Two New Critical Animal Studies Titles

Two recent books published you should check out. 

(1) Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights

Rodopi Books just released the second title of their Critical Animal Studies Book Series. “Framing Farming: Communication Strategies for Animal Rights” by Carrie P. Freeman.

"To what extent should animal rights activists promote animal rights when attempting to persuade meat-lovers to stop eating animals?

Contributing to a classic social movement framing debate, Freeman examines the animal rights movement’s struggles over whether to construct farming campaign messages based more on utility (emphasizing animal welfare, reform and reduction, and human self-interest) or ideology (emphasizing animal rights and abolition). Freeman prioritizes the latter, “ideological authenticity,” to promote a needed transformation in worldviews and human animal identity, not just behaviors. This would mean framing “go veg” messages not only around compassion, but also around principles of ecology, liberty, and justice, convincing people “it’s not fair to farm anyone”.

Through a unique frame analysis of vegan campaign materials (from websites, to videos, to bumper stickers) at five prominent U.S. animal rights organizations, and interviews with their leaders, including Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Baur, Freeman answers questions, such as: How is the movement defining core problems and solutions regarding animal farming and fishing? To which values are activists appealing? Why have movement leaders made these visual and rhetorical strategic choices – such as deciding between appealing to human self-interest, environmentalism, or altruism? To what extent is the animal rights movement actually challenging speciesist discrimination and the human/animal dualism?

Appealing to both scholars and activists, Framing Farming distinctively offers practical strategic guidance while remaining grounded in animal ethics and communication theory. It not only describes what 21st century animal rights campaigns are communicating, it also prescribes recommendations for what they should communicate to remain culturally resonant while promoting needed long-term social transformation away from using animals as resources."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction
Part I. Overview of Animal Rights, Vegetarianism, and Communication
Chapter 2: Ethical Views on Animals as Fellows & as Food
Chapter 3: Activist Communication Strategy & Debates
Part II. How U.S. Animal Rights Organizations Frame Food Campaign Messages
Chapter 4: Defining Problems & Culprits, Proposing Solutions
Chapter 5: Appealing to Values – Constructing a Caring Vegan Identity
Chapter 6: Appealing to Altruism or Self-Interest?
Chapter 7: How Movement Leaders Explain Their Strategic Choices
Part III. Strategic Communication Recommendations For Vegan Activism
Chapter 8: Activists’ Latest Insights & Projections
Chapter 9: My Recommendations for Ideological Authenticity in Framing Animal Rights

Carrie P. Freeman is an Associate Professor of Communication at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her scholarship on media ethics, activist communication, and representation of animal rights issues has been published in over 15 books and journals. A vegan and grassroots activist for almost two decades, she currently hosts radio programs on animal and environmental protection on WRFG-Radio Free Georgia.

(2) Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed

Religious arguments for animal rights and liberation are fairly common in the literature on the animal question and the animal condition. Meanwhile, arguments considering animal liberation from a deliberately secular perspective are virtually nonexistent. In Animal Liberation and Atheism: Dismantling the Procrustean Bed, Kim Socha initiates the conversation by exploring how the concept of religion is inherently antithetical to animal liberation. She also challenges secularists to view the world differently, free from religion's cultural baggage. Finally, Animal Liberation and Atheism is a call for everyone to consider developing a system of ethics disengaged from anthropocentric and speciesist mythologies so that needless violence against all beings and the environment may diminish.

Kim Socha, Ph.D., Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation (Rodopi: 2011) and is a contributing editor to Confronting Animal Exploitation: Grassroots Essays on Liberation and Veganism (McFarland Publishing: 2013) and Defining Critical Animal Studies: A Social Justice Approach for Liberation (Peter Lang: 2014). She has also published on topics such as Latino/a literature, surrealism, critical animal studies, and composition pedagogy. Kim is an English professor and activist for animal liberation, drug policy reform, and transformative justice.

Special Issue on the EcoGotchic has just been released

Special Issue Gothic Studies 16/1, "The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century", has just been released, and will probably be of great interest to many of you.

The special issue addresses introduces a new field of inquiry, the EcoGothic, which includes, among others, two essays on carnivorism and speciesism in Bram Stoker's Dracula and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  The issue is available in preview on the Manchester University Press website and by subscription through many university libraries. A brief description of the issue follows below.

This special issue of Gothic Studies brings together Gothic works--British, Irish and Italian--to consider their engagement with species- and environement-related issues through the theoretical lens of an emerging field of critical inquiry–the EcoGothic. An EcoGothic approach takes a nonanthropocentric position to reconsider the role that species, nonhumans and the environment play in the construction of monstrosity and fear, examining the construction of the Gothic body–unhuman, nonhuman, transhuman, posthuman, or hybrid–through a more inclusive, antispeciest lens.

