physical efforts to make sense of a world where so much is desensitized, disembodied, and fragmented.

In exploring different modes of activism throughout North America, The Pig in Thin Air asks how animal advocacy and environmental activism can best join forces to tackle these interconnected crises in such a way that we might develop deeper, more authentic compassionate relationships with all other animals, including ourselves.

The {bio}graphies series explores the relationships between human and nonhuman animals through scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences viewed through the lens of autobiography and memoir, to deepen and complicate our perspectives on the other beings with whom we share the planet.

Papers by Alex Lockwood

None, 2020

This article was written for the journal Climatic Change and its special issue on “Everyday Clima... more This article was written for the journal Climatic Change and its special issue on “Everyday Climate Cultures: Understanding the cultural politics of climate change”. With less than a decade left for us to change course from catastrophic climate change, this commentary on the contents of the special issue employed speculative fiction, Afrofuturism and sci-fi storytelling techniques to motivate scientists, and others, to use their academic expertise, and become activists in combating the climate crisis.

Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2019

The idea of the inclusive society as a policy instrument is based on equality of opportunities an... more The idea of the inclusive society as a policy instrument is based on equality of opportunities and the equal capacity of members, irrespective of differences such as gender and faith. Operating within society, the idea of inclusive journalism follows this model, including the anthropocentric practices that exclude the living conditions and concerns of most non-human animals. This article argues that for journalism to be truly inclusive the anthro-pocentric nature of both society and the media must be exposed, and our social practices extended beyond the species divide. The article begins by illustrating the common journal-istic practices of reporting on farmed animals, before exploring the new practices of Animal Journalism and, within scholarship, the field of Critical Media and Animal Studies. The article then turns to political theory before suggesting that Donaldson and Kymlicka's concept of positive relational rights can be placed at the centre of a non-anthropocentric and inclusive journalism practice.

Writing for Animals, 2018

The more we study animals, the smarter they get. My introduction from the anthology from Ashland... more The more we study animals, the smarter they get.

My introduction from the anthology from Ashland Creek Press. Here's a full description:

A unique anthology of articles and essays to inspire animal-themed creative writing
Despite all we know about the sentience of animals, society tends to view and treat nonhuman animals as lesser creatures. And for society to change its views, writers must change their views. We must look closely at how we depict animals and ask ourselves difficult questions. For example, are we using animals for our writing in a way that is authentic and fair? Or are we using them for our own purposes, leading to further misconceptions and abuses?

As our awareness awakens about animals’ intelligence, sensitivity, and social and emotional lives, literature is beginning to reflect this change in awareness. Yet little has been written about the process of writing about animals, from crafting point of view to giving animals realistic voices.

Writers face many questions and choices in their work, from how to educate without being didactic to how to develop animals as characters for an audience that still views them as ingredients. In this book, writers will find myriad voices to assist them in writing about animals, from tips about craft to understanding the responsibility of writing about animals.

Articles & Contributors
Do We Have the Right to Write About Animals? Joanna Lilley
Animals that Work in Stories Lisa Johnson
A Case for More Reality in Writing for Animals Rosemary Lombard
Meeting the Wild Things Where They Are Kipp Wessel
Rewilding Literature: Catalyzing Compassion for Wild Predators through Creative Nonfiction Paula MacKay
Rabies Bites: How Stephen King Made a Dog a Compelling Main Character Hannah Sandoval
Real Advocacy within Fantasy Worlds Beth Lyons
Writing Animals Where You Are Hunter Liguore
Other Nations Marybeth Holleman
Giving Animals a Voice: Letters from an Ashland Deer John Yunker
No One Mourns an Unnamed Animal: Why Naming Animals Might Help Save Them Midge Raymond
Are You Willing? Sangamithra Iyer
With a Hope to Change Things: An Exploration of the Craft of Writing about Animals with the Founders of Zoomorphic Magazine Alex Lockwood

The global Save Movement, alongside other animal rights organisations and practices, has since 20... more The global Save Movement, alongside other animal rights organisations and practices, has since 2010 sought to bring the experiences of nonhuman farmed animals into the public domain from privatized, usually hidden spaces of industrial procedure and slaughter.

