Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies – Conference Program

Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, Cripping Critical Animal Studies

Conference Program

June 21-23, 2016
University of Alberta

Organized by Chloë Taylor and Kelly S. Montford

For more info on rooms and for updates on the program, check out this site.

Tuesday, June 21

2:00-3:00 p.m. – Refreshments and Registration in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl

3:00-5:00 p.m. – Welcome and Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies Plenary Panel

Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies Plenary Panel with DINESH WADIWEL, KIM TALLBEAR, AND MANEESHA DECKHA; MODERATED BY BILLY-RAY BELCOURT

5:30 p.m. – Dinner at Narayanni’s Restaurant (vegan South Indian buffet), 10131 81 Avenue

Wednesday, June 22

8:00-9:00 a.m. – continental breakfast in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl
9:00-10:00 a.m.: Concurrent Individual Papers

A. ‘Animal Crips’ and Cripping Animal Liberation

Ryan Sweet, “Chickens with Cork Legs and Dogs with Dentures: Representations of Prostheticised Animals in Late Nineteenth-Century Periodicals”

Hannah Monroe, “Neurodiversity and Animal Liberation: Challenging Hegemonic Constructions of Normalcy”

B. Indigenous Epistemologies

Danielle Taschereau Mamers, “Decolonizing the plains: bison life beyond colonial commodification”
Brandon Kerfoot, “Seals that club back: Animal Revenge in Alootook Ipellie’s Arctic Dreams and Nightmares”

C. Critical Engagements with the Work of Temple Grandin

Chair: Lindsay Eales

Vasile Stanescu, “Lost in Translation: Temple Grandin, ‘Humane Meat’ and the Intersection of Oppression”

Vittoria Lion, “Disrupting Temple Grandin: Resisting a ‘Humane’ Face for Autistic and Animal Oppression”

D. Settler Colonialism and Animals

Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, ‘Dog whistling: Australian settler colonialism and the dingo’

Presenters: Fiona Probyn-Rapsey and Dinesh Wadiwel (Co-authors: (presenters plus Sue Donaldson, George Ioannides, Tess Lea, Kate Marsh, Astrida Neimanis, Annie Potts, Nik Taylor, Richard Twine, Stuart White), ‘Sydney’s sustainability and campus food justice workshop”

10:15-12:00 – Cripping Critical Animal Studies Plenary Panel

Plenary panel with Stephanie Jenkins, Sunaura Taylor, and A. Marie Houser
moderated by Vittoria Lion

12:00-1:00 – lunch in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl

1:00-2:30 p.m.: Concurrent Individual Papers

A. Gender, Disability, and Animality (Undergraduate Student Panel)

Samuella Jo Johnson, “Institutionalized Space: Dehumanization and the Masking of Violence”

James Harley, “The Trouble with Animal Rights Activism: Emotion Work is Women’s Work”

Dylan Hallingstad O’Brien, “‘We Are Humans!’: Animality as Disability in Yusuke Kishi’s Shinsekai Yori”

B. Settler Colonial Imaginings of Nature and Animals

Ben O’Heran, “Henry David Thoreau, the Unsettled Settler: Exploring Environmentalism as a Means of Usurping Indigenous Place-Thought”

Carina Magazzeni, “The Trouble with Taxidermy: Brad Isaacs and Animalium”

Rebekah Sinclair,”Guest, Pests, or Terrorists?: The Settler-Colonial Intelligibility of ‘Invasive Species”

C. Decolonial Perspectives on Domestication and Diet

Shaila Wadhwani, “Coloniality: Nature and the Bodies of Domestication”

Jason Price, “Decolonizing Desire and Relationships with Animals and Space in The Devil’s Chimney”

Samantha King, “Consuming Animals in Theory and Practice: Conversations with Indigenous and Postcolonial Studies Scholars on the Ethics and Politics of Food”

3:00-4:00 – Seeing Animals: Crip Reflections on the Work of Sunaura Taylor

Plenary Lecture by Alison Kafer
moderated by Emilia Nielsen

4:15-5:30 p.m. Art Exhibition Opening: Works of Sunaura Taylor
FemLab (Feminist Exhibition Space), Assiniboia Hall
curated by Michelle Meagher
Wine and Cashew Cheese Reception

Thursday, June 23

8:00-9:00 a.m. – continental breakfast in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl
9:00-10:30 a.m.: Concurrent Individual Papers

A. Global Perspectives on Interlocking Oppressions

Lisa Warden, “The street dog and the slum dweller: twin victims of urban renewal in modern India”

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, “But American Indians Blessed the Animals Before Killing Them: Native Fetishes and Edible Others in Brazil”

Maria Elena Garcia, “Culinary Spectacles: Bodies and Violence in Peru’s Gastronomic Boom”

B. Critical Animal/ Disability Studies

Nancy Halifax and Chelsea Jones, “‘What kind of animal are you?’”

