Dystopian fiction,postcolonialism and non-human biography: Sociological speculatives and crisis complexity

Sociology and non-human animals

Peggs (2013) commented in this journal that ‘[a]lthough human relations with non-human animals are taking an increasing role in social inquiry, sociologists often see the study of these relationships as marginal to the “proper” human focus of sociology’ (p. 591). Continuing to build on the scholarship in non-human sociology across the decade since, Taylor and Twine (2014) subtitled their collection, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, ‘from the margins to the centre’. Other sociologists in the field have published diverse work demonstrating, for instance, links between other animals’ domestication and broader violences and oppression, particularly of Indigenous people (Nibert, 2013); theoretical interventions informing animal rights (Wrenn, 2016), the potentialities of posthuman politics (Cudworth & Hobden, 2018); Foucauldian analyses of childhood socialisation and the categorisation of other animals (Cole & Stewart, 2016); and the impacts of structural organisational shifts on the capacities of animal activism (Wrenn, 2021). Nevertheless, the insights of this work remain overlooked, as recent pandemic responses have demonstrated continuing resistance to connecting climate, pandemic and environmental crises in systemic analyses sociologists are best situated to provide (Cudworth & Hobden, 2023; Twine, 2023, 2024).

Hunt et al. (2023) cogently describe links between climate and animal crises, with humans ‘killing off the wild animals, by destroying the places where they naturally live, in order to breed, feed and kill more domesticated animals’ (p. 318). Despite scholarship responding to the ‘animal turn’, sociologists of human–animal relations point to a lack of acknowledgement of causative links regarding affective and instrumental relations between humans and other animals as deeply implicated in current crises (Twine, 2023, 2024). The comprehensive need for reassessment includes serious engagement with calls for sociologists to attend to postcolonial worldviews in the light of modernity’s failures (Go, 2023; Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Paradies, 2022; Todd, 2016). These are urgent matters, given the political eschewing of ‘the critical voices demanding a different kind of zoonotic politics’ (Cudworth & Hobden, 2023) in the COVID-19 pandemic, and warnings from scientists that this has left us unprepared for other zoonotic diseases, including those already with us, such as monkeypox and birdflu (Maxmen, 2021).

Twine (2023) calls on sociologists to reconsider ‘an uncritical ontological framing’ in the anthropocentric roots of the discipline, ‘in order to more effectively contribute to the analysis of climate change’ (p. 106). This includes disease spread implicated in social and global economic relations (Cudworth & Hobden, 2023), as well as land use and emissions (Hunt et al., 2023; Twine, 2024). Sociological critiques of current crises need to encompass the social and historical nature of imperial globalising norms of industrialised animal farming and deforestation, for example. We are well situated to embrace the full complexity by understanding the emergence, impacts and future mitigations of climate change and pandemics in ways that do not ‘exclude certain aspects arbitrarily’ (Twine, 2023, p. 124). While ‘the human oppression of non-human animals is often overlooked’ (Peggs, 2013, p. 591), our responses will be limited by boundaries of our own making, rather than frank critiques of humanistic narratives that perpetuate imperialist norms and practices, including in sociology (Go, 2023; Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Nibert, 2013; Simmons, 2019; Taylor & Twine, 2014; Todd, 2016). Yet human–animal sociology has yet to draw on the rich possibilities of fictions which are already engaging publics with the complexities of just such ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Given the already established connections of sociology with both literature and future imaginaries, this is somewhat surprising.

Sociology and the speculative

Connecting sociological and political aims to literature is nothing new. In Mills’ (1959) provocation to sociologists, The Sociological Imagination, he argued that the imaginative link between biography and history is frequently demonstrated by writers of fiction. Indeed, the discipline’s foundations had close links to literary criticism, such that the term ‘literary sociologists’ has been suggested for some writers (Váňa, 2020).

