I follow Irus Braverman’s work with enthusiasm. She describes herself as working at the intersections of law, geography, anthropology, and posthumanism. I first read her work on acts of planting and uprooting trees in Israel/Palestine and I was hooked. She frames the nexus of inquiry in her work, as a general matter, as focused “on several common themes: the imbrications between law, space, and power, with an emphasis on materiality; the governance of populations through natural (e.g., trees, animals) and unnatural (e.g. flushometers, turnstiles) things; the role of low-level bureaucrats, especially inspectors, in the construction of particular legal geographies; the physical and symbolic manifestations of the public/private divide (e.g., at the checkpoint, the public toilet, and the zoo); and the heightened role of seeing and vision in various legal and material constructions (tree landscapes, checkpoints, zoos, doors and dogs in U.S. criminal procedure)”.

Read “Animal Frontiers: A Tale of Three Zoos in Israel/Palestine”. I wanted to profile it because it bridges Irus’ work that finds Israel/Palestine as its geography with her work that finds the zoo as its geography (or other institutions of animal conversation or animal wilderness). It some ways, the piece serves as a microcosm for many of the themes that run through Irus’ work more generally. This piece explores three zoos – Jerusalem, Qalqilya, and Gaza. In diving into each, Irus teases out the stories of an animal – the Persian Fallow Deer, a giraffe (Brownie), and a lioness (Sabrina). The interweaving stories, and geographies, are beautifully drawn.

Irus is an engaging writer, firmly located in her work. As a teaser, from the beginning of her section on the Qalqilya Zoo:

“Patrons of the Qalqilya Zoo will find the giraffe exhibit empty. Nowadays, the giraffe stands motionless in the zoo’s museum, stuffed and preserved by a taxidermist, confronting each viewer with the corporeality of its life and death. How did this giraffe come to live in Qalqilya? How did it die? Why does the zoo mount and display it? And what can the somber story of the giraffe’s death at the height of the Second Intifada – the popular Palestinian uprising of 2004 – teach us about the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians and between humans and nonhumans across war-ridden divides?”