Chelsea Jones and Liz Shek-Noble, “What to Make of Lashawn Chan: An Overview of Critical Disability, Animal, and Post-colonial Studies’ Intersections in Southeast Asia and North America”

C. Philosophical Perspectives on Interlocking Oppressions

Angela Martin, “Affirmative Action for Animals?”

Syl Kocieda, “The spectre of not-quite-humans in the narrative of ‘animality’: Should we be talking about actual animals in animal advocacy?”

Frédéric Côté-Boudreau, “Enabling Autonomy for Animals and People with Cognitive Disabilities”

10:30-11:00 a.m. – refreshment break in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl

11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Indigenous Food Politics

Billy-Ray Belcourt, “Reserve Dying and the Taste of Non-Sovereignty”
Margaret Robinson, “All My (Blood) Relations: Indigenous Relationality in Vegan Future”
moderated by Susanne Luhmann

12:00-1:00 p.m. – lunch in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl

1:00 – 2:15 – BOOK PANELS

A. Book panel on Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel’s The War Against Animals (Brill Press, 2015)

Chair: Chloë Taylor

Panelists: Vasile Stanescu and Kelin Emmett

Respondent: Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel

B. Book panel on Claire Jean Kim’s Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Panelists: Kelly Struthers Montford and Christiane Bailey

Respondent: Claire Jean Kim

C. Book panel on Sunaura Taylor’s Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (New Press, 2016)

Chair: Danielle Peers

Panelists: Alexis Shotwell and Joshua St. Pierre

Respondent: Sunaura Taylor

2:30-3:30 – Taxonomies of Power

Plenary lecture by Claire Jean Kim
moderated by Fiona probyn-rapsey

3:30-4:00 p.m. – refreshment break in the Humanities Centre Fishbowl

5:00-8:00 p.m. visit to F.A.R.R.M. (farm sanctuary) and vegan bbq

For more info on rooms and for updates on the program, check out this site.

Decolonizing and Cripping Critical Animal Studies – Alberta 2016

CALL FOR CONFERENCE PAPERS

DECOLONIZING CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES,
CRIPPING CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES

June 21-23, 2016, at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Program Conference is out : http://kellysmontford.com/program/

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 10, 2016

Sponsored by the Faculty of Arts, the Faculty of Native Studies, and the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta

CCAS Alberta

 

Conference plenary panels will include :

Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies

Moderated by Billy-Ray Belcourt (University of Alberta) and featuring
• Kim TallBear (Associate Professor of Native Studies, University of Alberta),
• Maneesha Decka (Associate Professor of Law, University of Victoria), and
• Dinesh Wadiwel (Lecturer in Human Rights and Socio-legal Studies, University of Sydney).

Cripping Critical Animal Studies

Moderated by Vittoria Lion (University of Toronto) and featuring
• Sunaura Taylor (artist and author),
• Stephanie Jenkins (Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Oregon State University), and
• A. Marie Houser (independent writer, editor, and activist).
Taxonomies of Power, Plenary by Claire Jean Kim (UC Irvine)

Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies

The first thread of conversation that we hope to develop is that of decolonizing Critical Animal Studies. While some theorists have turned to non-Western and indigenous cultures for examples of less or nonspeciesist worldviews, the relationship between anti-colonial politics and animal activism has been fraught. Single-issue animal activist campaigns have often functioned to justify racism, xenophobia and exclusion, with, to adapt Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, white humans saving animals from brown humans. The eating of shark fins and dog meat has been marked as cruel and backward, for instance, in contrast with dominant constructions of Western diets as sophisticated and humane. Indigenous rights activists and animal activists have clashed over the issue of hunting charismatic animals, such as whales and seals, often eclipsing attention to far more widespread forms of animal, colonial, and racial oppression in Western, settler societies. Ecofeminist approaches to animal ethics have been riven over the issue of indigenous hunting; some ecofeminists, such as Marti Kheel, have expressed dismissive views of the spiritual significance of subsistence hunting for indigenous people, while others, such as Val Plumwood, Deanne Curtin, and Karen Warren, have argued for contextual rather than universalizing forms of ethical vegetarianism. More recently, decolonial scholars have shown the interconnections between animal oppression, imperialism, and settler colonialism, and the need to center race in Critical Animal Studies. Maneesha Decka, for instance, has highlighted the ways that imperialism is justified through animalizations of racial others and condemnations of the ways colonized others treat animals, even while imperial identities are constituted through the consumption of animal bodies. Billy-Ray Belcourt has argued that speciesism and animal oppression are made possible in settler colonial contexts through the prior and ongoing dispossession and erasure of indigenous people from the lands on which animals are now domesticated and exploited. Belcourt critiques the ways that Critical Animal Studies assumes and operates within the ‘givenness’ of a settler colonial state, and suggests that Critical Animal Studies should center an analysis of indigeneity and call for the repatriation of indigenous lands.