Contents

The EcoGothic in the Long Nineteenth Century  David Del Principe

Abominable Transformations: Becoming-Fungus in Arthur Machen’s

The Hill of Dreams  Anthony Camara

(M)eating Dracula: Food and Death in Stoker’s Novel  David Del Principe

The Bog Gothic: Bram Stoker’s ‘Carpet of Death’ and Ireland’s Horrible Beauty Derek Gladwin

Italian Rural Gothic: The Powers of Were-Goats in Tommaso Landolfi’s La pietra lunare [The Moonstone]  Keala Jewell

Meat, Cannibalism and Humanity in Paul du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, or, What Does a Gorilla Hunter Eat for Breakfast?  John Miller

‘L’orrida magnificenza del luogo.’ Gothic Aesthetics in Antonio Fogazzaro’s Malombra  Maria Parrino

 An Already Alienated Animality: Frankenstein as a Gothic Narrative of Carnivorism  Jackson Petsche

 Between Darwin and San Francesco: Zoographic Ambivalences in Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee  Nicoletta Pireddu

(Thank you to David Del Principe for both putting this together, and letting me know this existed). 

Forthcoming Titles in Animal Studies

EDIT: You probably want to check out at Adam's blog a list of Critical Animal Studies books, most recently published.

Before I get to the forthcoming part, here are two very new titles in animal studies.

Carol Adams and Lori Gruen's edited volume on Ecofeminism. I know most of the authors in this volume, and I promise you this is an important book to get. The philosophical importance of ecofeminism is being reevaluated, and this book is a major argument for its importance.

Gandio and Nocella's The Terrorization of Dissent is an important work in analyzing all the ways that resistance to the animal-industrial complex has been turned into terrorism (includes an essay by my brother).


Now, on to the forthcoming proper list (these books are listed by upcoming publication dates).


If you know the work of Cynthia Willett, then you already know to be excited about any forthcoming work from her. Interspecies Ethics (due out in August), looks to be no exception.

Interspecies Ethics explores animals’ vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought, and continental philosophy. Interspecies Ethics develops a communitarian model for multispecies ethics, rebalancing the overemphasis on competition in the original Darwinian paradigm by drawing out and stressing the cooperationist aspects of evolutionary theory through mutual aid. The book’s ethical vision offers an alternative to utilitarian, deontological, and virtue ethics, building its argument through rich anecdotes and clear explanations of recent scientific discoveries regarding animals and their agency. Geared toward a general as well as a philosophical audience, the text illuminates a variety of theories and contrasting approaches, tracing the contours of a postmoral ethics.

Also in August, is  Wahida Khandker's (very expensive) Philosophy, Animality, and Life Sciences. I wish it wasn't so pricey, because it sounds very interesting:

A study of pathological concepts of animal life in Continental philosophy from Bergson to Haraway. Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with ‘the animal question’ have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks, can Continental approaches to animality and organic life make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals? By following its historical and philosophical development, Khandker argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal distinction. Looks at the assumptions underpinning about debates about science and animals, and our relation to non-human animals. Analyses the relation between the purpose and limitations of research in the life sciences and the concepts of animality and organic life that the sciences have historically employed. Explores the significance of key thinkers such as Bergson, Canguilhem, Foucault and Haraway, and opens up the complex and difficult writings of Alfred North Whitehead on this subject. 

There is an interview between the author and series editor, that can be found here.

EDIT: Thanks to Steven Shaviro for alerting to me this exciting anthology edited by Patricia MacCormack, with the kindle edition out, paperback out in August-- The Animal Catalyst.

Brian Massumi has been a central thinker in promoting a non-anthropocentric philosophy, being an early thinker in assemblage theory and affect theory, Massumi is following this work up with What Animals Teach Us about Politics, due out in September.

In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi takes up the question of "the animal." By treating the human as animal, he develops a concept of an animal politics. His is not a human politics of the animal, but an integrally animal politics, freed from connotations of the "primitive" state of nature and the accompanying presuppositions about instinct permeating modern thought. Massumi integrates notions marginalized by the dominant currents in evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and philosophy—notions such as play, sympathy, and creativity—into the concept of nature. As he does so, his inquiry necessarily expands, encompassing not only animal behavior but also animal thought and its distance from, or proximity to, those capacities over which human animals claim a monopoly: language and reflexive consciousness. For Massumi, humans and animals exist on a continuum. Understanding that continuum, while accounting for difference, requires a new logic of "mutual inclusion." Massumi finds the conceptual resources for this logic in the work of thinkers including Gregory Bateson, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, and Raymond Ruyer. This concise book intervenes in Deleuze studies, posthumanism, and animal studies, as well as areas of study as wide-ranging as affect theory, aesthetics, embodied cognition, political theory, process philosophy, the theory of play, and the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.

Corbey and Lanjouw's important edited anthology, The Politics of Species, has an affordable paperback edition out in September.


Another edited anthology in September is Moore and Kearns's Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology.

A turn to the animal is underway in the humanities, most obviously in such fields as philosophy, literary studies, cultural studies, and religious studies. One important catalyst for this development has been the remarkable body of animal theory issuing from such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. What might the resulting interdisciplinary field, commonly termed animality studies, mean for theology, biblical studies, and other cognate disciplines? Is it possible to move from animal theory to creaturely theology? This volume is the first full-length attempt to grapple centrally with these questions. It attempts to triangulate philosophical and theoretical reflections on animality and humanity with theological reflections on divinity. If the animal human distinction is being rethought and retheorized as never before, then the animal human divine distinctions need to be rethought, retheorized, and retheologized along with it. This is the task that the multidisciplinary team of theologians, biblical scholars, philosophers, and historians assembled in this volume collectively undertakes. They do so frequently with recourse to Derrida's animal philosophy and also with recourse to an eclectic range of other relevant thinkers, such as Haraway, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, Gloria Anzaldua, Helene Cixous, A. N. Whitehead, and Lynn White Jr. The result is a volume that will be essential reading for religious studies audiences interested in ecological issues, animality studies, and posthumanism, as well as for animality studies audiences interested in how constructions of the divine have informed constructions of the nonhuman animal through history.

