Tag: Animals

Animals Under Capitalism : Art and Politics (Bristol, 2016)

Animals under Capitalism: Art and Politics

University of Bristol
Institute of Advanced Studies
May 25, 2016

Deadline for Proposal : December 10 (250-300 word proposal)

Bristol Animal Capitalism

Animals under Capitalism: Art and Politics

The University of Bristol invites submissions for a 1-day conference to be held on May 25, 2016, on the subject of ‘Animals under Capitalism: Art and Politics’. The conference aims to explore the relations between capitalism and animal life, and will emphasise the following themes: 1) the intersections between capitalism and the ‘Sixth Extinction’; 2) artistic representations of animals under the aegis of capitalism; 3) the biopolitics of domestication; 4) the development of industrial animal farms.

This conference welcomes a broad range of responses from a variety of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, literary studies, art history, politics and critical studies. Other topics might include:

  • artistic responses to endangered and extinct animals
  • the development of zoos
  • animals under the law
  • feminist responses to animal exploitation
  • Marxism and animals
  • animal futures and science fiction
  • animals, class and biopolitics
  • big game hunting and ‘wildlife management’
  • Freud, Darwin, modernity and animal life
  • visual representations of animals in sculpture and painting
  • literary responses to ‘animals under capitalism’
  • pre-capitalist modes of relating to animals and post-capitalist alternatives

Please submit a 250-300 word proposal by the 10th of December to: mm8179@bristol.ac.uk

Conference Summary

Capitalism inaugurated a new set of patterns vis-à-vis our relationships with animal others. This conference explores what some of those relationship are. In this context, we welcome papers that address the following questions:

1) what ‘structures of feeling’ emerged during the long and complex evolution from feudalism to mercantilism to industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century?

2) Does the ‘animal’ signify different things as new economic systems come to predominate, and, if so, to what extent do alternative conceptions of the animal exist despite (or in spite of) these economic configurations?

3) How are changing relationships with animal life embodied in art and popular culture – in paintings, novels, poetry and folklore? In what ways do artistic representations of animals both embody and resist the dominant cultural understandings of their time?

4)  What alternative futures have artists imagined for animals (perhaps particularly in works of science fiction?)

Date and place: 25th of May, 2016; the Institute of Advanced Studies (University of Bristol)

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/ias/diary/conferences/animals-under-capitalism/

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 Review, American Quarterly, Art Journal, Cultural Critique, Radical 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 Artforum, ColorLines, Jadaliyya, 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

 

Le double sens de la communauté morale: La considérabilité morale et l’agentivité morale des autres animaux

Mon nouvel article « Le double sens de la communauté morale: La considérabilité morale et l’agentivité morale des autres animaux » vient d’être publié dans un dossier spécial sur “La justice animale : de l’éthique à la politique”  édité par Valéry Giroux et Jean-Philippe Royer pour Les ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum (vol 9, no 3, Automne 2014).

Ateliers ethique justice animale cover 3

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double sens

Ateliers ethique justice animale coverRÉSUMÉ : Distinguant deux sens de « communauté morale », cet article soutient que certains animaux appartiennent à la communauté morale dans les deux sens : (1) ils sont des patients moraux dignes de considération morale directe et équivalente, mais également (2) des agents moraux au sens où ils sont capables de reconnaître, d’assumer et d’adresser aux autres des exigences minimales de bonne conduite et de savoir-vivre. Au moyen de la notion d’« attitudes réactives » développée par Peter F. Strawson, je soutiens que les animaux sociaux qui sont à la fois objets et sujets d’attitudes réactives forment des communautés morales au second sens, dans la mesure où ils se traitent mutuellement comme des individus ayant des obligations et tenus à des exigences de bonne volonté minimale dans leurs interactions interpersonnelles. Distinguant l’agentivité morale du raisonnement moral, je soutiens que la capacité de raisonner abstraitement sur les principes et les conséquences de nos actions nous imposent plus de responsabilités que n’en ont d’autres animaux, mais que cela ne fait pas nécessairement de nous des agents moraux plus compétents que d’autres animaux sociaux. Je termine en donnant un aperçu de quelques implications de ce changement de perspective en éthique animale.

ABSTRACT:
This article draws the distinction between two meanings of “moral community” and maintains that certain animals belong to moral communities in both senses of the term: these animals are (1) moral patients worthy of direct and equivalent moral consideration, but also (2) moral agents in the sense that they are capable of recognizing and respecting minimal requirements of good conduct and manners as well as expecting and demanding the same from other members of their community. By way of the notion of “reactive attitudes” developed by Peter F. Strawson, I maintain that social animals who are at once objects and subjects of reactive attitudes constitute moral communities in the second sense of the term, in that they treat each other as individuals who have obligations and who are bound by the demand for a minimum of good-will in their interpersonal interactions. Distinguishing between moral agency and moral reasoning, I maintain that the capacity to reason abstractly about the principles and consequences of our actions gives us more responsibilities than other animals have, but that this does not necessarily make us more competent moral agents than other social animals. I conclude with an overview of some of the implications that this change in perspective has for animal ethics.

