S9E4: Segregation with Jules Skotnes-Brown

Jules Skotnes-Brown joins Claudia on the show to discuss how segregating logics were used to govern humans and animals in South Africa’s history. This includes everything from Addo’s elephants being driven, enclosed, and “tamed”, to Kalahari San people being policed inside a national park and managed through rations and confinement.  Topics Covered:  The difference between environmental history and animal history    Defining segregation as a ideological and material connections rather than direct comparisons  Addo elephants labelled vermin then reclassified as a rare “race” worth preserving  Kalahari San people policed through park rules, hunting bans, arrests, and rationing  The spectrum from pest to protected as a tool of governance and population control  Plague, sanitation, and health departments as engines for forced removal and spatial separation  How metaphors of infestation travel from animals to humans and back again  Animal highlight: pigs in Kingston, waste policy, hog cholera, and urban bylaw change Date Recorded: 16 October 2025 Jules Skotnes-Brown is a historian of animals, disease, and knowledge production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910-1948, which won the Royal Historical Society’s First Book Prize in 2025. He is currently writing a second book on the global history of rats, plague, and capitalist infrastructure in the twentieth century. Jules completed his PhD at University of Cambridge History and Philosophy Science in 2020. Jules is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at University of Liverpool and PI of the Wellcome Trust funded research project 'Conserving Global Health: Biodiversity Protection and the Prehistory of Planetary Health' (2026-2031). The project will explore the historical engagements, collaborations and frictions between conservation theories and practices and international, global, and planetary health in the long twentieth century. In so doing, it will provide a prehistory of Planetary Health. Featured:  Segregated Species: Pests, Knowledge, and Boundaries in South Africa, 1910–1948 by Jules Skotnes-Brown The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political Historyby Jane Carruthers What Was It Like to Be a Cow? History and Animal Studies by Erica Fudge  The History of Animals in the Present Moment by Erica Fudge Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question by Bénédicte Boisseron Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe The Sanitation Syndrome by Maynard Swanson  Elephants in Africa by Frank Melland The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis Scurrying seafarers: shipboard rats, plague, and the land/sea borderby Jules Skotnes-Brown Sulphuric Utopias: A History of Maritime Fumigationby Lukas Engelmann and Christos Lynetris Stones: Animal Histories of Kingston by Claudia Hirtenfelder Pigs Peace Sanctuary The Animal Turn Signal Group Other episodes of The Animal Turn S5E4: Epidemiological Dividual with Christos Lynteris  Season 8: Animals and Media Animal Highlight: “Eat Like a Pig”: Separating pigs from humans Quote:  “The elephant problem, a term which I use as one uses the unsatisfactory phrase ‘the native problem,’ because it means to me much the same thing – the rectification of our past mistakes and the attempt to bring an old, indigenous and very different form of life into harmony with our own life and aims” from Frank Melland, Elephants in Africa (1938), p 145. The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn,Blue Sky, and Instagram Credits: Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) Guests: Jules Skotnes-Brown Host: Claudia Hirtenfelder Editing and Production: Claudia Hirtenfelder Episode Artwork: Rebecca Shen Content Creation and Support: Herre de Bondt and Carlo Salzani Animal Highlight: Stones Walking Tour Sound Effects: Epidemic Sound Bed Music: Gordon Clarke Logo: Jeremy John A.P.P.L.E Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities. Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Support the show The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the  iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.