Université d’été féministe 2015

Cet été se tiendra L’université d’été féministe à l’UdeM, un ensemble d’ateliers, cours et conférences d’une à trois heures donnés par des étudiant·es de l’Udem entre le 18 juin et le 3 août 2015.

Universite d ete feministe

J’y donnerai un cours le mercredi 22 juillet 2015 à 13h (local B-3285)

Approches féministes en éthique animale et environnementale

Ce cours introduira certaines thèses développées par les approches féministes en éthique animale et environnementale depuis une trentaine d’années.

Les approches féministes ont développé les outils nécessaires pour critiquer non seulement le sexisme, mais également les autres oppressions comme le racisme, le capacitisme, l’âgisme, etc. Mais qu’en est-il du spécisme et de l’anthropocentrisme? Au coeur de l’écoféminisme se trouve l’idée que les oppressions des femmes, des personnes racisées ou marginalisées, des autres animaux et de la nature sont liées et fonctionnent selon une même logique de domination. Pourtant, les liens entre l’oppression des humains et des autres animaux restent encore aujourd’hui peu thématisés dans les mouvements féministes.

Les questions qui seront au centre de nos discussions sont les suivantes:

• Quels devoirs nous impose la reconnaissance que nous ne sommes pas les seuls êtres conscients sur la planète et que plusieurs animaux sont également des individus vulnérables qui ressentent des émotions et se soucient de ce qui leur arrive?

• Quel rôle joue le consentement (actuel ou hypothétique) des autres animaux dans la détermination de nos devoirs envers eux? Leurs actes de résistance ont-ils un poids moral?

• Quels sont les liens entre l’anthropocentrisme et l’androcentrisme?

• Comment la croyance dans la suprématie humaine – l’idée d’une domination « naturellement juste » des humains sur les autres animaux – alimente-t-elle d’autres systèmes d’oppression, comme le patriarcat et le colonialisme?

• Le spécisme (la discrimination des individus vulnérables qui n’appartiennent pas à notre groupe biologique) est-il moralement plus justifiable que le sexisme, le racisme ou le capacitisme?

• Comment les dualismes hiérarchiques et oppositionnels qui structurent la pensée occidentale – nature/culture, humain/animal, masculin/féminin, esprit/corps, rationel/émotionnel, développé/primitif, cultivé/sauvage – contribuent-ils à l’oppression des autres animaux, des femmes, des autres cultures humaines et des personnes marginalisées (notamment des personnes en situation de handicaps)?

• Quel est le rôle des émotions, de l’empathie, du care, de l’attention et de la perception morale dans la transformation de notre vision anthropocentriste du monde?

• Quelles pistes de solution à la dévastation environnementale sont compatibles avec les valeurs et principes féministes?

• Avons-nous les mêmes responsabilités envers les animaux domestiqués (utilisés pour la compagnie ou la boucherie) et les animaux sauvages en raison du fait qu’ils ont des capacités similaires ou nos devoirs envers eux sont-ils différenciés selon nos diverses relations avec eux et selon les contextes?

Selon le Living Planet Index (2014), nous avons tué la moitié des animaux sauvages vertébrés de la planète en moins de 40 ans. Cela est principalement dû à l’augmentation rapide de l’élevage qui accapare, détruit et pollue leurs habitats naturels et contribue davantage aux changements climatiques que l’ensemble des transports.

Étant donné les problèmes environnementaux, sociaux et moraux associés à l’élevage, le véganisme apparaît un outil incontournable dans les luttes pour la justice sociale et environnementale au niveau mondial (notamment pour la justice alimentaire et intergénérationnelle). Quels sont les défis qui attendent une révolution végane dans les sociétés industrialisées et non-industrialisées?

Comment développer un mouvement global de libération animale et humaine qui soit attentif aux contextes socio-économiques, respectueux des différences culturelles et solidaire avec les autres luttes sociales?

Voilà un aperçu des questions qui seront abordées dans ce cours.

Plus d’infos: https://etefeministeudem.wordpress.com/approches-feministes-en-ethique-animale-et-environnementale/

Page facebook de l’Université d’été féministe

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Animal Publics: Emotions, Empathy, Activism – Australian Animal Studies Group

Animal Publics: Emotions, Empathy, Activism

The 2015 Australian Animal Studies Group (AASG) Conference, hosted by the Human Rights & Animal Ethics Research Network (HRAE) and the Australian Centre, to be held at the University of Melbourne (Australia).

Sunday July 12 – Wednesday July 15, 2015.

