Abstract
Humans have long been in the thrall of birds-of-paradise plumes. When encountered the seductive power of these plumes is immediately felt, making it clear why for millennia they have been desired ornaments and commodities. This chapter describes how to harness these charismatic avian effects in the classroom to underline not only how these effects have co-constructed the allure of birds-of-paradise plumes as commodities, but how they ensure that even millinery preserved birds-of-paradise will always remain more than an object enframed by human desires and designs. In doing so, the chapter recognizes and forwards taxidermy objects as sophisticated pedagogical tools for not only examining the co-constitution of human-avian histories but offering speculative modes of knowing and relating to birds-of-paradise across time and space and states of life and death.
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Patchett, M. (2022). Flights of Fancy: Speculative Taxidermy as Pedagogical Practice. In: Williams, N., Keating, T. (eds) Speculative Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_15
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