Rafi Youatt
Biographic Data
| ID | 196212 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rafi Youatt |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rafi |
| FAMILY NAME | Youatt |
| SIGNATURE | YOUATT R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New School |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2815-8531 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Book Forum
Interspecies politics and the global rat
Rats tend to thrive wherever humans do. In recent centuries, the growth of human populations around the planet has meant the growth of a nearly equivalent global population of rats, particularly in cities, where they thrive on trash, food scraps, and infrastructure, and widely stymie human efforts to get rid of them. This forced coexistence has inspired a wide range of human responses, ranging from revulsion and extermination efforts as vermin, t…
Walking the International
Walking is a nearly universal activity, even given the many contrivances invented to avoid it, yet it is widely absent from the sedentarist disciplines of politics and international relations. This absence is perhaps not surprising, given that so much political thought and practice are deeply tethered to the inventions of the boot and the chair that remove walking from our view, as Tim Ingold has observed. Yet, given the significance of events su…
Introduction
Introduction:Invasive Ecologies Rafi Youatt (bio) during a recent collective research effort at the us-mexico border in Texas, some members of the group went to see a section of the border fence at a place called the Hidalgo Pumphouse. The Pumphouse itself is now a museum about early agriculture in Texas. The site is also visited because it is a World Birding Center, home to hundreds of species of migrating birds. Thousands of people come to watc…
Personhood and the Rights of Nature
This article evaluates the emergence of rights for nature in global politics, focusing particularly on questions surrounding the politics and ontology of collective personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand. Rather than assuming international space to be largely populated by state persons who in turn grant personhood to nature, these cases suggest that it is more productive to start by asking what kinds of collective persons populate world spaces, an…
Images Unwalled
Counting Species
Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical mana…
Interspecies Relations, International Relations
International politics is widely assumed to be an exclusively human activity. This article argues that rethinking this assumption is necessary in order to find a practical and ethically appropriate relationship with nature and nonhuman animals, and in order to call into question the violent logics that underpin the category of the human in existing international politics. The article inquires into the ways that anthropocentrism structures thinkin…
Power, Pain, and the Interspecies Politics of Foie Gras
This article examines the practices, logics, and politics of foie gras production and consumption. It argues that scholars need to rethink both pain and sentience to account for the fact that ducks are responsive, and not just reactive. Rather than using the capacities of animals to judge when power relations between species are acceptable, it suggests that scholars should start with the power relations themselves to account for how animal and hu…
A Retrospective of Northern Green Political Thought and Practice
Counting Species
Biopolitical analyses of census-taking usually focus on human censuses and consider how human experience is shaped by the practice. Instead, this article looks at the proposed global biodiversity census, which aims to take inventory of every species on earth as a response to anthropogenic species extinction. I suggest that it is possible to extend and modify Foucault's concept of biopower to consider contemporary human-nonhuman interactions. Spec…
Counting Species
Biopolitical analyses of census-taking usually focus on human censuses and consider how human experience is shaped by the practice. Instead, this article looks at the proposed global biodiversity census, which aims to take inventory of every species on earth as a response to anthropogenic species extinction. I suggest that it is possible to extend and modify Foucault's concept of biopower to consider contemporary human-nonhuman interactions. Spec…
Interspecies Relations, International Relations
International politics is widely assumed to be an exclusively human activity. This article argues that rethinking this assumption is necessary in order to find a practical and ethically appropriate relationship with nature and nonhuman animals, and in order to call into question the violent logics that underpin the category of the human in existing international politics. The article inquires into the ways that anthropocentrism structures thinkin…
Personhood and the Rights of Nature
This article evaluates the emergence of rights for nature in global politics, focusing particularly on questions surrounding the politics and ontology of collective personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand. Rather than assuming international space to be largely populated by state persons who in turn grant personhood to nature, these cases suggest that it is more productive to start by asking what kinds of collective persons populate world spaces, an…