Sociology has particularly had a fascination with utopia, which articulates ‘an expression of the human demand and desire for a different and better world’ (Jacobsen, 2016, pp. 357, 358). Levitas, Moylan and Bauman, for example, have argued for the political significance of imaginaries in transforming futures, as Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019) have outlined. However, they also point to the relatively neglected dystopias as having much to contribute to comprehensive sociological understanding (Seeger & Davison-Vecchione, 2019). Mills’ (1959) concern with the interplay between the individual and their wider social structures – biography and history – is central to speculative imaginaries, and their diagnosis of social ills may inspire real political engagement (Hinchliffe, 2021). Alacovska and Holt (2023) have recently described speculative climate literature as ‘not only anticipatory but effective social critiques’ that ‘gesture towards the “real” political possibilities of imagining alternatives and enacting the future otherwise’ (p. 1096). Likewise, Adorno’s corrective to the modern human tendency to deny ourselves a part of nature is art, which, he argued, plays ‘a fundamental role in gaining insight into this relationship’ (cited in Flodin, 2018, p. 179). The persistence of arguments for literature’s sociological use is evident, as ‘crucial mechanisms by which human societies come to understand themselves’ (Milner & Burgmann, 2020, p. 1), but the especial significance of dystopian speculative work requires further explication.

Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019) argue for engaging seriously with dystopian fiction, given its inherent structural usefulness to the aims of a fully realised sociological imagination. Firstly, they explain, dystopias commence with facts already present in contemporary society, which are implicitly critiqued through the narrative (Seeger & Davison-Vecchione, 2019). The significance of this critique is that narration tends to be from the point of view of a protagonist from the present who experiences an imaginary journey with philosophical implications (Fitting, 2009). Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019) describe the experience of this immersive, subjective narrative on the reader, as they follow a participant in an extension of our own society. This is significantly distinct from utopian narratives, where a narrator typically visits an idealised society as an outside observer (for example, Herland, Gilman, 1915/1979). This difference in point of view is sociologically consequential, because it explicitly furthers the disciplinary aim of expanding reflexivity regarding our own positionality (Seeger & Davison-Vecchione, 2019). The nature of the interplay between individual lives and wider historic structures is thus the central concern of dystopian narratives, aligning with Mills’ (1959) infamous challenge to sociologists, that we must account for ‘the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections’ (p. 6). The purpose of dystopias, Thaler (2021, p. 268) adds, is:

. . . to warn an audience about risks that are already present right now, but whose magnitudes have not yet been fully appreciated in the wider public.

This combination of literatures based in ‘a critical interrogation of the present’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 258), able to affectively connect readers within complex near-familiar worlds, simultaneously ‘making strange’ and engaging with future-thinking, renders speculatives accessible tools for expanding critical sub-fields, such as human–animal sociology. Analysed through sociological rather than literary approaches (Milner & Burgmann, 2020), this fiction explicates specifically critical frameworks addressing individual experience in the contexts of social and political power structures. The speculative can thus enable the ‘[r]esistance to the biopolitical regime of neoliberal capitalism’ that Vint (2010) calls for, for example, by ‘rethinking both governance and ethics from a new premise of species continuity’ (p. 444). Drawing on Derrida, Vint (2010) notes the persistence of power arrangements as ‘not a choice between sovereignty and its absence, but merely a struggle to transfer the power of sovereignty’ (p. 447), an attention to imagined political systems that speculative fiction is immersed in, and a pathway to addressing the challenges of the postcolonial and temporal.

Challenges of decolonising

Many postcolonial and indigenous scholars have pointed to issues of temporality ignored by dominating settler narratives that reconstitute colonial discourses of mastery (Simmons, 2019; Singh, 2017), particularly in relation to the environment, the Anthropocene and more-than-human kinship (Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Moreton-Robinson, 2011; Todd, 2016). In writing of the speculative, Davidson (2022) argues that neglect of the temporal in utopian imaginaries can avoid memory of the past and restitution in the present. It is necessary for a complex re-imagining of temporality to reconstruct utopian sociology to eschew ‘the implicit whiteness of utopian imaginaries’ (Davidson, 2022, p. 831), stripped of such memory and restitution, so contributing toward a postcolonial sociology (Go, 2023). Davidson (2022) uses the work of W. E. B. du Bois to demonstrate how the lack of temporal acknowledgement in much utopian writing serves to reinscribe colonialist logics by implying utopian visions are white. Simmons (2019) additionally points out that many Indigenous peoples already are living in a postapocalyptic dystopia of violence, displacement and environmental devastation, where ‘this violence that underwrites much of human history cannot be easily forsaken or forgiven’ (p. 178). Despite the constant pleasurable present Bauman (2007) describes in neoliberal systems, the truism of uneven experiences of utopia remains (Davidson, 2022).

