Humanimal research group - member bios

Andrea Petitt 
​Andrea Petitt is a multispecies ethnographer at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, with in PhD in Rural Development from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Her main interests are gender and intersectionality in multispecies relations in agriculture and beyond. Andrea completed her international post-doc project, funded by the Swedish Research Council, in 2022. The project focuses on gender and the ‘multispecies triad’ of human–horse–cattle relations in working cattle ranching, tourism and sports in Sweden and the US. There, she uses creative methods of data collection such as drawn as well as rhyming field notes, and also enjoys creative methods for both analysis and dissemination. Previous projects includes  research on women’s cattle ownership in Botswana and social relations around the breeding of Swedish Mountain Cattle. Andrea teaches across the range of gender and intersectionality theory, human–nature relations, gender in science, human-animal studies as well as qualitative methods and creative methods.

David Redmalm 
David Redmalm is a researcher in the Division of Sociology, School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, at Mälardalen University, Sweden. His research focuses on the categorization of life: the constructions that make life valuable and grievable, and how life itself is used as a resource – or biopoliticized – in contemporary societies. He has published articles and book chapters on, among other things, the grief for companion animals, presidential pets, Chihuahuas in popular culture, riding schools, and the biopolitics of pet keeping. Redmalm is currently engaged in two projects (funded by VR and AFA) that studies animal robots in dementia care from different perspectives. Redmalm is also a researcher in the Formas project "License to Cull: Rural and urban geographies of wild animal culling," led by Erica von Essen.

Redmalm has taught human–animal studies at undergraduate level, to graduate students, and at three summer schools (in Portugal, Germany and Sweden). Redmalm also teaches qualitative methods. He is especially interested in zooethnography, multispecies ethnography and other alternative forms of ethnographic methods, and has worked with organizational videoethnography.

Erica von Essen 
Erica von Essen is a human–animal studies and hunting scholar with a PhD in Environmental Communication from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her current work is divided between Stockholm University, Högskolan i Innlandet (Norway) and as a research associate with the Czech Academy of Sciences, where she works in an ERC project on wild boar. She tracks developments in hunting and wildlife management; from trophy hunts, hunting tourism, weapons technology, culling animals for biosecurity to poaching of large carnivores. Erica is published across sociology, conservation, communication, environmental ethics, philosophy and human–animal studies fields and regularly appears in the media on wolf, hunting, and controversial hunting ethics issues. She is a keen reviewer for close to 40 different peer reviewed journals. At the moment, Erica leads a Formas research project "License to Cull: Rural and urban geographies of wild animal culling", together with David Redmalm.

Claudia Hirtenfelder
Claudia Hirtenfelder is a PhD Candidate in Geography and Planning at Queen’s University and the host of The Animal Turn Podcast. Claudia’s PhD project is concerned with cows and how they came to be removed from urban areas, with a focus on Kingston, a small Canadian city. Claudia is interested in how animals are both physically and epistemically invisibilized in urban spaces, histories, and industry discourses. More broadly her work sits at the intersection of urban animal geographies, political economy, and history. She has an MSc in the Social Studies of Gender from Lund University as well as an MA in Tourism and Management, a BA (Hons) in Political Science, and a BA in Journalism from the University of Johannesburg. In addition to the Humananimal Group, Claudia is a member of the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Research Group (A.P.P.L.E);  the iROAR Network; the Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA); and the Global Economies in Everyday Lives (GEELS) Group.