Race. Part 1

Conventionally, race has been approached in Geography and other social sciences in terms that maintain a firm boundary around "the human". In whichever way race is conceived, racial designation and discrimination have been understood within the confines of an essentially human domain of sociality. This is unsurprising. As Bruno Latour (2004) has pointed out, the social itself is usually considered as a more or less exclusively human arrangement; where, if they figure at all, its "non-human" members appear as just the "constructs" of human dispositions and relations that themselves remain explicable in their own - purely human - terms (Latour 2005: 39). This idea of the social has, however, been increasingly and variously, called into question in Geography and elsewhere (e.g. Braun and Castree 2001; Smith et al. 2009 : 13 - 17; Panelli 2000 ; Sofoulis 2009). Not only has the boundary separating the human and the non-human - and culture from nature - become less and less secure, it has itself come to be understood as an artifice.