This book focuses on the spaces and practices of caring for horses, explored in a series of case studies set across the equine lifespan. For horses, everyday practices of care as well as ever-changing understandings of what is good care directly shape their living conditions and lives with humans. In this book, questions of animal ethics and welfare are approached in a tangible way by exploring the relationships and practices of interspecies care across a range of different spaces, including horse yards, training grounds, farms, rescue centres and the street. The chapters illuminate the ways in which interspecies care ties horses to human society and culture, addressing care practices in different stages of the equine life cycle. Through a unique set of case-studies addressing issues such as training, working, rescue, aging and death, the book offers a clear overview of how humans shape the lifespan of animals living under their care. It simultaneously foregrounds the agency of animals in this process and how such agency is interpreted and responded to by humans. With its theoretically solid analysis of rigorous empirical study, the book answers the need to understand human connection to the nonhuman world within the everyday practices and spaces of contemporary society and culture.

Horses, Power and Place explores the evolution of humanity’s relationship with horses, from early domestication through to the use of the horse as a draught animal, an agricultural, industrial and military asset, and an animal of sport and leisure. Taking an historical approach, and using Britain as a case study, this is the first book-length exploration of the horse in the more-than-human geography of a nation. It traces the role and implications of horse-based mobility for the evolution of settlement structure, urban morphology and the rural landscape. It maps the growth and various uses of horses to the point of ‘peak horse’ in the early twentieth century before considering the contemporary place of the horse in twenty-first century economy and society. It assesses the role of the horse in the formation of places within Britain and in the formation of the nation. The book reflects on the implications of this historical and contemporary equine geography for animal geographies and animal studies. It argues for the study of animals in general in how places are made, not just by humans. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars of animal geography and animal studies more widely.

Multispecies Leisure: Human-Animal Interactions in Leisure Landscapes seeks to ‘bring the animal in’ to the leisure studies domain and contribute to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, interwoven multispecies phenomenon. The emerging multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies encourages researchers to move beyond narrow focus on human-centric practices and ways of being in the world, and to recognise that human and non-human beings are positioned within shared ecological, social, cultural and political spaces. With some exceptions, leisure studies has been slow to embrace the ‘animal turn’ and consider how leisure actions, experiences and landscapes are shaped through multispecies encounters between humans, other animals, birds and insects, plants and environment. This book begins to address this gap by presenting research that considers leisure as more-than-human experiences. The authors consider leisure with nonhuman others (e.g. dogs, horses), affecting those others (e.g. environmental concerns) and affected by the non-human (e.g. landscape, weather), by exploring the ‘contact zones’ between humans and other species. Thus, this work contributes to greater understanding of leisure as a complex, multispecies phenomenon. The chapters in this book were originally published as a Special Issue of the Leisure Studies.

This original and insightful book explores how horses can be considered as social actors within shared interspecies networks. It examines what we know about how horses understand us and how we perceive them, as well as the implications of actively recognising other animals as actors within shared social lives. This book explores how interspecies relationships work, using a variety of examples to demonstrate how horses and people build social lives. Considering horses as social actors presents new possibilities for improving the quality of animal lives, the human condition and human-horse relations.

A fascinating interspecies relationship can be seen among the horse breeding pastoralists in the Altai and Saian Mountains of Inner Asia. Victoria Soyan Peemot herself grew up in a community with close human-horse relationships and uses her knowledge of the local language and horsemanship practices. Building upon Indigenous research epistemologies, she engages with the study of how the human-horse relationships interact with each other, experience injustices and develop resilience strategies as multispecies unions.

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Lord Aberdare Literary Prize* This book is the first, full-length scholarly examination of British women’s involvement in equestrianism from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, as well as the corresponding transformations of gender, class, sport, and national identity in Britain and its Empire. It argues that women’s participation in horse sports transcended limitations of class and gender in Britain and highlights the democratic ethos that allowed anyone skilled enough to ride and hunt – from chimney-sweep to courtesan. Furthermore, women’s involvement in equestrianism reshaped ideals of race and reinforced imperial ideology at the zenith of the British Empire. Here, British women abandoned the sidesaddle – which they had been riding in for almost half a millennium – to ride astride like men, thus gaining complete equality on horseback. Yet female equestrians did not seek further emancipation in the form of political rights. This paradox – of achieving equality through sport but not through politics – shows how liberating sport was for women into the twentieth century. It brings into question what “emancipation” meant in practice to women in Britain from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. This is fascinating reading for scholars of sports history, women's history, British history, and imperial history, as well as those interested in the broader social, gendered, and political histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and for all equestrian enthusiasts.

We live in an era of experimentation – both if we look at the broader social world of politics, media and art and at the narrower context of academic knowledge production. This collection consists of 14 chapters by leading scholars in affect studies. They explore the affective dimensions of experimental practices related to, for example, activism, the COVID-19 pandemic, populism, sustainability, patient communities, music streaming, Jamaican dancehall, gangs, leadership, tourism and minority youth cultures. Experiments are understood as intentionally crafted milieus aimed at (re)presenting unnoticed aspects of the world, as non-linear processes with unpredictable outcomes, and as ways of giving the future a provisional form. The collection responds to a pressing need to understand the intersection between affect, experimentation and sociocultural change by offering empirical strategies to explore how, and with what consequences, experimentation is affective.