This page provides updates on my ongoing research project: Making Worlds with Crows. The core of this project is a book in progress (under contract with Columbia University Press). In addition, however, I am writing journal articles, newspaper articles and blog posts. I’ll provide relevant links here as they emerge. If you’d like further information, please contact me.

The project in brief:
Ubiquitous in their global presence, crows are now found almost everywhere that people are: from critically endangered island crows living in disappearing forests to abundant urban species finding new ways to exploit changing cities. This multi-sited interdisciplinary project takes crows as guides into some of the many cultural and ethical issues that define human interactions with wildlife in this period of rapid environmental and social change. Drawing ethnographic research in a range of cultural contexts into dialogue with the literatures of philosophy and biology, this project will explore the role of an innovative environmental humanities approach in better understanding our place in, and obligations to, a changing world.

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Some of my related crow papers already published:

van Dooren, T. (2017) “Banking the Forest: Loss, Hope and Care in Hawaiian Conservation,” in Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (eds.) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, MIT Press.

van Dooren, T. (2017) “Spectral Crows in Hawai`i: Conservation and the Work of Inheritance,” in Deborah Rose, Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (eds.) Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations. Columbia University Press: New York. 

van Dooren, T. (2017) “Making Worlds with Crows: Philosophy in the Field,” Rachel Carson Centre Perspectives, 2017/1.

van Dooren, T. (2016) “The Unwelcome Crows: Hospitality in the Anthropocene,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 21.2.

van Dooren, T. (2016) “Authentic Crows: Identity, Captivity and Emergent Forms of Life,” Theory, Culture and Society, 33.2, pp. 29-52.

van Dooren, T. (2015) “A Day With Crows: Rarity, Nativity and the Violent-Care of Conservation,” Animal Studies Journal, 4.2, pp. 1-28.

van Dooren, T. (2014) “Mourning Crows: Grief and Extinction in a Shared World”, in Susan McHugh and Garry Marvin (eds.) The Handbook of Human-Animal Studies, Routledge: London and New York.

van Dooren, T. (2014) “Spectral Crows in Hawai’i: Conservation in Haunted Landscapes“, Humanities Australia vol. 5.

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Image: “The eyes have it” (Torresian Crows) by Ian Sutton (CC BY 2.0)