Speaking of edited volumes, Eben Kirksey has an interesting, if not strickly animal studies, work coming out in October, The Multispecies Salon.

A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and emergent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in to this curated collection of essays and artefacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope.

There is also a related website with this volume, found here.



If I have missed any forthcoming books, please let me know. If you are a publisher interested in my reviewing your book on my blog, please feel free to contact me at James.Stanescu@gmail.com

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species

Call for Papers for an Edited Volume on Non-native Species

Within a growing literature of animal studies and animal ethics, scholars have critically examined factory farms, zoos, companion animals, and laboratory testing.  What remains underexplored are the logics of extermination deployed against feral or non-native species.  The existing vocabulary utilized to describe non-native species often represents these animals as pests that wreak havoc on the eco-system, promiscuously over-populate, and spread disease. This rhetorical framing justifies a militarized relationship to these species.  Furthermore, the debate over non-native species divides common ground between animal activists and environmentalists.  If the world is moving very slowly towards less cruelty in the treatment of animals and a modest increase in awareness about the basic dignity that should be afforded to all creatures, there is a vast slippage in the case of feral and non-native species that merits attention.

We are looking for essays that critically explore the affiliation between humans, non-native species, and the environment.  These essays will be part of a submission for an edited volume to be published by an academic press.  We are excited to invite scholars from a variety of disciplines and epistemic positions, including thinkers from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary backgrounds.  300-500 word abstracts should be emailed to criticalspecies@gmail.com.  Interviews and reprints from journals will be considered.

Topics might include:

• Bridging the gap between environmental ethics and animal ethics
• Rhetorical examination of the tropes of nativity, exoticness, and/or invasion
• Media and mediated accounts of invasive species
• Ecofeminist approaches to overpopulation, fertility, and promiscuity
• Queer critiques of reproductive futurism
• New materialist and speculative realist interventions in non-native species
• Colonialism and critical geographies
• Economic imperatives and wild/pristine spaces
• Defining ecosystem harm and the terminology of equilibrium, balance, and harmony
• Questions of cohabitation and competition with endangered species
• Introducing, re-introducing, and restoration ecology
• Invasivores
• The biopolitics of wildlife management and/or hunting


The deadline for submission of abstracts is June 6, 2014.  Please address correspondence to Dr. James Stanescu and Dr. Kevin Cummings.

Dr. Kevin Cummings is associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Studies and Theatre at Mercer University.  He publishes in the areas of rhetoric and media theory.

Dr. James Stanescu was the winner of the 2012 international critical animal studies dissertation of the year for The Abattoir of Humanity: Philosophy in the Age of the Factory Farm.  He publishes in the areas of continental philosophy and critical animal studies and is the author of the blog Critical Animal.

Call for Nominations for the 2014 annual ICAS Awards

(Please post to facebook, tweet, send to listservs, reblog, tumblr, instagram, carrier pigeon, telegram, read aloud on the phone, etc this call for nominations widely. Pdf link at the bottom).

Call for Nominations:
2014 Annual International Critical Animal Studies Awards of the Year
________________________________________________________
• Critical Animal Studies Media of the Year – For outstanding media such as documentaries, films, books, visual art, operas, plays, and music in the field of critical animal studies. The media cannot be older than three years. We stress that critical animal studies includes any topic, issue, or concern (from environmentalism to prisoners’ rights) that promotes the protection, liberation, and freedom of animals in the world and is based not only on theory, but in practice as well. The media can come from any discipline or topic including, but not limited to, international studies, ethnic studies, gender studies, religion, sociology, environmentalism, critical animal studies, social work, biology, history, economics, public  administration, criminology, philosophy, anthropology,  chemistry,  medicine, agriculture, political science, disability studies and information studies. If the media needs cannot be emailed, please contact me for an address.
• Critical Animal Studies Undergraduate Paper/Project/Thesis of the Year  – Awarded to an undergraduate student who has written an outstanding paper/thesis that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate an undergraduate student for this award, the nominator must write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.
• Critical Animal Studies Graduate  Paper/Project/Dissertation of the Year – Awarded to any graduate student working on a masters or doctorate degree who has written an outstanding paper/thesis that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in    projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate a graduate student for this award, the nominator must write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.
• Critical Animal Studies Faculty Paper/Project of the Year – Awarded to a faculty member conducting research or working at a college, university or institute who has written an outstanding paper that promotes, or who has established and organized a project that fosters, animal protection, liberation, and freedom. We are strongly interested in projects that bridge the gap between academia and the surrounding community. To nominate a professor for this award, the nominator must  write a one page letter and include the paper or write a one page detailed description of the project.