Thaler (2021) explores three modes of utopian discourse discussed by the African-American writer Octavia Butler: ¹ the if-only, the what-if and the if-things-go-on-like-this. He points out that critical discourses arising after ‘the animal turn’ have tended to focus on the estranging narratives of the ‘if-only’, which seeks to defamiliarise the present reality and ‘prompt readers to fundamentally reconsider their place in the world’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 269). This encapsulates the concept of ‘making the familiar strange’, a concept whose potential is explored by Watson (2022) specifically in relation to sociological fiction. In considering the mode of ‘if-things-go-on-like-this’, Thaler (2021) concludes that there is unexplored opportunity within dystopic narratives, specifically for considerations of human–animal relations. The indebtedness to Indigenous cosmologies when reconsidering such futures of human–animal relations has been noted by a range of scholars, including sociologists (Cudworth & Hobden, 2018; Gaard, 2017), and is considered part of broader critical decolonising work to comprehend and address current crises (McKibben, 2025; Srinivasan, 2022), including expanding intersectionality to species (Guenther, 2024). Singh (2017) urges us to critically examine ‘how drives toward mastery inform and underlie the major crises of our times’ (p. 3), alerting us to the difficulty of the postcolonial project, despite our hopes, while we ‘remain deeply entrenched in a logic of domination we have yet to understand how to relinquish’ (p. 172). Srinivasan (2022) likewise notes, ‘on the one hand there is awareness and acceptance of the idea that humankind is part of nature, [but] this coexists with the assumption that human life and wellbeing are and ought to be more important than . . . the rest of nature’ (p. 361), while Savranksy (2022) issues the challenge of ecological uncivilisation to replace metanarratives of progress, given ‘the underlying causes of the present ecological turmoil are inseparable from the entire configuration of social, cultural, political and economic patterns’ (p. 371).

Advancing these arguments supporting postcolonial critiques, The Animals in That Country (McKay, 2020) is framed by the terms of Indigenous cosmologies. In dialogue with Atwood’s (1968) poetry collection of the same name, the work attends to the temporal in its attention to colonial pasts, pre-colonial pasts, and the overarching construction of human–animal relations. In her titular poem, Atwood (1968) writes, of pre-colonial Canada, ‘In that country the animals/have the faces of people’. By contrast, ‘This’ (settler-colonial) Country is a place of violence, where kinship, interdependence and mutual responsibility is eschewed – ‘They have the faces of/no-one’ (Atwood, 1968): here, attendance to the animality of the human has been lost, with catastrophic consequences. Thus McKay (2020) expands a critique of human–animal relations and imperial political structures into critical dystopian warnings. The title provides a continuous reification of postcolonial narratives across Canada and Australia, attesting to commonalities of Indigenous cosmologies (Simmons, 2019), with colonised peoples having ‘a shared underlying set of concerns and rudimentary experiences that in turn shape knowledge production’ (Go, 2023, p. 350), providing a framework for challenging an imperial sociology.

While McKay’s (2020) zooflu, in a seeming departure from the extrapolation typical of dystopia, is fictional, the title’s frame indicates it is a device to further the exposé of colonial denialism. In fact, humans have always had capacity – as another animal – to both attend to and comprehend other animal and environmental communications. It is a product of denialist power, embedded in the ‘logics’ of colonial politics and binaried languaging practices, that refutes this capacity for communication, comprehension and response-ability. Such division supports the status quo and vested interests, in Urry’s (2016) terms – while the capacity for us to understand one another as comprehensively linked is one that Indigenous epistemologies have never denied (see Kimmerer, 2021; Simmons, 2019; Yunkaporta, 2019).