Possible presentation topics for the Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies thread include:

• The intersections of decolonial and Critical Animal Studies
• The uses of nonhuman animals in projects of land settlement
• Cultural food colonialism or decolonial food studies
• Reservization, food and fat studies
• Animal ethics and decolonization
• Animals, ontology, and settler colonialism

The Cripping of Critical Animal Studies

The second thread of conversation that we wish to pursue at this meeting is the cripping of Critical Animal Studies. Scholars working at the intersections of Critical Animal Studies and Critical Disability Studies have argued that the oppression of nonhuman animals and disabled humans are interconnected. Humans who defend animals and refrain from eating them have often found themselves labeled as cognitively disabled, mentally ill, ‘stupid’ or ‘crazy,’ and psychiatrists have proposed diagnoses for animal activists and vegans such as ‘anti vivisection syndrome’ and ‘orthorexia nervosa.’ Disabled humans, like people of colour, have been put on display along with nonhuman animals in the history of ‘freak’ shows, and disabled humans and nonhuman animals continue to have their bodies objectified and their interests sacrificed for the purposes of medical training and scientific knowledge. Disabled humans are continually compared to nonhuman animals, not only in insults but also in medical terminology, with effects that are oppressive because of the pre-existing denigration of nonhuman animals. The same claims about what makes human life ontologically distinct and morally valuable—that humans have reason, that humans have language, that humans are autonomous—justify the exclusion of both nonhuman animals and cognitively disabled humans from moral consideration, as well as the oppression of physically disabled humans who are considered ‘dependent.’ Despite these interconnecting oppressions, speciesism has characterized Critical Disability Studies as much as ableism has characterized animal rights discourse (Peter Singer, Jeff McMahan). In recent years and more productively, however, Critical Animal Studies scholars such as Sue Donaldson, Will Kymlicka, Stephanie Jenkins and Sunaura Taylor have borrowed from Critical Disability Studies scholarship to argue that the dependency and vulnerability of domesticated animals should not be a reason to devalue their lives; far from removing a human or another animal from the realm of moral concern, (inter)dependency and vulnerability are the animal (and thus human) condition. Two types of animals come immediately to mind at the intersections of Critical Disability Studies and Critical Animal Studies: the service animal and the disabled animal, and scholars such as Kelly Oliver and A. Marie Houser have provided ethical analyses of these animals drawing on both animal and disability ethics. In particular, while disability scholars have critiqued the ways we view disabled humans as pitiful, tragic, exotic, or inspirational, Houser observes that heartwarming images of disabled pigs and dogs in mobility devices function to reassure viewers that we live in a society that is extraordinarily compassionate to animals, even while actual animals have by and large disappeared from view, sequestered in institutions of exploitation, containment and death.

Possible presentation topics in the Cripping Critical Animal Studies thread include:

• Intersections of Critical Disability and Critical Animal Studies
• Critiques of the work of Temple Grandin
• The ethics of using service animals
• Representations of disabled animals
• The cultural associations between mental illness and love for animals (e.g. ‘crazy cat ladies’)

SUBMISSIONS:

FORMAT: Presentations should be 20 minutes in length, leaving 10 minutes for discussion. We are receptive to different and innovative formats including but not limited to panels, performances, workshops, and public debates. You may propose individual or group presentations, but please specify the structure of your proposal. Please be sure to include your name(s), title(s), organizational affiliation(s), field of study or activism, and A/V needs in your submission.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 10, 2016

TO SUBMIT: email an abstract of no more than 500 words and a bio of no more than 150 words to the conference organizers: Chloë Taylor (chloe3[at]ualberta[dot]ca) and Kelly Struthers Montford (kelly.sm[at]ualberta[dot]ca).

(Download the call for paper)

CFP: Philosophical Ecologies: Considerations of the Animal, the Vegetal and the Environmental

Philosophical Ecologies: Considerations of the Animal, the Vegetal and the Environmental

23rd Annual DePaul University Graduate Student Conference

February 12-13, 2016

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Call for submissions – Deadline: December 1, 2015

