Human–Bug Encounters in Multispecies Networks

Laura Hollsten, Ph.D. (2005), Åbo Akademi University, Finland, is a researcher specialised in environmental history at that university. Her research interests include human-animal studies, early modern environmental history, the history of knowledge and science, and global history. Otto Latva, Ph.D. (2019), University of Turku, Finland, is a historian focusing on human-animal and human-plant studies as well as environmental history. Latva is the author of the monograph The Giant Squid in Transatlantic Culture: The Monsterization of Molluscs (2023). Sanna Lillbroända-Annala, Ph.D. (2010), Åbo Akademi University, Finland, is an ethnologist and senior lecturer at that university. She has conducted research in urban environments from the perspective of gentrification and cultural heritage, lately with special interest towards non-humans in urban settings. Suvi Rytty, Ph.D. (2021), University of Turku, Finland, is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in the history of medicine and health. Her research interests include the history of the natural way of life, alternative medicine, vegetarianism and anti-vaccinationism. Tuomas Räsänen, Ph.D. (2015), University of Turku, Finland, is a Professor of environmental history at the University of Eastern Finland. He has studied the history of human-wildlife relationships and marine environmental history. He has been leading the research project Humans and Ticks in the Anthropocene.

List of Figures

Notes on Contributors



Introduction

 Laura Hollsten, Suvi Rytty, Otto Latva, Sanna Lillbroända-Annala and Tuomas Räsänen



Part 1: Ethics



1 Becoming Aware of Insects: Dangers and Endangerments in the Anthropocene

 Michaela Fenske

2 Deconstructing Wasp Aggression: Proposing a Critically Anthropomorphic Narrative of Shared Vulnerability

 Minna Santaoja



Part 2: Insects and Human Gaze



3 Fly Eyes and Insect Vision at the Turn of the 20th Century: from Scientific Curiosity to Compound Menace

 Concepción Cortés Zulueta

4 Encounters with the Insect World: Care and Human – Insect Relationships in Wildlife Documentaries

 Heidi Mikkola



Part 3: Science and Knowledge



5 Wild Spiders in Fragile Knowledge Networks: Spiders in Medicine, Natural History, and Silk Production in Eighteenth-Century Europe

 Laura Hollsten

6 Valuing Birds and Insects in America, c. 1815–1920: a Multispecies Perspective

 Sophie FitzMaurice

7 From Harmless Nuisance to Frightening Enemy: the Perceptions of Ticks in Finland before the Beginning of the Tick Hysteria in the 1990s

 Otto Latva

8 Anopheline Mobilities and More-Than-Mosquito Biopolitics in Making Biotechnology

 Marianne Mäkelin



PART 4: Bodies at Risk



9 Clandestine Agents in Meadows: Ticks, Cattle and Redwater Fever in Finland, 1860s–1930s

 Taina Syrjämaa

10 Social Construction of Tick-Borne Diseases from the 1950s to the Twenty-First Century: a View From the History of Medicine

 Suvi Rytty

11 Tick Smart: Practices and Materializations in Human – Tick Entanglements

 Sanna Lillbroända-Annala



PART 5: Multispecies Networks



12 Fleas, Knowledge-Making, and the Epidemiology of Plague in British India: Perspectives from the Bombay Epidemic, 1905–1906

 Emily Webster

13 Epidemic Encounters: Mingling with Mosquitoes in Réunion and Mauritius

 Karine Aasgaard Jansen

14 Humans, Ticks, and the Conflict over the Cervids

 Heta Lähdesmäki and Tuomas Räsänen



Index