Mariam is interested in all aspects of animals’ lives, and especially in how the animal sciences shape those lives. Her most recent book, Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences (2024, Manchester University Press), introduces and develops the concept of ‘species stories’ as a way to make species visible and legible not as a scientific taxonomic category, but as a technology that is decked with the power to frame, judge, legitimise and delegitimise animals’ behaviours.
Mariam’s focus on animals is the outcome of an intellectual journey that has propelled her from health (‘The nature of Prozac’, 2001, History of the Human Sciences), to the body (The Body: A Reader, 2004, co- edited with Monica Greco), to new materialism/affect (Inventive Life: Approaches Towards the New Materialism, 2006, co-edited with Celia Lury and Sarah Kember), to non-linguistic words (Word: Beyond Language, Beyond Image, 2015), animal words (‘Dog words – or, how to think without language’, 2019, Sociological Review), and finally to animals. The topics of science, interdisciplinarity, mind/body relation, cognition/sensory cognition, and process philosophy have been unifying across these domains. She is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow, based in UCL Anthropocene.