Keynote Speaker: Cynthia Willett, Emory University

Recent research in interspecies ethics, the place of plant life, and conceptions of the environmental testifies to escalating concerns regarding the insufficiency of existing interrogations into the historical privileging of some forms of life over others. These concerns emerge from a long history of global injustices that have resulted in environmental degradation as well as marginalization of both human and nonhuman populations through such practices as speciation, colonization, feminization, criminalization and dehumanization. This conference highlights the particularly urgent need for more rigorously articulated philosophies of the animal, the vegetal, and the environmental and seeks to reconsider conceptual boundaries between natural and artificial spaces and concepts of life. Topics of interest may include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • environmental, animal, or food ethics
  • conceptions of animal, plant, and human life
  • eco-feminism
  • theoretical, political, and/or historical distinctions between the human and the nonhuman
  • environmental politics and policy
  • rights discourse and its application to nonhuman others
  • nature and the polis
  • colonization and environmental exploitation
  • eco-affectivity and interspecies attunements
  • intergenerational environmentalism
  • ethology and communication in animal and plant life
  • environmental aesthetics
  • dehumanization and oppression

Submissions from any area of study addressing these topics are welcome. Papers should be limited to 3,000 words and prepared for blind review. Please include name, university affiliation, and submission title in the body of your email, and send all submissions and inquires to: depaul.philosophy@gmail.com

Critical Animal Studies

See new post for this conference: https://christianebailey.com/critical-animal-studies-2016/

 

Race and Animals – Summer Institute Wesleyan University

Race and Animals – Summer Institute

June 6-17, 2016

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

Deadline December 1, 2015

Lori Gruen, Claire Jean Kim, and Timothy Pachirat invite you to apply for “Race and Animals,” a two-week institute to be held June 6-June 17, 2016, hosted by Wesleyan Animal Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

The “Race and Animals” summer institute seeks to foster critical discussions on theoretical, historical, and political understandings of how power works to constitute racialized and animalized subjects.  We encourage applications from:

  1. Those working on current projects addressing the intersection of race studies and animal studies.
  2. Those working on current projects focusing on race who are interested in exploring connections to animal studies.
  3. Those working on current projects focusing on animals who are interested in exploring connections to race studies.

We welcome applications from all fields of study.  Applicants should either have their Ph.D.s or other terminal degrees (e.g., MFAs or JDs) or be advanced graduate students at the ABD stage of their graduate work.

10-12 selected scholars will attend daily lectures and engage in structured daily discussions with the institute organizers and visiting speakers.  They will also have the opportunity to present and receive feedback on their own research.  Required readings will be distributed in advance of the institute.  Participants will be provided with dormitory style housing and will receive $500 each to offset travel expenses.

About the Organizers:

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Philosophy, and Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University.  She also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies.  She is the author of 3 books, including most recently Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015); the editor of 5 books, including The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014) and Ecofeminism:  Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth with Carol J. Adams (Bloomsbury, 2014).  With Kari Weil, she co-edited “Animal Others” a special issue of Hypatia (2012).

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies, social movements, and human-animal studies.  She is the author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge, 2015), Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale, 2000), and numerous essays on race and animals.  In 2013, she co-guest edited a special issue of American Quarterly entitled, Species/Race/Sex.

Timothy Pachirat teaches in the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst.  His book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), is a widely acclaimed political ethnography of the massive, repetitive killing of animals carried out by a largely immigrant workforce.

About the Visiting Speakers:

Colin Dayan is Professor of English, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author most recently of With Dogs at the Edge of Life (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2015).  She has also authored The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton UP, 2011), a Choice Outstanding Academic book; The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT/Boston Review Press, 2007); Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995, 1998; Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987); A Rainbow for the Christian West (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).

Maria Elena Garcia is director of the Comparative History of Ideas and associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and has been a Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University and Tufts University. Her first book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford, 2005) examines Indigenous and intercultural politics in Peru. Her work on Indigeneity and interspecies politics in the Andes has appeared in multiple edited volumes and journals such as Anthropology Now, Anthropological Quarterly, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Her second book project, Dancing Guinea Pigs and Other Tales of Race in Peru, examines the intersections of race, species, and capital in contemporary Peru.

Jared Sexton  is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Film and Media Studies. He has published articles in journals such as African American ReviewAmerican QuarterlyArt JournalCultural CritiqueRadical History Review, and Social Text, and essays in various anthologies on contemporary politics and popular culture. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism and a co-editor of a special issue of Critical Sociology on “Race and the Variations of Discipline,” and has contributed occasional pieces to magazines like ArtforumColorLinesJadaliyya, and openDemocracy.

About Wesleyan Animal Studies:

From 2010-2015, Wesleyan Animal Studies, in partnership with The Animals and Society Institute held an annual summer fellowship program for scholars pursuing research in Human-Animal Studies. The fellowship program was started by the Animals and Society Institute (ASI) in 2007 and directed by Margo DeMello; it was hosted by Lori Gruen and Kari Weil since coming to Wesleyan; and over the years funded over 60 fellows. The ASI-WAS Human Animal Studies Fellowship Program will celebrate its 10th year by hosting a conference at Wesleyan in October 2016.

 

For more info : http://www.wesleyan.edu/animalstudies/applications.html