The conference theme is: ‘Animal Publics: Emotions, Empathy, Activism’.

Submissions should be made by November 17 and sent to: aasg-conference@unimelb.edu.au

Keynote Speakers:

Anat Pick teaches film at Queen Mary University of London. Her book Creaturely Poetics was published by Columbia University Press in 2011. She is coeditor of Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (2013), and her nonfiction book, Maureen, will be out next year (published by Hen Press). In 2013-14, Anat curated a series of film programs on flora, fauna, and the moving image at Tate Modern, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Goethe-Institut. Anat’s current project is titled Vegan Cinema: Looking, Eating, and Letting Be.

Erica Fudge is Professor of English in the School of Humanities at the University of Strathclyde. Her research is in the fields of Animal Studies and Renaissance Studies, on issues as varied as meat eating, dreams, children, laughter, reason, bladder-control, animal faces, pet ownership, experimentation, the wearing of fur, anthropomorphic children’s literature and vegetarianism. She has recently had articles on human-livestock relations in early modern England in the journals Angelaki; Theory, Culture and Society; and History and Theory. Her books include: Pets (Acumen Press, 2008), Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 2006), Animal (Reaktion Books, 2002), Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Macmillan/St Martin’s Press, 2000). Erica is director of the British Animal Studies Network (BASN).

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is a world renowned author and animal rights activist. After a career in psychoanalysis, which involved the publication of the controversial The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), Jeffrey moved to writing on the emotional life of animals. His books include the best-selling When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (Cape, 1994) and, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs (Broadway Books, 1998). Jeffrey is a Director of Voiceless, the animal protection institute. His most recent book is Beasts: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Origins of Good and Evil (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Timothy Pachirat is an Assistant Professor of Politics at The New School for Social Research, with research interests in comparative politics, the politics of Southeast Asia, spatial and visual politics, power and the sociology of domination and resistance, the political economy of dirty and dangerous work, and interpretive and ethnographic research methods. His recent book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), was produced after working for five months undercover in a slaughterhouse. This ethnographic study focuses on the distancing of the violence of food production from broader society, with serious implications ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare.

Una Chaudhari is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English and Drama at New York University, New York and Abu Dhabi. Una is a pioneer of animals studies in the humanities and “eco-theatre”—plays and performances that engage with the subjects of ecology and environment—as well as the related field of ecocriticism, which studies art and literature from an ecological perspective. She was guest editor of a special issue of Yale Theater on “Theater and Ecology” and a special issue on Animals and Performance, for TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies (2007). She is a highly respected and award-winning scholar for her books and articles. Her most recent publications include Animal Acts: Performing Species Today (University of Michigan Press, 2014), co-edited with Holly Hughes, and Ecocide: Research Theatre and Climate Change (Palgrave, 2014), co-authored with Shonni Enelow.

Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and internationally recognised as a major scholar in animal studies. Her seminal research is foundational to the history of animal/ human relations, the history of natural history, environmental history and British history. She has authored a number of important books: The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard UP, 1987),and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Virginia, 2010).

Call for Papers :

The human/nonhuman animal relationship is continually in flux. In the twenty-first century our relationship with other species is more complex than ever. Images of animals dominate advertising and the internet. Many people feel a profound connection with their companion animals, consider them part of the family, and grieve when they die. At the same time almost all the species we breed for consumption are processed through the animal industrial complex, and are neither seen, nor heard, nor touched in a living state. Animal exploitation and commodification is increasingly hidden from public view.

The predominance of some species, and the complete absence of others, in our relationships with animals, raises important questions about how we understand and empathise with others. Why do so many people have such an emotional response to animals? Why do children bond with animals? What have we lost by excluding so many animals from the public domain – from our cities and day-to-day lives?

New advances in science indicate that we are only beginning to understand the complex nature of the emotional and ethical lives of animals. Philosophers have begun to re-think the way in which they have theorised some form of ‘essential’ divide between human and nonhuman animals in order to define what it means to be ‘human’. Political scientists have begun to discuss the issue of social justice for animals. Artists, writers and filmmakers now question the validity of an anthropocentric viewpoint in their creative works.

In this interdisciplinary conference, Animal Publics, we ask:
How can the lives of animals be made visible – brought into the public domain?
How might they be transformed?
What roles might direct engagement, academic discourse, bearing witness, the arts, or community debate take?
What part do emotions play in the changes taking place across a range of key discourses and in our relationships with nonhuman ‘others’?
How should we understand our emotional response to animals and how important should the emotional lives of animals be to us?
How might the emotions, empathy and activism be brought to bear on making the lives of animals visible in the public domain?