McKay’s The Animals in That Country in Context

The works of H. G. Wells (1895), Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915/1979), Ursula Le Guin (1974) and George Orwell (1949), for example, in their attention to gender, class and racism, have long provided rich material for social and political imaginaries. The truism that the speculative reflects the concerns of contemporary societies (Levitas, 2010) is amply demonstrated in the recent emergence of dystopian climate fiction (clifi); likewise, there is a growing field of literary texts that take seriously the ‘animal turn’ in writing for adults (for instance, Coetzee, 1999, 2003; Fowler, 2013; Dovey, 2015). Although writing that considers animal experience emerged during the Romantic period (Hunt et al., 2023), contemporary work incorporates ‘recent changes in philosophical and scientific thinking’ (Bayes, 2022, p. 48), including decolonising and critical approaches challenging humancentrism. Concurrently, a thriving literary animal studies field both revisits classical literature to interrogate human–animal relations, and responds to contemporary literature interrogating normative enmeshments of human and other animal lives (see, for example, McHugh et al., 2021; Ortiz-Robles, 2016).

McKay’s (2020) work advances understanding in human–animal sociology by providing departures that are sociologically significant. Relying on contemporary research (Burke, 2021), it critiques the human in the fully-realised biography of a non-human actor, both advancing sociological imaginaries linking biography and history (Mills, 1959), and (re)centralising the significance of the non-human within pandemic crises. Further, in engaging the temporal of Atwood’s (1968) poem, the work visibilises Indigenous cosmologies by referring to this earlier poetry mourning the resituating of animals from Indigenous relationality to Western instrumentalisation, in a critique that attends to memory, history, violences and the possibility of ‘everywhen’ (Neale & Kelly, 2020). The title suggests a way of reading that frames temporality and colonialism as constitutive of the politics of masterful power. It does so through this invocation of Atwood’s titular poem, in work mourning the Indigenous past, combined with its contemporary neocolonial Australian setting, thus situating the reading via ‘critical interrogation’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 258) – in this case, of continuity between disregarded Indigenous epistemologies and repeated artistic challenges – of hegemonic human–animal relationships denying Indigenous and posthuman critiques. That this novel can coherently dialogue with Atwood’s (1968) poem attests to the relevance of Urry’s (2016) contention that we pay attention to who determines the narratives of our futures. Such analyses point to the emergent dominance, over the 50-plus years since Atwood’s (1968) collection, of neoliberalism, and its correlating triumphalism, which has largely succeeded in dismissing alternative sociopolitical systems as unworthy of our scholarship (Levitas, 2010).

As a framing device, the critique in the novel’s title invokes a challenge to neoliberal norms, by rendering visible significant postcolonial analyses regarding ‘how collectives of human and non-human agents are unequally mediated within networks of power’ (Kemple & Mawani, 2009, p. 228). The complexity of this multi-invocation of the temporal rejects both nostalgic ‘returns’ to imagined pre-colonial states (Simmons, 2019), and discourses of progress implied in modernity (Paradies, 2022). It instead exemplifies the connections of ‘wicked problems’ in an ‘everywhen’ (Neale & Kelly, 2020), consistent with postcolonial theorists’ cautions, and an understanding of Indigenous cosmologies of incorporation and adaptation, rather than the imposition of Edenic fantasies in responding to environmental degradations (Kimmerer, 2013, 2021; Paradies, 2022; Simmons, 2019). This attention to the temporal acknowledges variations in defining different groups’ experiences of dys/utopic worlds (Davidson, 2019), dependent on relations to dominating cultures and institutions, including realities of Indigenous people living in postapocalyptic conditions (Simmons, 2019). The novel thereby reckons with both the significance of history, and the necessity for restitution that Davidson (2022) notes is absent in dominating discourses of imagined futures, enabling shifts between viewpoints ‘if only’, and the warning ‘if things go on like this’ (Thaler, 2021). As has been argued (Go, 2023; Thaler, 2021), there is an implicit utopia within dystopia, and the narrative contains such alternatives, where ‘the animals in that country’ (Atwood, 1968) are valued as individual, agentic co-beings, with needs and desires that are taken seriously, raising significant ethical complexities that continue to be avoided or normalised (Gunderson, 2014; Twine, 2024).