Submitting Nominations:
• All nomination letters must be sent via e-mail as an MS Word document attachment with: (1) a description of the project and person being nominated, (2) how it relates to critical animal studies, and, if applicable, (3) the details of when it was published, who published it, and ISSN or ISBN number, along with the work itself. Individuals may nominate themselves.
• Deadline for award submissions is March 7, 2014.
Please email all nominations and information to james.stanescu@gmail.com. The awards will be given out at the 2014 North American Institute of Critical Animal Studies conference, but attendance is not required to be considered for the award.

(pdf of this call, please share widely). 

New PhaenEx special issue on Animal and Food Ethics

This is just a quick note to let you know that Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor have done a great job editing the new special issue of PhaenEx on Animal and Food Ethics. The issue also features an essay I wrote.

Accelerationism, animal ethics, and the factory farm

I am probably not an accelerationist, but I think certain core principles of accelerationism are useful for exploring tensions within the animal ethics community.

Accelerationism is a term coined by Benjamin Noys in his book, The Persistence of the Negative. Accelerationism is a philosophy loosely based on Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, Jean-Francois Lyotard's Libidinal Economy, and Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death (sidenote, I had an undergraduate class utilizing those three texts back in 2002, weird), along with the writings of Nick Land. As Noys explains, "they are an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist." (p. 5) It is important to note that Noys is critical of the accelerationist move. There many who have adopted the mantle of accelerationism as a positive radical political project. You should look to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek's accelerationist manifesto, as well as Steven Shaviro's talks on accelerationism (this link contains both an video giving an intro, plus the text of another talk). The only animal ethicist I know who has also written on accelerationism is Patricia MacCormack. Though it is not principally on animal ethics. And David Roden has written about accelerationism and posthumanism. While there is a lot about accelerationism I probably would not agree with, I do want to focus on a couple of points I am in agreement with, and how those points pertain to animal ethics and the factory farm.

Accelerationism argues strongly that there is no going back. Or at least, back is not the direction we wish to go. In this sense, Marx (or at least a certain Marx) is a principle figure for accelerationism. Just as anyone who has read Marx understands that he has no wish to move from capitalism back to feudalism, or to destroy the machines of capitalism. Instead, the machines and factories of capitalism are the basis of the general intellect and the powers of social production necessary for communism. The accelerationist, then, is in opposition to the Heideggerian critiques of free floating intelligences, the das man, and en-framing. In other words, we do not suffer from too much calculation and too much abstraction, but rather, from too little or the wrong kinds of calculation and abstraction. As Negri wittily once put it, " But here we are once again, always at the same point: Marx frees what Heidegger imprisons. Marx illuminates with praxis what Heidegger reduces to mysticism." (Insurgencies, p. 29). Animal ethics is stuck in a similar fight: Do we embrace calculative and production capabilities of the present, even with the its taint of the violences of modernity, or do we strive for a premodern remedy to the violence against other animals?

The slow food and locavore movements have clearly embraced the premodern strategy. The issue for them is not one principally of speciesism, or the killing and eating of other animals, but rather of capitalist and modern 'excess.' If we could just turn the clock back (to the '50s, though I am never sure if they mean the 1950s or the 1850s), everything about our food productions would be fine. Thus we see the simultaneous orientalism of the hunting and eating practices of indigenous peoples, the romanticism of the pasture, and the nostalgia for the food preparation of the immediate post-war generation. As my brother has constantly chronicled, such orientalism, romanticism, and nostalgia is frequently the basis of political and social conservatism of the most extreme sorts (pdf). This also brings us to a post by James McWilliams on the work of historian Maureen Olge. Olge is no friend to the animal ethicist or the vegan activist. At the same time, she completely pegs the mythology of the slow food and locavore movements. We will return to this shortly. Unlike, say, the move from feudalism to capitalism, or sovereign power to disciplinary power, it is a bit harder to not fall for the premodern nostalgia. As anyone who has bothered to pay attention to animal agribusinesses and animal science knows, the current move is to fully realize Descartes' belief that animals are just machines. Agribusinesses do this by simply treating animals in factory farms as if they are machines, and animal science is doing this by actively trying to create biological subjects that will behave just as machines (take away animal's sentience, for example, make animals even more docile, etc). And when I have written about the push to treat and make animals into machines, I have not always been clear to not sound like I support a return to a pre-industrial agrarianism. And much of the slow food and locavore people are advocating for a reduction in the violence to other animals (including an attack on some of the intensive forms of violence). Clearly, however, our only choice is not between the present system, and the romanticized past. And make no mistake, it is a romantic past.

Okay, back to Maureen Ogle. She has argued:

As many Americans know, the agrarian past looms large in both our national identity and mythology: The nation was founded by the sturdy yeoman, the rugged individual, etc. Those who work the land are the best among us, etc. Rural values are the bedrock of American society; threaten those and the republic itself is threatened, etc. (See, for example, Wendell Berry.)
This mythology is just that: mythology. Historically, first in the colonies and then in the new United States, American farmers were less interested in yeoman "independence" than in earning profits from a national and global market for food stuffs. (And make no mistake: American agriculture has served a global market since the 1600s.)