We seek abstracts that address the theme ‘Animal Publics: Emotions, Empathy, Activism’ in relation to humans and other species:

In what sense can we ‘know’ nonhuman animals?
What role does empathy play in the human/nonhuman relationship?
How might the emotions help us to rethink the boundary between human and nonhuman?
How does anthropomorphism influence the human/nonhuman relationship?
Why is the human species so fascinated with nonhuman species?
How can the lives of animals be made visible – brought into the public domain?
How can we use the law to regulate the lives of animals when most animals are absent from our lives?
Why are some species rendered invisible to the public while others enjoy a privileged status?
Why are animals so frequently omitted from discussions about sustainability & the future of global food production?
Why does the human species ‘deny’ its animal origins?
What role should emotions play in ethical responses to animals?
How has science influenced the human nonhuman relationship?
What role do emotion and empathy play in response to species extinction and climate change?
Why do we care more about some creatures than others?
What impact do representations of animals have on the human/animal relationship?
Is ethical consumerism an adequate response to species with whom we do and do not empathise?
What can the ‘othering’ of animals teach us about ourselves?
What role should animal welfare science play in teaching us about the needs of nonhuman animals and other species?
What has the animal protection movement contributed to our understanding of nonhuman animals?
How should we live ethically and emotionally with other species in the era of the Anthropocene?

Submissions are not limited to the suggestions above. Contributions from all disciplines are welcome.

Info: http://humananimal.arts.unimelb.edu.au/event/animal-publics-emotions-empathy-activism-conference

Call for papers (PDF) : http://humananimal.arts.unimelb.edu.au/sites/humananimal.arts.unimelb.edu.au/files/Animal_Publics_CFP_1.pdf

HRAEN Australia

The Exceptional Animal

The Exceptional Animal

Friday 6 September 2013, Oxford Brookes University

Speakers

  • Alastair Hunt, Portland State University
  • Robert McKay, University of Sheffield
  • Anat Pick, Queen Mary, University of London
  • Tom Tyler, Oxford Brookes University

Context and aims

Much has been said concerning the exceptional nature of the human being, and these celebrations have, in turn, attracted considerable criticism. But what, exactly, is “human exceptionalism” – a term of very recent coinage – and how does it articulate with broader forms of anthropocentric thought? How has this exceptionalism manifested, and been contested, within literary and cinematic texts, particularly those concerned with nonhuman animals and their treatment? And what are the ethical, political and personal stakes involved in any engagement with questions of human exceptionalism.

This one day symposium will bring together new work on these matters by Alastair Hunt (Portland State University), Robert McKay (University of Sheffield), Anat Pick (Queen Mary, University of London) and Tom Tyler (Oxford Brookes University).

Abstracts

Tom Tyler, The Exception and the Norm: Dimensions of Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentric thinking assumes or argues that humans are Nature’s “most prominent object”, that animals are means to humanity’s ends, or perhaps that human beings are an inevitable or necessary axis for reflection. The grounds of these claims for human-centering have been many and varied, but two key themes can be identified. On the one hand, it is frequently asserted that humanity is exceptional; on the other, that it is the norm. Within these themes, it is useful to distinguish six separate dimensions of anthropocentric thought: humans have been understood as the highest point on a spatial hierarchy; as the culmination of a temporal sequence; as absolutely different in kind; as a physical standard or measure; as a mental mode of apprehension; and as a self-evident identity.

Robert McKay, Read Meat: Species Exceptionalism in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin

Under the Skin is the story of Isserley, a woman who escapes a socially and ecologically ravaged planet by working secretly in remote Scotland for an opaque corporate concern. In an astonishing reversal of species fortunes, she captures human males who are prepared underground and slaughtered as meat to be consumed by a social elite at home. Faber’s careful focalization of this story through Isserley allows for a subtle, ambiguous and counterintuitive inquiry into the nature of anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism. The science fiction genre of the novel delivers a plot that commands the human reader to sympathize with a protagonist who enacts murderous views about humans that are analogous to ideas that underpin human use of animals. It is gradually revealed that a commitment to species exceptionalism is Isserley’s flawed vision of enlightenment, her protection against the social degradation that has blighted her life. Eventually, though, she comes to sense that subjection, alienation and bodily vulnerability align her with the human animals she kills, and she finally stops. Via the play of genre and form, then, Under the Skin offers a narrative of the ethical recognition of nonhuman species that exceeds significantly the established story of principled and reasoned recognition of their rights.