McKay’s (2020) novel thus imaginatively resituates readers within a present critiqued by historic and Indigenous epistemologies of human–animal relations. This work thereby attends to sociopolitical realities while also situating the possibilities of future-thinking in relation to posthuman and decolonial ideologies. This effectively provides a new resource for human–animal sociology within literatures founded on contemporary critique (Thaler, 2021) – and, in this case, a novel that specifically links current crises as consequent of failed human–animal relations (Twine, 2024), thus expanding critical understanding without neglecting temporal dimensions including history, a defamiliarised present and future-thinking that attends to expanding justice.

Species in history and biography

The Animals in That Country (McKay, 2020) links disease spread and colonial politics to critique significant hierarchical dualisms such as nature/culture and human/animal by demonstrating, through biography, entanglements between species and environments. In considering ‘agency . . . radically rethought in relational terms’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 262), sociology’s ontology comes into question: rather than dualisms, which perpetuate hierarchical categorisation – opposing rational humanity with instinctual animals, for example – the human subject is decentralised by increasing consciousness of their situation as a category of animal, reliant on social worlds containing other animals (for food, entertainment, leisure, pets, etc.). This awareness, in the familiar made strange, necessitates responding to the complex ethics of others with their own interests and needs. These realisations emerge in a range of ways, including through normalised practices of denying human animality, and the presence of a co-protagonist of another species with her own interests and agenda. Such a resituating of the human within social worlds that exposes interdependence and exploitation further enables consideration of ‘the possibilities . . . of a social science informed by anticolonial thought’ (Go, 2023, p. 346), beyond the sadism that Marcuse argued was a structural result of ‘the domination of animals and the rest of nature’ (cited in Gunderson, 2014, p. 287). The discussion suggests the ‘melancholic hope’ that might redefine sociological utopias, where ‘the desire for a better world is indexed to the memory of racial violence’ (Davidson, 2022, p. 834), including ongoing displacement from lands and attempted erasure of epistemologies (Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Kimmerer, 2013, 2021; Moreton-Robinson, 2011; Simmons, 2019; Todd, 2016).

Jean’s increasing encounters with other animals reveal current social arrangements, a strength of dystopian worlds (Seeger & Davison-Vecchione, 2019). In this way, links with biography and history are examined (Mills, 1959). For example, Jean considers herself an animal lover; she and her granddaughter dream of setting up an animal sanctuary (p. 18), yet she engages in cognitive dissonance between this avowal and eating other animals: when challenged, she demands, ‘What the hell else am I supposed to eat?’ (p. 176). She and her granddaughter agree they want to ‘talk to the animals’, but their naivety about the kind of human–animal relations this might enable are exposed when Jean is first infected, and hears with horror the terrified screaming of mice bred solely for gassing at the park, to enable tourism in the feeding of the raptors (pp. 75–76). Jean’s relationship with the dingo hybrid, Sue, was previously based on social norms about dogs. Sue’s individuality demonstrates how patronising these have been, with Jean noting wryly, ‘Pat pat walkies had so much damned power yesterday’ (p. 83). Later, visiting the farm she ran with her former partner, Jean encounters ‘dairy’ cows who demand to be told where their babies are: McKay (2020) here links the gendered use of the life-giving bodies of females, in an examination of shared lack of hegemonic power (Cudworth, 2016). This critique aligns hierarchical norms for other animals with the ‘domination of human beings, especially of women and racial and ethnic minorities’ (Gunderson, 2014, p. 285), a point expanding intersectionality (Taylor & Twine, 2014), but remaining unrealised in sociological theorising (see Cudworth, 2015; Nibert, 2013). Such examples demonstrate how this narrative enables the ‘if-only’ estrangement of the everyday, rendering the familiar strange (Watson, 2022), a point also noted by reviewers (Browne, 2021; Jordan, 2020).