Again, make no mistake, Ogle is not on the side of the animal rights advocate. However, her point here is entirely correct. What I came to understand in my work on the history of the factory farm, is that the seeds of the factory farm existed within the time period before the factory farm. If you want an slaughterhouse that doesn't treat an animal as a carcass to be disassembled like a machine, you will need to go back to slightly before 1850s. We would have to go back, as Ogle states, to before the 1600s to get an American production of animal bodies not for a global market. Want to understand animals before interventions to breed for size, docility, etc? Depending on what you mean, we are are going to have to go to at least the `1700s, or basically the entire domestication of animals if you want a broader understanding. Some of our first institutions of higher education in this country were built to do research and teach animal husbandry. Scientific journals on the intervention of breeding animals are some of the first trade journals in this country. The techniques and technologies of the factory farm are found an encouraged in this history of animal agriculture, not because of the excesses of capitalism, but because capitalism's machinic formation are found and encouraged in the same history. You cannot fully disentangle capitalism's violence and speciesism (I really do believe one cannot oppose capitalism without also opposing a certain expropriation of the animal). So, now what?

Well, you can earn for a mythic past. For the vegan, at least, this seems to be a non-starter. Our relationships to other animals, at every level, does not seem separable. Agamben's claim that we should just let animals be (along with any number of animal rights activists) is just so insane. We build roads and productions and houses in animal habitats. We domesticate animals, we eat animals, we use animal bodies for clothes, jewelry, to clarify wines and beers, to make pills and condoms, to test drugs on, to labor for us, and on and on. While the present system of violence and expropriation needs to be abolished, our lives with other animals seems to be so entangled I do not begin to understand how we would just let animals be. Or why that would be ethical. Instead, we have a world to create. The danger and hope of animal science is that life can be created and recreated. The danger and hope of animal agribusiness is that we can achieve levels of vast production of the relations between humans and other animals. The factory farm is a great evil, but I also have no desire to go back, whatever that would mean. We need less appeals to nature and the natural, and more appeals to a future constructivism. I have before called this an ecofeminist constructivism. Constructivist because the ontology is not on the natural, and the politics are not on the level of voluntarism, and aesthetics is not a romanticism of the past, and the ethics is not a withdrawal of relationships. Ecofeminist because the world that needs to be built is one centered on flourishing, on respecting relationships, on understanding intersectionality and interlocking oppressions. Deleuze and Guattari, in What is Philosophy?, called for a new people and a new earth. I have written before of becoming-vegan.  In that I mostly focused on a foucaldian understanding of askesis. But we need not just new human subjects, but a new world. This not the worse it is, the better it is (as Noys put it). But at the same time, this is not something that will come about by going back. Anyway, there is no back to go to.

Philosophy of Race and Critical Animal Theory

Tom has an interesting post, that I started writing a comment to, and it became really long, so I decided to turn it into a blog post. You should go read it, it concerns tensions between animal ethics, philosophy of race, and the role of intuition in philosophy. Short, but smart. Go read, I'll wait. 

(Also, I am excited for his two new books coming out. His short monograph Levinas Unhinged, and his edited collection on Habit.) 

The point made my the philosopher of race (I wonder who it was?) is pretty common (though from from universal) in many philosophy of race, decolonial and postcolonial philosophy theories. And as someone who takes decolonial and postcolonial philosophy, nonwestern philosophy, and philosophy of race very seriously (and incorporates it in my scholarship and teaching) this is a real issue for me. I've written about these issues a lot on this blog, so I embed some links to past posts to do some of the work for me. Even though I do not fully agree with all of these posts. 

On the one hand, decolonial thinkers advance some of the best critiques of humanism, on the other they usually do it in order to talk about the need for a stronger humanism . And I do think that fights against anthropocentrism are useful for fights against racism (though they are not sufficient!). However, there is more than just the fact that people of color have been compared to animals and dehumanized, but the history co-mingling animal welfare and rights groups with obviously problematic, racist, and colonialist projects. Peta still engages in campaigns that are not only sexist, but frequently racist (often both ). And not just PETA, but if you look at the original animal welfare groups in Britain, you see some complex and interesting things. On the one hand, you have the The Vegetarian Society, which was viewed with disgrace, attracted a bunch of different radicals, and Gandhi credits with his radicalizing on the issues of colonialism. On the other hand, the RSPCA and the first animal welfare laws were all centered around class concerns, race concerns, and connected to explicit colonialists. 

I think there is a lot that needs to be done by critical animal theorists in order to help this. (1) Avoid the seduction of tokenism, of being able to point out a few diverse people in order to shrug of systemic claims of what is going on at conferences, edited volumes, etc. (2) Maybe we need to read less continental thinkers, and start reading more explicitly radical women and queers of color, decolonialist and postcolonialists, philosophers of race, and generally nonwestern philosophy. If I want an anthropocentric thinker who is critical of humanism, I don't always need to go after Agamben when I can read and cite Sylvia Wynter. (3) This will mean, also, to practice the sort of humility in engagement that can be really hard. To expect to be surprised, to be open to being wrong, and generally to not engage in that sort of way when one goes around and explains that the other side just needs to get how right you have been this whole time ("But don't you understand that anthropocentrism is behind racism? So thank you very much for no longer insisting upon your humanity..." etc.). 

None of this entails necessarily giving up our core ethics, or even being critical of other philosophers of race on occasion. For example, arguments about the cultural imperialism of vegetarianism and veganism that continue  simply ignore that other animals have culture is not very convincing or useful. 

In general, critical animal theorists need to admit that we do indeed, as a field, often have a problem with eurocentrism. No, this isn't unique to our field, and no, we are not all guilty of it. But none of that changes the fact we need to change our field. 