Counting Species
Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical mana…
Power, Pain, and the Interspecies Politics of Foie Gras
This article examines the practices, logics, and politics of foie gras production and consumption. It argues that scholars need to rethink both pain and sentience to account for the fact that ducks are responsive, and not just reactive. Rather than using the capacities of animals to judge when power relations between species are acceptable, it suggests that scholars should start with the power relations themselves to account for how animal and hu…
Walking the International
Walking is a nearly universal activity, even given the many contrivances invented to avoid it, yet it is widely absent from the sedentarist disciplines of politics and international relations. This absence is perhaps not surprising, given that so much political thought and practice are deeply tethered to the inventions of the boot and the chair that remove walking from our view, as Tim Ingold has observed. Yet, given the significance of events su…
Counting Species
Biopolitical analyses of census-taking usually focus on human censuses and consider how human experience is shaped by the practice. Instead, this article looks at the proposed global biodiversity census, which aims to take inventory of every species on earth as a response to anthropogenic species extinction. I suggest that it is possible to extend and modify Foucault's concept of biopower to consider contemporary human-nonhuman interactions. Spec…
A Retrospective of Northern Green Political Thought and Practice
Power, Pain, and the Interspecies Politics of Foie Gras
This article examines the practices, logics, and politics of foie gras production and consumption. It argues that scholars need to rethink both pain and sentience to account for the fact that ducks are responsive, and not just reactive. Rather than using the capacities of animals to judge when power relations between species are acceptable, it suggests that scholars should start with the power relations themselves to account for how animal and hu…
Interspecies Relations, International Relations
International politics is widely assumed to be an exclusively human activity. This article argues that rethinking this assumption is necessary in order to find a practical and ethically appropriate relationship with nature and nonhuman animals, and in order to call into question the violent logics that underpin the category of the human in existing international politics. The article inquires into the ways that anthropocentrism structures thinkin…
Counting Species
Three decades of biodiversity governance have largely failed to stop the ongoing environmental crisis of global species loss. Yet that governance has resulted in undeniably important political outcomes. In Counting Species, Rafi Youatt argues that the understanding of global biodiversity has produced a distinct vision and politics of nature, one that is bound up with ideas about species, norms of efficiency, and apolitical forms of technical mana…
Introduction
Introduction:Invasive Ecologies Rafi Youatt (bio) during a recent collective research effort at the us-mexico border in Texas, some members of the group went to see a section of the border fence at a place called the Hidalgo Pumphouse. The Pumphouse itself is now a museum about early agriculture in Texas. The site is also visited because it is a World Birding Center, home to hundreds of species of migrating birds. Thousands of people come to watc…
Personhood and the Rights of Nature
This article evaluates the emergence of rights for nature in global politics, focusing particularly on questions surrounding the politics and ontology of collective personhood in Ecuador and New Zealand. Rather than assuming international space to be largely populated by state persons who in turn grant personhood to nature, these cases suggest that it is more productive to start by asking what kinds of collective persons populate world spaces, an…
Images Unwalled
Walking the International
Walking is a nearly universal activity, even given the many contrivances invented to avoid it, yet it is widely absent from the sedentarist disciplines of politics and international relations. This absence is perhaps not surprising, given that so much political thought and practice are deeply tethered to the inventions of the boot and the chair that remove walking from our view, as Tim Ingold has observed. Yet, given the significance of events su…
Interspecies politics and the global rat
Rats tend to thrive wherever humans do. In recent centuries, the growth of human populations around the planet has meant the growth of a nearly equivalent global population of rats, particularly in cities, where they thrive on trash, food scraps, and infrastructure, and widely stymie human efforts to get rid of them. This forced coexistence has inspired a wide range of human responses, ranging from revulsion and extermination efforts as vermin, t…
Book Forum
Political science (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Environmental ethics (6 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Ecology (4 works) · Biology (3 works)