{"id":281,"date":"2023-11-03T21:28:00","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T20:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/?p=281"},"modified":"2026-07-26T13:20:40","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T12:20:40","slug":"the-insignificant-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/the-insignificant-others\/","title":{"rendered":"02 Los Otros, los Insignificantes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Catherine Oliver<\/a>\u00a0<\/u>and\u00a0Christopher Kelty<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>have curated this number.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Content<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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  1. Introduction to the issue<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Non-human animals inconsistencies <\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. The Roadkill Project<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Online references<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. Handbook references<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Introduction to the issue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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    Far from being a human-made product, cities are the convergence of a continuous set of assemblages involving all kinds of elements such as animals, weather, plants, and other objects and beings we have labeled as non-humans<\/em>. This category is ontologically broad enough to include everything but people and still handy to pack such heterogeneity into a concept that can be semiotically extended and its components symmetrically compared to those inside the category of humans<\/em>, at least in terms of agency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The notion of the nonhuman, as Edwin Sayes [1<\/a>] suggests, has been used as an umbrella term to encompass a wide range of entities capable of affecting others and altering their trajectories. Non-human is then an unstable category hiding tremendous complexity. Although semiotically speaking, a bench may be in the same position as a dog, the two elements are not politically the same [2<\/a>]. Following that line of reasoning, a stray dog is not the same as a pet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    This second issue of Tarde explores a bunch of fatal encounters between people and a particular type of non-humans we have problematized in our handbook as insignificant<\/em>. That categorization obeys a careless way of considering and approaching others<\/em>. It means those<\/em> individuals who are not like us. Along with this handbook, our eyes have been on those scenarios where non-humans ended up beaten, crushed, and shattered \u2014which means, dead\u2014 mainly due to a human lack of care for their presence. Following that, the idea of insignificant beings \u2014whose analytical core is based on a matter of relation rather than on its ontology\u2014 is circulated through some vignettes of frogs, ants, hedgehogs, and worms. To expand the notion of otherness, we have prepared a brief online discussion on animal inconsistencies and enhanced a visual exercise on roadkill that we started in our printed version.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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    An African black beetle was crushed by an unknown vehicle in Colombia.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

    Non-human inconsistencies<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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    We encourage you to download and print this edition’s handbook and the included<\/strong> additional small flyer<\/a>. The flyer comes with an invitation to write or draw what caring for those others<\/em> means to you. Don\u2019t forget to send us your work, we want to publish it online!<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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    The corpse of a bird in Colombia has been dead on the pavement for several days.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    Seven minutes before taking this picture, a cyclist, unintentionally, killed this bird. The situation happened in northern Germany.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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    The still fresh and slimy dead body of a slug on a sidewalk in northern Germany.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

    Imagine, instead of frogs, ants, hedgehogs, slugs, and earthworms, a road paved with the corpses of dogs, cats, horses, bunnies, or even bees. One does not need to go too far with the number of individuals. A solitary dog, who passed away hit by a truck, concerns more than, for instance, a rat lying dead on a sidewalk intentionally killed by someone \u2014see our set of roadkill infographics. To make this exercise more extreme, picture a street covered by freshly dead humans. Or just by one. What a difference! right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Specifically, in the following exercise, we will explore some of the data obtained by the Roadkill Project<\/a> (RkP), a citizen program held by the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, that registers and maps roadkill incidents reported by citizens, mainly in Austria. Besides being an open and collaborative project, one of the particularities of the RkP is its detailed attention to\u2014or concern for\u2014all kinds of animals, regardless of their size, type, background, or the possible economic implications of the incidents they were involved in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The Roadkill Project<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Perhaps the core of the Roadkill Project (RkP) is its interactive and collaborative online map service where researchers and citizen can upload their roadkill observations. The artifact has been working since 2014 and has more than 17,000 registered reports. For the purposes of this exercise, we will visualize the dead animals reported in the first six months of 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    If you are already familiar with the Idaho dead animal stockpile from the handbook (download it here<\/a>), perhaps you may notice below a few differences between the data reported in Idaho and the data collected in Austria. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between both places in terms of location and fauna, there are some interesting findings to compare regarding the type of animals reported,  their monthly reports, and the way the RkP has labeled some of the collected information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    For instance, despite both stockpiles being collective exercises based on inventorying of nonhuman lifeless bodies, the intentions behind those counts are different. The Idaho stockpile<\/a> gives the sensation of being an index of administrative procedures and animal salvage parts. People mainly report big animal (elk and deer) collisions either for insurance purposes or to inform that they are taking advantage of the incident, either taking the dead animal\u2019s body to be consumed, exhibited, or used in different processes. Meanwhile, as it was already introduced, what the RkP is seeking is to make visible and discuss roads as careless infrastructures towards other beings. It does not matter how big or useful they may be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    *Although the RkP has a broader approach to registering all kinds of beings killed by vehicles on roads, that attention to small animals seems, sometimes, to play against the idea of visualizing all the incidents. The reason is that some dead animals are difficult to identify and need to be classified into practical categories. Regarding birds, they have created four categories to organize their findings: Gr\u00f6\u00dfer als Taube<\/em> (Bigger than a pigeon), Gr\u00f6\u00dfer als Sperling<\/em> (Bigger than a sparrow), so Gro\u00df wie Taube<\/em> (As big as a pigeon), and so Gro\u00df wie Amsel<\/em> (As big as blackbird). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

    **A similar situation occurs with other beings that are not possible to recognize and need to be organized by classes: mammals and amphibians, for example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Online references<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    Handbook references<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    [1] Shingne, MC. (2022). The more-than-human right to the city: A multispecies reevaluation. Journal of Urban Affairs<\/em>, 44(2), 137-155, DOI: 10.1080\/07352166.2020.1734014<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [2] Ibid, p. 7.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [3] Ibid, p. 8.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [4] Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds<\/em>. University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [5] Bedoya-V, MM., Arias-Alzate, A., Delgado-V, C. (2018). Atropellamientos de fauna silvestre en la red vial urbana de cinco ciudades del Valle de Aburr\u00e1 (Antioquia, Colombia). Caldasia<\/em> 40(2):335-348. https:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.15446\/caldasia.v40n2.68297<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [6] Bartoni\u010dka, T., Andr\u00e1\u0161ik, R., Du\u013ea, M., Sedon\u00edk, J. and B\u00edl, M. (2018), Identification of local factors causing clustering of animal-vehicle collisions. Jour. Wild. Mgmt<\/em>. 82, 940-947. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1002\/jwmg.21467<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    [7] Englefield B, Starling M, Wilson B, Roder C, and McGreevy P. (2020). The Australian Roadkill Reporting Project\u2014Applying Integrated Professional Research and Citizen Science to Monitor and Mitigate Roadkill in Australia. Animals<\/em> 10(7). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/ani10071112<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Catherine Oliver\u00a0and\u00a0Christopher Kelty\u00a0have curated this number.\u00a0 Content Introduction to the issue Far from being a human-made product, cities are the convergence of a continuous set of assemblages involving all kinds of elements such as animals, weather, plants, and other objects and beings we have labeled as non-humans. This category is ontologically broad enough to include everything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"insignificant","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[18,16,17,15,19],"class_list":["post-281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-past_issues","tag-carelessness","tag-more-than-human-city","tag-multispecies-care","tag-road-infrastructures","tag-urban-animals"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/main-post-page-scaled.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1044,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281\/revisions\/1044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tarde.info\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}