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)

Critical Animal Studies

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

 

Students for Critical Animal Studies – SCAS 2015

3rd Annual International Students for Critical Animal Studies Conference

Vasar College, New York
November 20 to 22, 2015

Call for Papers Deadline: Sept 1, 2015

Students for Critical Animal Studies

#2015SCASConference

Conference will be livestreamed.

https://www.facebook.com/events/524972497647281/
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CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS

Submit your title and abstract (150 to 200 words) with a biography one paragraph 80 to 100 words third person

Send to: studentsforcas@gmail.com

Deadline: Sept 1, 2015

________________________

For more information contact:

studentsforcas@gmail.com
Skype: studentsforcas
Twitter: @_SCAS_
________________________

 

SCAS does not pay speakers to present, nor do we have professors present. SCAS also does not have keynote or plenary presentations. SCAS finally will only accept papers that promote radical critical intersectional presentations that foster total liberation from an academic-activist perspective. We encourage marginalized voices and perspectives. We accept only presentations from students. Presentations can be Skyped in as well. The rooms will be accessible and with technology (projectors, microphones, internet, and computer).

 

There will be a Roundtable Discussion on SCAS organizing and future and goals open to all as well as activism workshops

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Off Campus Sponsors:

Institute for Critical Animal Studies
Save the Kids
Academy for Peace Education
Outdoor Empowerment
Arissa Media Group
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Safer Space Policy: The conference promotes a safer space in which all must feel welcome, supported, and secure. No one should endorse or tolerate racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQIA sentiments, ableism, speciesism, or any other kind of oppressive behavior. In kind, this conference is a vegan space, and all should refrain from consuming or wearing animal products while taking part.

Sober Space Policy: We encourage a sober space as well, so please do not drink, shoot, or inhale intoxicants into your body closely before or while in attendance at the conference.

Inclusive Space Policy: All rooms and bathrooms are accessible. Please avoid wearing fragrances or strong scents, as the odors may cause allergic reactions. If you have any requests for assistance such as a translator, note taker, medication, childcare, or physical accessibility, please let us know by e-mailing studentsforcas@gmail.com. (We understand this conference is not fully inclusive because of cost, but we do want to address these issues as they are needed to confront ableism).

MLA 2016: Teaching Animal Studies

CFP for MLA 2016: Teaching Animal Studies

Special Session: Teaching Animal Studies
(Austin, 7-10 January 2016)

mla 2016

How do we teach animal studies and how could we? Approaches from any field or time period are welcome. We will consider case studies, narratives, proposals, or pedagogical theory.

Those using or developing creative methods or methods that engage with the public humanities are strongly encouraged. Examples may include but are not limited to service learning, animal ethnographies, creative writing, public history, open access, activism, and projects exploring the intersections between animal and environmental protection.

Please send a 250-word abstract and CV by 15 March 2015 to Thomas Doran: thomasdoran@umail.ucsb.edu

Info : http://www.mla.org/cfp_detail_7478
https://tomdoran.wordpress.com/cfp-teaching-animal-studies-mla-2016/

MLA

 

 

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Animal Studies at Queen’s

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Animal Studies

The Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada is delighted to announce that the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Animal Studies program will be offered for another year, and we are now inviting applications for the 2015-16 academic year.

This is a one-year non-renewable 12-month fellowship. The successful applicant will have a demonstrated expertise in animal ethics, law and public policy, show evidence of teaching potential, and be able to participate constructively in departmental and collegial activities.

While we interpret animal ethics, law and public policy broadly, and welcome applications from various disciplines that study human-animal relations including political science, law, philosophy, sociology and environmental studies, we are looking in particular for research that critically examines the moral, legal and political dimensions of how human-animal relations are governed. A recipient of the Fellowship is expected to reside in Kingston, to teach a University course in animal studies, and to collaborate in developing initiatives related to the promotion of the analysis and understanding of animal rights (such as workshops, conferences, public lectures, etc.)

The Fellow will work under the supervision of Prof. Will Kymlicka.

The 2015-16 fellowship will start on July 1, 2015. Applicants must have submitted their doctoral dissertation by that date, and must be within five years of having received their doctorate.

The salary for the postdoctoral fellowship will be $40,000, which includes remuneration for teaching a half-course in animal ethics or a cognate subject.

Applications are due by January 15th, 2015.

For more details on the fellowship and the application process, please see: http://www.queensu.ca/philosophy/Jobs.html

 

giraffes Apple Kymlicka