
Rewilding epidemiologies, and un/bordered engineers
Rewilding epidemiologies, and un/bordered engineers
Tue Feb 24 10:49:51 CET 2026

Paper presented at ‘Un/bordering animal health’ workshop in Halle, 21-23 January 2026.
On 21-23 January 2026, Kieran O’Mahony presented a paper at the workshop ‘Un/Bordering Animal Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Spatial Politics, Colonial Legacies and Multispecies Entanglements of Animal Disease Control’. The workshop was organised by Dr. Larissa Fleischmann (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg) and Wisse van Engelen (University of Twente) and took place in Halle.
The paper develops the concept of rewilding epidemiologies to examine how large herbivores introduced for their ecological engineering simultaneously re-engineer epidemiological landscapes. Drawing on ethnographic research with feral wild boar and free-roaming rewilding pigs in the UK, it shows how these animals and their disease ecologies unsettle biosecurity governance, generating political and epistemic frictions. The paper concludes by calling for forms of animal health governance that move beyond exclusion and eradication toward managing multispecies coexistence.

