Crows peck at it: Jetsam on busted shorelines of the fracture commons

• In Event: Envisioning Mutlispecies Justice

Abstract

Being at a shore is an occasion of awareness, and the self that perceives there lapses into jetsam. This scattered personhood coincides with other coastal scatter and fragmentation, and (re)collects itself in recognition, of crows, for instance. I consider several sets of birds at different altered shorelines—crows along Seattle’s Montlake Cut, night herons at the outlet of Lake Merritt in Oakland, and gulls on Dead Horse Bay at the edge of Brooklyn—and their various quarries. Studying what they peck at can lead to recognition of a constantly rearranging post-capitalist relation of justice that unworks species boundaries.

Presenter

• July Hazard, University of Washington