One key mechanism used is to conduct vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passers-by. Central to the practice are the roles played by
emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a selfstyled ‘love-based’ compassion for other living beings. In 2014, I joined the Save Movement in Toronto for a number of vigils, engaging in an autoethnographic study of the means by which activists employ emotional labour, bearing witness and bodily encounter in foregrounding the realities of life for industrially farmed nonhuman animals. This article argues that the Save Movement represents a new moment (although not wholly without precedent) in the practices of animal rights activism.

Working from the intellectual standpoint of Critical Animal Studies, the structure of the paper employs this autoethnographic and emotionally-affected personal account of taking part as a researcher-activist in the vigils, to offer access to experiences of how emotion, activism and empathy overlap in ‘coming to care’ for nonhuman others in public settings. The article seeks to elucidate the Save Movement’s emphasis on bodily encounter and the making visible of already existing embodied entanglements with farmed nonhuman animals, and suggests this form of engaged witnessing offers opportunity for radically reimagining our species’ existing relationships with those species we currently identity as food.

Launched in 2015, Zoomorphic.net was first an online and is now also a print magazine of writing ... more Launched in 2015, Zoomorphic.net was first an online and is now also a print magazine of writing “in celebration and defence of wild animals”. It was established by two writers, Susan Richardson and James Roberts, who have dedicated their practices, and much of their personal lives as well, to championing the creation of “spaces of truce” in which writers from around the world can share attempts to reconfigure how we perceive nonhuman animals and our entanglements with them; indeed, with animals’ own entanglements with the world and with each other, outside of the human-centred view. I interviewed Susan and James after the launch of Issue 1, sitting in a public park in the city of Cardiff, capital of Wales, on a blustery but warm summer’s day after the two of them had conducted a Zoomorphic editorial meeting. They were both enthused by the reaction people had toward their venture, and keen to see it grow and shape the writing landscape for animals in Britain, and across the world. I have followed Zoomorphic since through a number of issues, having published over 150 writers, with its first print anthology, Driftfish, focusing on marine life, having come out in December 2016. The sense of a community of practice able to write, read and share in the craft of writing about animals in more animal- and less anthropo- centric ways has been critical to the way in which the project has developed since its inception.
I caught up again with Susan and James to see how the project has shifted and changed shape—a natural development for a publication interested and involved with the zoopoetics of wild animals. In both conversations we explored both the “macro” work of establishing an animal-centric space of truce for new writing, and at the “micro” work of the individual acts of writing craft, technique and imaginative leaps that shapes and expands the animal-centric ethos of such a space. This essay is drawn from these interviews, as well as from follow-up conversations, the study of their books, and writing published in Zoomorphic.

H is for Hypocrite I’m interested in asking what nature writing feels like when we read it throu... more H is for Hypocrite

I’m interested in asking what nature writing feels like when we read it through the lens of vegan theory. I argue there is a lack of attention given to the ways in which contemporary creative non-fiction nature writing fails the nonhuman body; and that this failure (in the text, and our criticism) undermines the often explicit pro-environmental messages of the texts. Such a failure can be identified by reading/writing environmental or nature texts through a vegan lens. This essay will then explore how vegan studies furthers ecocritical studies, as well as be of use to ‘nature writers’ in deepening the impact of their work.

My essay provides readings of two contemporary nature narratives: Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Charles Foster’s Being a Beast. Both have been praised for their quality of writing and embodied engagement with the nonhuman; both pronounce a need to steward our environmental commons better. And yet both fail to address the structural causes of the devastation to nonhuman bodies that they argue pro-environmental behaviours will protect.