Ultimately, Jean’s view could be described as a journey toward understanding the ways other species are experiencing anthroparchy (Cudworth, 2016), from environmental domination to animal commodification – for entertainment, food, pets, as roadkill, ‘rescue’, agriculture. Jean’s story links biography with history in a gradual understanding of constructed norms in human–animal social worlds. While Jean and other humans experience estrangement from current social norms (in the ‘what-if’ world), as well as dystopian fears ‘if-things-go-on-like-this’ (Thaler, 2021), Sue and the other animals have no such estranging experience of the everyday: this distinction is vital to consider, as it leaves the non-human narratives in McKay’s (2020) work situated in the present reality, with suggestions of the utopic hope of being attended to and taken seriously, in the possible future reimagining of ‘That Country’.

McKay (2020) provides an alternative viewpoint for linking biography and history, demonstrating that ‘[e]ven the bleakest of dystopias . . . leaves some residual room . . . for oppositional agency’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 270). Unusually for adult fiction, Sue is co-protagonist in this novel, and the inclusion of her experiences and views of the human enable further examination of the normative social world relevant to McKay’s (2020) use of a sociological imaginary. By presenting a research-based ‘biography’ of Sue (Braithwaite 2020), McKay (2020) is able to explore a range of anthropocentric ontologies, engaging in discourses reflecting sociological calls for reconsidering these (Cudworth, 2015; Stewart & Cole, 2014; Taylor & Sutton, 2018; Twine, 2023, 2024). Sue has a distinct and particularised biography, complex needs and wants. She eschews the dominant anthropocentric narrative of ‘man’s best friend’ by being indifferent to the human ability to now understand other animals. Rather than focused on communicating with Jean, Sue’s interests are her new-found freedom (escaping her cage in the wildlife park, where she has lived as commodified spectacle for tourists), and pursuing the pleasures of her choices in roaming, food and mates.

Through Sue’s limited enthusiasm for Jean’s ‘new’ ability, humans are diminished, represented as (re)joining an always already complex and communicating world of other animals – animals that are disregarded in dominant narratives, many critiqued in the novel. These include infantilising (Stewart & Cole, 2014), ‘meatifying’ (Twine, 2023), denying autonomy (Wadiwel, 2014), and assuming multispecies agreement with human supremacy (Plumwood, 2002). Sue and Jean’s relationship and relative status is contextual, challenged and changed as the social situation around them worsens with the spread of the pandemic and subsequent social destabilisation. When Jean is stripped of petrol, food and money, her survival is threatened. Sue, however, despite earlier captivity, is able to keep them both alive, with her ability to hear the heartbeats of prey underground, smell how clean water is, and identify and respond to threats (p. 260). In the world of this novel, Sue is a credible autonomous subject in her own right, often resenting Jean’s imposed normative human agendas (such as Sue waiting alone in the car, or not acting on her instinct to kill). This is particularly evident in the early days of their journey, when Jean behaves like a dog ‘owner’. Thus the inherent utopian authoritarianism of ‘unjustified claims to know the desires of all’ (Davidson, 2019, p. 88) is exposed – in this case, expanding to speciesism.

By rendering Sue co-protagonist in this novel, McKay (2020) challenges the reader to consider more than the referential of the human within current society, in keeping with postcolonial analyses (Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Simmons, 2019; Todd, 2016), and to be co-participant in Jean’s journey to reimagine other animal experience in human society and within human relationships. This hierarchical ‘flattening’ confounds the easy separation of nature and culture, human and non-human (Plumwood, 2002), representing ‘a great provocation to hegemonic frameworks’ (Thaler, 2021, p. 270), and extending critiques of power relations to speciesism. By implicating relations with the land in the need for survival, as Jean and Sue journey across the desert toward the sea, McKay’s novel also displaces the centrality of the urban imperial project of settler colonialism (see Go, 2023; Moreton-Robinson, 2011), overlaying the reader’s imagined continent with the significance of Country for Indigenous Australians (Neale & Kelly, 2020; Yunkaporta, 2019).

