Hospitality, nonhuman mobilities and the cosmopolitan city.
Maan Barua - University of Cambridge
This paper attends to the politics of urban nature through nonhuman mobiles - creatures circulating through trade that become part of ecosystems to which they are non-native. The paper looks at different forms of accommodation and expulsion of these mobile creatures through a scrutiny of institutional arrangements and vernacular practices. It then turns to how nonhuman mobiles forge new forms of urban liveability with and against political grain. The paper's focus is on feral parakeets in London. It argues that nonhuman mobiles induce a shift from nature as rooted to nature forged along routes: simultaneously cosmopolitan and postcolonial.