Anat Pick, Criminal Animals: Animality, Vulnerability, and the Biopolitics of Film

This paper considers early cinema as a biopolitical apparatus that produces the “attraction” of the vulnerable animal body. Early film’s close connection to the life sciences makes it a compelling case for thinking through the ways in which human and nonhuman lives and rendered visible. Cinema, then, is a privileged realm for considering the vulnerable body’s place in regimes of power, as well as the ethics and politics that govern the body’s production, regulation, and consumption. While “vulnerability” has been mobilized to challenge human exceptionalism, it remains a highly ambivalent term. Its dual nature, as an ethical foundation and as an invitation to violence, suggests that the vulnerable body, whether human or not, be thought through its imbrication in specific mechanisms of power, of which cinema is one example.

Cinema and biopolitics share terms like exposure, capture, and framing, at the heart of Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, and Cary Wolfe’s work and post-anthropocentric politics and precarious life. Cinematically, vulnerability is a double exposure: the exposure of bodies, and the exposure of the filmstrip, the capture and framing of bodies by the camera, and the place of those bodies in the mise-en-scene.

I pursue the biopolitics of film – the production and management of life in moving images – through examples of early films by three cinematic pioneers: Thomas Edison, Alfred Machin, and Luca Comerio, and in the recuperative archival work of contemporary filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi who recycle footage by Comerio and Edison to critique cinematic biopolitics.

Alastair Hunt, The Politics of Personification

Before the law, all human beings are recognized as “persons,” subjects of legal rights. So, oddly enough, are corporations. Animals, however, are not, and have no legal rights. All such attributions and denials of legal personality are assumed to depend on whether the entities in questions possess certain properties, such as cognitive capacities or species-identity. A close reading of the works of political theorist Hannah Arendt and literary critic Paul de Man, however, suggests that legal personality is actually a principle of appearance or legibility that takes as its defining condition, the figure of speech known as personification. Personification does not tell us who is really a person. But insofar as it makes all claims to personality, including those by human beings, possible, it renders all denials of personality based on human exceptionalism rather debatable.

More info : http://www.history.brookes.ac.uk/conferences/2013/exceptional-animal/

Unruly Creatures I and II – Animal Conference at the London Graduate School

Le Blogue “Critical Animal” de James Stanescu (http://criticalanimal.blogspot.ca) m’a fait découvrir les enregistrements de Unruly Creatures sur Backdoor Broadcasting

Unruly Creatures I: The Art and Politics of the Animal. June 14th, 2011. Hosted by The London Graduate School.

Participants include: Cary Wolfe, Vinciane Despret, Steven Baker, and Phillip Warnell (there are also important respondents and introductions).

Unruly Creatures II: Creative Revolutions. June 18th, 2012. Hosted by The London Graduate School.

Participants include: André Dias, Erica Fudge, Jonathan Burt, and Anat Pick (and again, there are also important respondents and introductions.

 Unruly Creatures

The London Graduate School is holding a one-day conference at the Natural History Museum on June 14 2011 entitled ‘Unruly Creatures: The Art and Politics of the Animal’. Its purpose is to analyse and discuss the numerous ways in which animals have been used in contemporary art and the humanities, the political and philosophical implications of this use, and, especially, the manner in which animals have also resisted such employment. With examples taken from philosophy, fine art, and recent films by Phillip Warnell and Vinciane Despret, we will examine whether there is an art, politics, and thinking that is peculiarly ‘animal’.

Programme

Welcome by Professor Phil Rainbow (Acting Director of Science, NHM).

download

 

Introduction to the conference by Professor John Mullarkey (Kingston)
download

 

Cary Wolfe (Rice University) – Biopolitics, Biopower, and the (Non-Human) Animal Body
(AUDIO HERE)

Respondent: Wahida Khandker (Manchester Metropolitan University)
(AUDIO HERE)

Vinciane Despret (l’Université de Liège/l’Université Libre de Bruxelles) –
Experimenting with Politics and Happiness — through Sheep, Cows and Pigs
(AUDIO HERE)

Respondent: Katerina Kolozova (Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Macedonia)
(AUDIO HERE)

Steve Baker (University of Central Lancashire) – Dislocations in Contemporary Animal Art
(AUDIO HERE) This entry is restricted. For access please email Professor John Mullarkey


Respondent: Robert McKay (University of Sheffield) (AUDIO HERE)

Phillip Warnell (Kingston University) – Projections of Animality (AUDIO HERE)

Respondent: Stella Baraklianou (University of Portsmouth) (AUDIO HER)