Open Access

Mieke Roscher

• In her article, "Current Objectives of Human-Animal Studies: Why the Story of Harriet the Tortoise Should Be Retold," Mieke Roscher responds to Haraway's call to action in "When Species Meet" in order to propose a political history of animals. To develop this new historiographical approach, she turns to concepts of agency and human-animal interaction as the most widely discussed paths to making visible the involvement of animals in "our" shared history. Built on the story of Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise and a decisive historical figure living in the Galápagos Islands during Darwin's visit in 1835, who died as recently as 2006, Roscher shows how praxiography, material culture, and spatial approaches could be connected to tell different stories to the ones currently being told by traditional historiography. Tortoises and turtles in particular have already influenced historical thinking, not least because they have come to symbolize the extinction discourse as well as debates on climatic change and the Anthropocene. Hence, Roscher introduces a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and relations (and agency as a relation), practices and materialities, spaces and places, and offers a way to retell Harriet's life story - and the life stories of many other animals - in the future.