Unruly Creatures I&II

Backdoor Broadcasting has the recordings up of Unruly Creatures (which they have had up for a while), and the more recent Unruly Creatures II. If you click the links, you will get the talks, plus sometimes other things. You will also get a quick summary of the talk.  [sidenote: I am not done with the Feminists Encountering Animals event, just thought I would put this up first].

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).

FEA: Stephanie Jenkins, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and killable subjects

Two quick notes: (1) The "virtual symposium" has been extended until at least July 20th. So, if you haven't had a chance to read and participate, you have longer! (2) The comments are coming more quickly than they were in the first few days. There are several lively and interesting discussions throughout the various posts of the symposiums, and I highly suggest you pop on over there and read the comments, even if you have already read all the initial posts. They are worth your time.

Stephanie Jenkins' contribution is a wonder, and particularly close to my own work. She wants an "an affective feminist practice that views animal others as grievable, vulnerable, and valuable"*. Such an understanding gives us (either contra or pace Warkentin, I am not full sure) a different understanding of veganism. As Jenkins argues: 

When built upon feminist ethics, vegan practice is not a universal obligation or a fantasy of purity but rather a “bodily imperative” (Weiss 1999, 129) to respond to another’s suffering and to reject the everyday embodied practices that make certain animate others killable.

This is a strong contribution to a rethinking of veganism that several of us are trying to produce, in which veganism is neither reducible to another instance in the economies of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the polluted, and the innocent and the damned; but also is not reducible to one more consumer choice, one more boycott, one more instance in the transformation of us into homo economicus.  

Jenkins in interesting in contrasting an ethically engaged animal studies with what she, cleverly, called "hypo-critical animal studies". 

Because it isolates ontological inquiry from ethical practice, hypo-critical animal studies constitute a response to animal suffering that is a nonresponse. These studies do not call upon us to change how we eat, dress, or entertain in the world in regard to our everyday relationships with other animals. 

Hypo-critical animal studies would be what Michael Lundblad terms "animality studies".  

The major target of Jenkins attack is Donna Haraway, and particularly Haraway's notion of "killing well" (a somewhat strange translation of Derrida's eating well). For those who have read When Species Meet, Haraway justifies scientific experimentation on animals, as well as killing and eating animals. Both of which are problematized, but ultimately the conclusions are for our right to kill and eat animals in ways that very, very problematic (and conclusions matter, no matter nuanced we get there). For example, Donna Haraway is okay with killing and eating wild boars in California because they are an invasive species. To tie this back into Kelly Oliver's piece, just as pit bulls are seen sometimes in racialized and criminalized codes, the invasive species occupies a similar ground, bringing in our xenophobia and anxieties over immigration (I want to thank my colleague Kevin Cummings for this insight). After all, the invasive species does not belong, replicates too quickly, drains important resources that should be going to other, 'more natural' species that 'belong'. For Donna Haraway, killing well often means a biopolitical justification of killing, that is of sacrificing the individual for the population's sustainability (I have argued this before). Now, for a brief disagreement with Jenkins. 

Jenkins is concerned with articulating a nonviolent philosophy, one that centralizes the idea of though shalt not kill, as opposed to Haraway's formulation of thou shalt not make killable. I am not at all convinced that nonviolent ethics is truly possible (again, see my discussion of ethics and innocence). And I agree with Haraway that the issue isn't one so much of thou shalt not kill as much as it is one of thou shalt not make killable. Haraway failure, and here I come back to full agreement with Jenkins, is that she doesn't actualize this ethos. Jenkins is passionate in her articulation of why the violence of the vegan and the violence of the omnivore is not the same violence. 

Jenkins ends her short essay with an appeal to Butler's work. (Stephanie, along with Eric Jonas, presented on Butler and animal ethics/ontology/politics at the Sex, Gender, Species conference. Their work on Butler has been essential for my own). Needless to say, I agree, and I encourage to read it (and all of the comments) in full. 

*I currently don't have the pdf in front of me, with the page numbers. And cutting and pasting from it caused the weird formating issues from earlier posts. So, I don't have page numbers right now. Also, I will keep to calling Stephanie "Jenkins", even though we are friends, and it seems weird. 

Animal Studies Book Series

This post is meant to both make sure that I have a complete list, so please let me know if I am missing any, and also so that people looking into book series, either for buying books or submitting manuscripts, might have a list. This list will be alphabetical by publisher.

AK Press: While clearly not an academic press, and often focusing more on cookbooks than animal studies, AK Press still turns out books dedicated to a radical animal studies.

Columbia University Press: Has published several key books in Animal Studies, and obviously continues to publish more. Wendy Lochner seems to be the editor for animal studies.

Lantern Books: While not a press that is specifically academic, it has several important works, and keeps publishing important works, in animal studies.

University of Minnesota Press: Has the Posthumanities series, edited by Cary Wolfe. While not dedicated specifically to just animal studies, animal studies is obviously an important and frequent subset of the books that come out of this series.

Palgrave Macmillan has a the Animal Ethics series, edited by Andrew Linzey and Priscilla Cohn.

Penn State University Press has the new Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures series, edited by Nigel Rothfels and Garry Marvin. I had a chance to briefly talk to Nigel about this series at The Non-Human Turn conference, and he said the hope was to publish books that were about something in particular, rather than a purely philosophical of theoretical treatise.