The use of Sue as non-human protagonist enables McKay (2020) to imaginatively go further than Seeger and Davison-Vecchione (2019) posit for the usefulness of the protagonist in dystopia, enabling readers to simultaneously consider the ‘what-if’ estrangement from current norms (Thaler, 2021) to consider this other ‘Country’, in which animal-others are kin (Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Kimmerer, 2013, 2021; Simmons, 2019; Todd, 2016) – a term Sue herself uses to describe her and Jean’s relation. Sue’s experience provides a critique of the current humancentric structures in which other species are enmeshed (Cudworth, 2015), a recognition of ‘the animal turn’ that human–animal sociology seeks to centralise.

Sue’s early life has been determined as a commodity in a tourist park, yet her experiences reveal she has both fondness and antipathy toward humans, such as Jean and her former partner respectively (pp. 186–188). In placing Sue within history/biography tensions analogous to Jean, the narrative critiques the normative elision of individual biography for all beings participating in social relations. McKay (2020) provides a speculative possibility for addressing the significant absence of agency ascribed to non-human animals in current social worlds (see Twine, 2024; Wadiwel, 2014), a complex epistemology of agencies already present in marginalised Indigenous knowledge systems (Kimmerer, 2013; Todd, 2016; Yunkaporta, 2019).

As the novel progresses, the principal character action is that between Sue and Jean, and their relationship is rendered with the complexity of that between any two agentic subjects. Eventually, the breakdown of social structures leads to Jean’s total dependence on Sue. Jean’s loss of most of the structural pillars of modernity – a bathroom, washing machine, money, medicine, food, etc. – means that she is living confronted with her own animality (Laird, 2021), separated from material items that are constructed as evidence of an ontological basis for a distinction between nature and culture. Sue leaves Jean to pursue her own interests, returning grudgingly and infrequently at times, to keep Jean alive, while reminding her dismissively that she is now the status of ‘cat’. Jean is confronted with her limited understanding, recognising Sue’s autonomy and capabilities, and their kinship.

In this narrative use of Sue and Jean as co-protagonists, equally motivated by desire for family and companionship, along with Jean’s correlation with mothering and loss for dairy cows, anthroparchal relations are visibilised. The nexus of gender and species are connected (Gunderson, 2014; Nibert, 2013; Twine, 2023), and links between biography and history (Mills, 1959) expanded to include more-than-human biography. This multispecies analysis of agency and structure, history and biography, expands sociological appreciations of asymmetrical power relations to include both similarities and distinctions between, for example, species and gender. Rendering Sue as equally estranged from current social structures challenges the boundaries and limits of sociological thinking restricted to human agency. The ‘what-if’ that other species may experience in human attention to their communications sets up a challenge for seriously considering how individual creatures with whom we inhabit the social world might experience asymmetrical power relations in the present.

Prescience and dystopian usefulness

McKay (2020) represents accelerating pandemic panic as more and more Australians are infected: from initial days of seeking to free other animals from cages, many humans experience increasing distress and horror as they attend to other animal experiences, along with a deep yearning to return to pre-pandemic ‘normal’. In her descriptions of social responses, McKay (2020) inadvertently strengthens Seeger and Davison-Vecchione’s (2019) case regarding the research and fact-based ‘warning’ of dystopias. Although the novel was written in the decade prior to COVID-19 (Braithwaite, 2020), readers recognise the pandemic descriptions are uncannily accurate – including government directives, panic buying and conspiracies spread on social media (Seeger & Davison-Vecchione, 2019; Thaler, 2021). To enable the population to continue ‘business as usual’ while a vaccine is sought, the government supplies and mandates ear plugs, so that humans can shut the cacophony out. The sociological point here is clear: those who can now communicate with other animals – or, in postcolonial terms, are now listening – find perpetuating current human–animal relations frightening and unbearable; as one man says of ‘his’ pigs, ‘Money didn’t talk before’ (p. 126).