H is for Hawk retells the story of Macdonald’s training of a Goshawk, Mabel, intermingled with the death of her father. Being a Beast is Foster’s attempt to ‘live like’ five different nonhuman animals. Both books advocate a nostalgic conservancy ethic of intimately ‘knowing nature’ as a means to protect it. However, both Macdonald and Foster fail to engage with contemporary understandings of the role of speciesism in contributing to the damage inflicted on nonhuman nature through, for example, industrial animal agriculture.

Macdonald’s book reinforces an outdated paradigm of relating, based on speciesist valuations, and reinforcing systems of exploitation. In perpetuating a logic in which humans express love for some animals but exploit others, she forecloses an opportunity for a radical episteme of affective knowledge, gained though an embodied engagement with other species’ bodies that her writing, on the surface, seems to advocate. I explore this question through the book’s other birds: the dead one-day-old chicks, by-products of broiler production that Macdonald feeds to Mabel; and the pheasants that the pair hunts. These different relations to less charismatic birds help us see the gap in knowledge between the model Macdonald offers, based on speciesist hierarchies implicit in the worst degradations of nature, and a more entangled, vegan ethic.

Similarly, Foster’s attempts at garnering embodied knowledges of the nonhuman other are grounded in his anthroponormative view of them as other, often as victims, falling into the fallacy of human exceptionalism. His nature writing remains rooted in a historical relation to knowledge of nature that is blind to the systems of exploitation that such knowledge shores up and sustains.

My essay argues that Ecocriticism must begin to explore ‘nature writing’ through the lens of vegan studies if it is to avoid the trap of failing to ethically engage with the environmental crises of our 21st century; similarly, this essay implores ‘nature writers’ to attend to a vegan ethic in their contributions to bearing witness to the nonhuman world.

The idea of the inclusive society as a policy instrument is based upon equality of opportunities ... more The idea of the inclusive society as a policy instrument is based upon equality of opportunities and the equal capacity of members regardless of differences such as gender and faith. Operating within society, the idea of inclusive journalism follows this model, including the anthropocentric practices that exclude the living conditions and concerns of most nonhuman animals. This article argues that for journalism to be truly inclusive the anthropocentric nature of both society and the media must be exposed, and our social practices extended beyond the species divide. The article begins by illustrating the common journalistic practices of reporting on farmed animals, before exploring the new practices of Animal Journalism and, within scholarship, the field of Critical Media and Animal Studies. The article then turns to political theory before suggesting Donaldson and Kymlicka's concept of positive relational rights can be placed at the centre of a non-anthropocentric and inclusive journalism practice.

Biographical and autoethnographic accounts can tell us much about our relations with other beings... more Biographical and autoethnographic accounts can tell us much about our relations with other beings, and are useful for studying the ways we articulate how we come to know and care for nonhuman animals. These accounts often capture the embodied nature of people's experiences in encountering others, and can be explored for ways of understanding the role played by the body and its affects in advocating for change in our relationships with nonhuman animal species. This attention given to the body is part of a growing corpus that privileges embodiment in research. As Despret (2013) puts it, 'bodies are actively being involved' in research in ever more foregrounded ways. Much of this focus has originated from the social sciences with a growing awareness that our bodies are the source of how society is structured. For Shilling (2012): 'It is the properties and capacities of embodied humans that provide the corporeal basis on which identities and social relations are consolidated and changed.' It is never only our 'disembodied' intellectual evaluations that guide action, but always thoughts entangled with bodily reactions that become knowable and nameable as emotions: joy, disgust, anger, fear, etc. Although its roots have not always been engaged with species relations — indeed, the history of sociology and philosophy have left us with the feeling that other bodies are barely relevant to the creation of social life — such study has brought the nonhuman and inanimate into the field of affecting and affected bodies with which we are entangled. The dominant (male, white) view of social life focusing on abstract, Universalist processes while excluding particular bodies within those processes is being challenged. The beings who make our social world work are not only human. To pay these other individuals consideration is to give what Walker (1992) has called an 'attention to the particular' grounded in the feminist ethic-of-care tradition that rejects hierarchical Cartesian objectivism. Such a rationalist ethic is at the heart of speciesism, the ideological practice — ideologies are always dynamic practices — that arbitrarily separates our species from others. This turn to the body and embodiment has brought about a redefinition of what the body is. Blackman (2012) writes that bodies are best defined as 'processes that extend into and are immersed in worlds. That is, rather than talk of bodies, we might instead talk of brain–body–world entanglements, and where, how and whether we should attempt to draw boundaries between the human and nonhuman, self and other.' She suggests that if we understand our experiences as 'brain–body–world entanglements' we come much closer to sensory reality and our corporeal embeddedness in relations. As with other areas of lived practice, scholarship also only begin to make sense when we take account of our 'brain–body–world entanglements' with the subjects of our curiosity and criticality. When this is applied (or rather, 'felt into') the ways in which the lives of nonhuman animals can be made more visible, the work finds itself at home in the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). For Taylor and Twine (2014) CAS 'is concerned with the nexus of activism, academia and animal suffering and maltreatment.'

