Ashton Wesner

“Anti-Colonial Arachnologies” is a queer feminist analysis of scientific and cultural knowledge production about spiders. Stories about spiders are shaped by cisheteronormative social orders and material histories of land occupation. Drawing on years of collaboration and ethnography with spider biologists, this book project examines how scientists reinforce and reconfigure legacies of gendered and racialized colonial violences in their formal and popular communications, research laboratories, and field sites on Indigenous homelands. The project offers a conceptual toolkit for charting the contours of these influences in contemporary animal sciences and explores interdisciplinary methods for forging anti-colonial practices. As such, this work contributes to broader conversations about biological research as a form of land-use and argues for the importance of spiders in critical science studies.