Reaktion Books has the unique Animal series, edited by Jonathan Burt. 

Rodopi Press has the Critical Animal Studies series, edited Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stănescu. It is a series dedicated to specifically to books that take seriously issues of animal oppression and emancipation.



Honorable Mention (these are presses that frequently, and currently, keep publishing heavily in animal studies, without having a dedicated series or editor):

University of Chicago Press

Continuum Books

Fordham University Press

Oxford University Press


So, what did I miss?

Rodopi Critical Animal Studies: Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde

The Rodopi Critical Animal Studies book series has its first book coming out, and it looks awesome (I particularly like the cover. In particular the CAS1 on the side. If I could rename my blog, it would probably be CAS0). According to Amazon, it is in stock, and ready to ship (who says us anarchistic, anti-capitalist CAS people don't understand the importance of the holiday shopping period?). Who out there is planning on being CAS2? 3? 4? Infinity? (CAS is the other thing I would rename my blog).

Anyway, I haven't had a chance to read the book yet (review copy, anyone?), but I know several people who have, and by all accounts the first book is unique and exciting. Check it out.

Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation

By: Kim Socha
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2012, XIV, 258 pp.
Pb: 978-90-420-3423-5
€ 54 / US$ 81

____________

ABOUT THE BOOK

This interdisciplinary study fuses analysis of feminist literature and manifestos, radical political theory, critical vanguard studies, women’s performance art, and popular culture to argue for the animal liberation movement as successor to the liberationist visions of the early twentieth-century avant-gardes, most especially the Surrealists. These vanguard groups are judiciously critiqued for their refusal to confront their own misogyny, a quandary that continues to plague animal activists, thereby disallowing for cohesion and full recognition of women’s value within a culturally marginalized cause.

This volume is of interest to anyone who is concerned about the continued—indeed, escalating—violence against nonhumans. More broadly, it will interest those seeking new pathways to challenge the dominant power constructions through which oppression of humans, nonhumans, and the environment thrives. Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde ultimately poses the animal liberation movement as having serious political and cultural implications for radical social change, destruction of hierarchy and for a world without shackles and cages, much as the Surrealists envisioned.

______________________________________________

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword – Helena Pedersen and Vasile Stanescu: Series Editor’s Introduction: What is “Critical” about Animal Studies? From the Animal “Question” to the Animal “Condition”

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Rooting for the Avant-Garde

I. Avant-Garde Women Writers and Destruction in the Flesh

II. Staring Back in the Flesh: Avant-Garde Performance as an ALM Paradigm

III. Convulsive Beauty, Infinite Spheres and Irrational Reasons: Reverie on a New Consciousness

Conclusion: Love and Laughter Now: Plucking at Stems or Uprooting Oppression?

Works Cited

Index

_____________________________________________
Kim Socha is an animal activist and sits on the board of the Animal Rights Coalition in Minneapolis, MN. Holding a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism, she works as a composition and literature instructor with publications in the areas of surrealism, Latino literature and pedagogy.

The Archive of Critical Animal Studies

This post is inspired by writing the lit review of my dissertation, and reading Barbara Noske's Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (which is sadly out of press).

In the anglophone world, particularly the North American anglophone world, Animal Studies as a major academic phenomena is distinctly a 2000s event, and comes about with the rise of continentalist attention toward animals. To give some dates, we have H. Peter Steeves (ed) Animal Others, a volume that was particularly unique when it came out in 1999. In 2000 we get Steve Baker's Postmodern Animal and Lippit's Electric Animal (and does it surprise anyone that it would get the paperback reprint treatment eight years late?), Critical Inquiry published the English translation of Derrida's "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" in Winter of 2002, Cary Wolfe's edited Zoontologies and his monograph Animal Rites both came out in 2003, Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto was also released in 2003, and finally Atterton and Calarco's edited volume of Animal Philosophy came out in 2004. Shortly after that Columbia UP starts a concentrated effort of publishing animal studies, and by 2008 Cary Wolfe has his Posthumanities series at Univ of Minnesota Press. During all of this we also see both the rise and support by the Institute of Critical Animal Studies, founded in 2001, and the foundation of the Journal of Critical Animal Studies in 2003. And while the work after the sudden and important attention toward animal studies is important, I want to turn our attention to the work done before this rise in animal studies.

There exists a vast literature of people who published on animals before the boom. I think it is important to honor that archive. Many of these published in a climate absolutely hostile to doing animal studies work. I have written many times about how the climate of doing animal studies has become increasingly friendly since I started. I believe I have told the story about how I once told another student that my work was on animals, and she laughed at me. She thought it was a joke. Well, a lot of things have changed since then. But for those who worked in animal studies before the boom, or in the earliest stages of the boom, they faced a lot of opposition to do both ethical and cutting edge work. Their books were frequently published in minor presses, or advertised in ways they wouldn't be today, and many of them have gone out of print. They faced attacks on their work. Noske describes near the end of her book: "[I]t turned out the continuity [between humans and other animals] question especially was a taboo subject among feminists. Behind my back doubts were expressed as to my political correctness...." (p. 171) Any number of other examples can be given, no doubt. Greta Gaard and Susan Fraiman have both worked on the ways that ecofeminism, particularly in regards to questions of animals, have faced serious troubles. Ecofeminists thinkers like Carol Adams, Lori Gruen, Greta Gaard, Chris Cuomo, Lyndia Birke, Val Plumwood, Vandana Shiva, and I am sure many more I will be embarrassed for not listing later on, are an invaluable resource for any critical animal studies scholar.
I think it is vitally important as we build our archive of critical animal studies that we pay attention to thinkers who were fighting the anthropocentrism of the academy years, even decades, before it was acceptable (to the degree that it is now). Their work has been frequently marginalized when it came out, so it up to us now to find it, read it, and engage with it.