Donald Turner has suggested that “if a non-human animal’s story is to be told or heard, this will... more Donald Turner has suggested that “if a non-human animal’s story is to be told or heard, this will require a different type of listening than that to which humans are accustomed.” This chapter proposes that not only do we require a new type of listening for creaturely life, but also new forms of narrating those stories, and an attentiveness to the creatureliness of narrative itself. Here I explore the processes by which writers imagine and narrativize the creaturely nature of human-animal relationships and the place and representation of the nonhuman in their work and lives. I am particularly interested in the affective dimensions of a creaturely writing process—the structures of feeling for writers when they engage with ideas and narratives that are seen as creaturely, which might be directly concerned with the nonhuman, or indirectly approach these subjects. The chapter asks: How does responding to scenes of creatureliness expose for us the affects of writing in relation to how the human and the animal are delineated?
In addition, if writing is, as Jose Rivera names it, “the explanation of life to the living” where writers “try to tease apart the conflicting noises of living and make some kind of pattern and order” how does the non-linguistic nature and sense of those being written about impact upon the writers’ processes; those stories being told anew, and listened to? And by whom? How do writers avoid didacticism and propaganda in their work? How are affects and emotions from the research processes parsed back through the everyday lives of those engaged with creaturely narrative pursuit?
A particular thread will engage with the belief that fiction creates knowledge differently, and it is a different kind of knowledge created through narrative. Engaging with ideas from Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, with Susan McHugh’s Animal Stories, and with the strands of literary considerations of affect theory, I will elucidate a sense of the process of ‘writing the creaturely animal’ in literary works that are an attempt to create a break with the business-as-usual representations of the nonhuman in contemporary culture.
This is important. It is through a sense of new more-than-representational narratives, the something-out-there that we are beginning to become attuned to, that we will become cognizant of other beings in ways that no longer deny them (or us) our creatureliness, and instead build constellations of affect and meaning-making between and becoming-with species, rather than over and against them.

Keywords: creatural, writing, craft, emotion, pigs, Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales

How can theories of affect and felt emotions be useful in studying the communication of environme... more How can theories of affect and felt emotions be useful in studying the communication of environmental crises? Beginning from tears spilt over a graph of transgressed planetary boundaries published in an academic paper, this article explores the presentation in graphic visual forms of affective imagery and a growing sophistication amongst scientists, policymakers and activist communicators in the visualization of information, data and stories employed to carry the often difficult and complex messages of current earth systems crises. Critically, this article attends to the “emotion work” of such images. Taking a lead from cultural sociology and attempting to elucidate the relationship between societies under pressure and its choice of texts, this article considers the environmental documentary Cowspiracy [Anderson, K., & Kuhn, K. (2014). Cowspiracy. San Francisco, CA: AUM Films & First Spark Media.] to ask questions of affect’s relation to expressions of the earth systems crisis, which is also a crisis of culture.