Voici les autres articles du dossier (Revue complète accessible en ligne)

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Bailey, Christiane, « Le double sens de la communauté morale: La considérabilité morale et l’agentivité morale des autres animaux », Les Ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum, vol 9, no 3, Automne/Fall 2014.

Dossier spécial “La justice animale : de l’éthique à la politique” édité par Valéry Giroux et Jean-Philippe Royer.

ateliers

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

Becoming Ecofeminisms / Devenirs écoféministes

CALL FOR PAPERS / APPELS À CONTRIBUTIONS

Becoming Ecofeminisms / Devenirs écoféministes

PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture is seeking contributions for its next special topics issue on Becoming Ecofeminisms.

Ecofeminism has many versions and genealogies. In the context of new kinds of environmental crises, imaginaries, and discourses, how might we rethink and reinvigorate ecofeminisms—telling alternative genealogies of this movement, highlighting current practices, and envisioning its bold futures? We are interested in ecofeminisms in both theory and practice.

Proposals and papers related (but not limited) to the following are welcome:

  • Ecofeminist intersections with current discourse and practice in queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, critical disability, and critical animal studies
  • Genealogies of and differences within ecofeminisms
  • Critiques of ecofeminism / Ecofeminist critique
  • Contemporary revival of ecofeminist approaches
  • Links or tension between ecofeminism and posthumanism, new materialism, object-oriented ontologies, speculative realism, etc.
  • Ecofeminist reappraisal of relationships, affects, and communities (anarchist praxis, solidarity-based movements, grassroots initiatives, transformative justice, etc.)
  • Ecofeminism in relation to creative practices including eco-art, bio-art, ecopoetics, cli-fi, etc.
  • Ecofeminist engagements with the Anthropocene, deep time, resilience, the geological turn, the oceanic turn, rewilding, green futures, or other salient contemporary concepts.

DEADLINE FOR FULL SUBMISSIONS : AUGUST 1, 2015

All papers will be peer-reviewed.

Info: Astrida Neimanis (astrida.neimanis [at] gmail.com) & Christiane Bailey (christianebailey [at] gmail.com)

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PhænEx revue de théorie et culture existentialistes et phénoménologiques invite des articles pour un numéro consacré aux devenirs écoféministes.

Il y a plusieurs versions et généalogies de l’écoféminisme. Dans le contexte des nouvelles formes de crises environnementales et du développement de nouveaux imaginaires et discours écologiques, est-il possible de repenser et de revitaliser les écoféminismes? Quelles sont les généalogies de ce mouvement, ses nouvelles pratiques et ses futurs possibles? Nous nous intéresserons ici autant aux théories qu’aux pratiques écoféministes.

Les propositions liées (mais pas limitées) aux thèmes suivants sont les bienvenues :

  • Intersections entre l’écoféminisme et les théories et pratiques queer, anticolonialistes, antiracistes, anticapabilistes et les études animales critiques
  • Histoire(s) de l’écofémisme et différents types d’écoféminismes
  • Critiques écoféministes et critiques de l’écoféminisme
  • Renaissance contemporaine des approches écoféministes
  • Rapprochements et tensions entre l’écoféminisme et le posthumanisme, le nouveau matérialisme, les ontologies orientées vers les objets, le réalisme spécultaif, etc.
  • Revalorisation des relations, des affects et des communautés (praxis anarchiste, mouvements solidaires, justice transformative, etc.)
  • Relations entre l’écoféminisme et les pratiques créatives comme l’éco-art, le bio-art, l’écopoésie, la cli-fi (« fiction climatique »), etc.
  • Perspectives écoféministes sur l’anthropocène, les temps profonds, la résilience, le tournant géologique, le tournant océanique, les futurs verts, etc.

DATE LIMITE pour les soumissions : 1er AOÛT 2015

 Les articles seront soumis à une évaluation par les pairs.

Info: Astrida Neimanis (astrida.neimanis [at] gmail.com) & Christiane Bailey (christianebailey [at] gmail.com)

http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/

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Call for papers Appel a contributions Phaenex Ecofeminism Vol 11 No 1 2016 -2 Call for papers Appel a contributions Phaenex Ecofeminism Vol 11 No 1 2016