Cudworth and Hobden (2023) attest that ‘dominant discourses constituting zoonotic politics have reflected our colonial present’ (p. 648), and we continue on a ‘failure to learn’ trajectory that both hard and soft scientists are currently raising the alarm on – not only in relation to the recent pandemic, but also regarding associated climate and environmental crises (IPCC, 2023; Maxmen, 2021; Twine, 2024). The persistence of anthropocentric practices fuelled by the logics of neoliberal domination, and resistance to alternative posthumanist and decolonial activities (including degrowth, circular economies, non-extractive processes and localised reforestation, for example) is insufficient to avoid the continuing – and deeply inequitable – catastrophic consequences for the planet and all living beings (IPCC, 2023). This is unsurprising when ‘causes of zoonotic diseases . . . are not addressed in policy responses which focus on medical management and public health’ (Cudworth & Hobden, 2023, p. 649): these responses reinforce a myth that the status quo is not seriously implicated in pandemics, and is, indeed, desirable.

As sociologists, the need for comprehensive connections of global, structural issues is likewise increasingly urgent, in the ‘late capitalist, nature-dominating society’, acknowledging that ‘the economic order has indeed become a threat to the very thing it was supposed to secure: human survival’ (Flodin, 2018, p. 183). Postcolonial calls to respond to these matters by challenging Western ideological constructs, including in sociology, and our failure thus far to do so, require sustained attention (see Davidson, 2022; Go, 2023; Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Neale & Kelly, 2020; Paradies, 2022; Simmons, 2019; Todd, 2016).

Conclusion

This article has argued for the usefulness – indeed the urgent need for – the speculative to advance human–animal sociology toward ‘the centre’ (Peggs, 2013), so that we can comprehensively link ongoing anthroparchal dominations with existential threats, and expand consideration of futures. It has done so by describing the meta-analytical framing of The Animals in That Country (McKay, 2020) in the postcolonial, including the significance of a non-human protagonist, arising from a research basis in the present (Burke, 2021), with its warning, ‘if things go on like this’ (Thaler, 2021) critiquing contemporary norms of human–animal relations. By attending to this novel’s analysis of the colonial and temporal, history and non-human fictionalised biography, the existential nature of linked crises is made clear, extending sociological critiques of asymmetrical power experienced within current structures. This draws attention to the uneven nature of utopian imaginaries, and the need to address postcolonial scholars’ arguments about violence, degradation and displacement (Kemple & Mawani, 2009; Todd, 2016), and to (re)imagine ‘That Country’ as a place of ‘mutual accountability, a way of living in the world that refuses a hierarchy of being’ (Simmons, 2019, p. 178). The speculative is an overlooked, significant resource for advancing the work of human–animal sociology, addressing unrealised calls for animal inclusivity (Gunderson, 2014) and implicated forms of domination (Nibert, 2013), whilst responding to the urgencies of complex, linked crises (Twine, 2023) that anthroparchal critiques elucidate.

The final challenge left by the novel, of whether we will listen, heightened by our failures during the COVID-19 pandemic, reminds us of ‘the caustic irony and dishonesty of conceptualizing the human being as the Aristotelian rational animal in contradistinction to the allegedly irrational nonhuman animal, particularly in the wake of humanity’s irrational domination of the animal world’ (Gunderson, 2014, p. 285). In a world of increasing and interconnected environmental crises, it is imperative that sociologists are able to intervene effectively. In order to do so, however, we need to continuously expand our understanding of the structural causes of interlinked global problems, a task in which we have largely failed regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. Human–animal sociology contributes an important critical analysis that remains neglected. This article therefore argues for an expanded multispecies sociology that utilises the potential of speculative novels, particularly dystopias, to advance understanding of the significance of other animals in the social world, and furthers sociology’s work in utopian imaginaries. Expansive understanding ensures increasingly comprehensive critical analyses of complex problems, and possible alternatives – an urgent need in our crises-ridden world.