In the fiftieth year since the publication of Silent Spring, the importance of Rachel Carson's wo... more In the fiftieth year since the publication of Silent Spring, the importance of Rachel Carson's work can be measured in its affective influence on contemporary environmental writing across the humanities. The ground broken by Silent Spring in creating new forms of writing has placed affect at the very centre of contemporary narratives that call for pro-environmental beliefs and behaviours. A critical publicfeelings framework is used to explore these issues and trace their passage from the private and intimate, where they risk remaining denuded of agency, and into the public sphere. The work of Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart and their focus on the struggle of everyday citizenship in contemporary life is helpful in illustrating how Silent Spring mobilised private feelings, particularly anger aimed at environmental destruction, into political action. This template is then explored in two contemporary environmental writers. First, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben is examined for its debt to Silent Spring and its use (and overuse) of sadness in its attempt to bring climate change to the public's attention. Second, Early Spring by Amy Seidl is shown to be a more affective and effective descendant of Silent Spring in its adherence to Carson's narrative procedures, by bringing attention back to the unpredictable and intimate power of ordinary, everyday affects. As such, Silent Spring is shown to occupy a foundational position in the history of the environmental humanities, and a cultural politics concerned with public feelings.

A number of globally recognised environmental protests over the past thirty years have focused on... more A number of globally recognised environmental protests over the past thirty years have focused on the protection of trees in various locations (individual trees, woodland and forest), or have employed trees and forested spaces in their campaigns for the symbolic power they provide in the mobilisation of public interest and action (see Anderson,

While environmental psychology has in general focused on constructs such as 'place attachment' to... more While environmental psychology has in general focused on constructs such as 'place attachment' to explore the formation of environmental identification, other disciplines have sought out modes of understanding that introduce 'space' as a means to highlight possibilities for pro-environmental identification that move away from self-concepts engendered through fixed named and specified places. In the era of global ecological crises, the play of difference between place and space can be examined in works that respond to the tropes of sea-level rise and the disappearing coastline. Through Rachel Carson's sea writing, J.G. Ballard's terminal beaches, the literary environmental journalism of Mark Lynas, and Cormac McCarthy's post-human borderlands, this chapter explores writing that shifts the terrain of meaning between two articulations of landscape: the shore and beach. In the context of the contemporary experience of our relationship with survival, such a shift might operate as a 'literature of recruitment' for pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, offering a last defence in shoring up the walls of human identity with nature at the point of ecological collapse.

John Hunt Publishing, 2019

The Pig in Thin Air

None, 2020

Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies, 2019

Writing for Animals, 2018

The more we study animals, the smarter they get. My introduction from the anthology from Ashland... more The more we study animals, the smarter they get.

My introduction from the anthology from Ashland Creek Press. Here's a full description:

H is for Hypocrite I’m interested in asking what nature writing feels like when we read it throu... more H is for Hypocrite

Keywords: creatural, writing, craft, emotion, pigs, Marie Darrieussecq, Pig Tales

Animal Studies Journal, 2019

Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published lite... more Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published literary and creative prose, which choose to engage with climate change, environmental shock, biodiversity crises, and extinction risks – the existential threats we face as a global multispecies population – all tell stories with and of nonhuman animals? My theory, one shared by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (although with
differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ away from our accountabilities. The
argument here is that literature, poetry, and creative writings can help us have that reckoning by leading us to explore our storied relations with the nonhuman, especially animals. Ghosh, however, believes that the realist
novel – and by implication the ‘highest’ forms of literature – has failed us in this need. This is because the novel has become a bourgeois vassal of numbing entertainments, and in such a form has wholly betrayed us, because it is not capable of coming to terms with the evidence of climate change: that, in simple terms, we are no longer connected to or a part of ‘nature’. That is, the realist bourgeois novel cannot admit we are, and always have been, ‘animals’ dependent on our very real environment.

Bodies of Knowledge Conference, 2019