Initial issues with the grad program listing.

There are already a lot of issues to think through with the grad programs friendly to critical animal studies project.

(1) I have generally been very open with the idea of working on animals. I have included people who have published, people who are teaching, and people who are just beginning doing these things. The goal of the project is to try and identify programs where students would find an atmosphere that might allow them to do the sort of critical animal studies work they want to do, without feeling always intellectually alone.

(2) But I have already run into the problem about the ambiguity of critical animal studies. Usually I enjoy the ambiguity, taking it as a good coalitional term. But there are two problems I am faced with here.

(A) Does CAS just refer to animal studies that intersects on some level with theory (a poorly defined term itself!)? In this, I mean is there any reason, for example, to exclude the animal ethicists working in the analytical tradition? Or the people doing quantitative work on human-animal relationships (if, indeed, anyone is doing that work)? I honestly do see any reason to, say, not list Princeton with the work of Peter Singer.

(B) The other problem has to do with the level to which the work of people listed are for animal welfare, animal abolition, pro-veganism and/or pro-vegetarianism, etc. For example, Kathy Rudy is obviously not pro-vegan or pro-vegetarian, but still considers her work pro-animal welfare. Do we list her work? And what about all the more ambiguous cases? If someone is publishing on, say, Herman Melville and the animal, we might have no good sense of that person's position on vegetarianism/veganism, abolitionism vs. welfarism, etc etc etc. It would be terrible if this list turned into some sort of weird witch-hunt, in which people email into me that so-in-so actually was seen eating animal flesh or whatever. Anyone interested in critical animal studies knows that there is a constant stream of rumors and gossips if certain academics are vegetarians. Or if they are more than vegetarians, but also vegans. Lastly, there is a real limit to my knowledge. I just cannot possibly know everyone's work in every field and discipline, and I cannot know all their positions.

These two issues makes me wonder if a list about critical animal studies is at all possible. Perhaps, all I can do is a list about human-animal studies. I would really like some feedback on all of this.

(3) Should I continue to list graduate certificate programs along with MA and PhD programs? My gut feeling is yes, but I don't have a good reason for that one way or another.

(4) Eric pointed out that I need to add which professors are working on animals in this list. That strikes me as a good idea. Is there any reason that I should maybe avoid this?


Lastly, all of this is taking absurdly more time than I already thought it would. Which is fine. But I have a dissertation to finish (among other things). So the idea of even having a decent Beta list for this application season seems impossible. Still, the goal is to have a strong initial list, at least for North America, by the start of Fall 2012. And that will mean lots more working. I have only gotten a few suggestions so far. Please keep them coming.

Help me generate a list of graduate programs in Critical Animal Studies

I tried to start this once before, but it didn't work out.

Since I made that post, I have gotten increasingly more hits of people interested in this material. I think this is information that will be important for many people. Here is what I am working for: Graduate programs, in any discipline and in any English speaking country, that would be seen as being friendly to critical animal studies. My guess is that we can determine two different levels of friendliness. First, programs that have some sort of specific or stated affinity toward animal studies. Second, programs that have at least one faculty member that is interested in critical animal studies. (If anyone has any objections to these, let me know. If anyone has any other ideas, let me know). Please either post in comments or send me an email. Furthermore, please let me know why you are including the programs you are suggesting. This year's graduate school hunt is already upon us, but I want to try and get some sort of Beta list up by the end of this month, if that is possible. Then hopefully before Fall 2012 begins, I would have a stronger list up, and then I would try to keep it updated as long as the list seems relevant.

Other relevant comments:
(1)This is in no way a ranking list, and I have no desire to start a ranking system.
(2) Critical Animal Studies here is meant in its broadest, most inclusive sense. We can work out if there are issues with this after we have gotten the data.
(3) I am open to any advice or criticism in all of this.
(4) As always, self-promotion is welcomed.

Here is the immediate data I have so far. All the programs listed have faculty that are working on the issues of animals. The schools offering programs in animal studies, are obviously offering programs in animal studies. Also, Colorado State also have an animal studies working group of some sort.
I will certainly have some obvious and embarrassing omissions in what follows. Help me fix those. These schools are being drawn from things other people have mentioned in the past, or I have written down for some reason. This current list is completely devoted to the United States, because that is what I have. I will try to do one on Canada tomorrow (I have a lot less for Canada). I have almost nothing for other countries outside of North America. Send in other stuff, and I will expand the list.

Tell me what I missed. Who has schools where people are teaching and/or publishing on animals, and have graduate departments.

United States

Animal Studies/Animal Public Policy

Humane Society University (MA only).

Michigan State University.

Tufts University (MA only).

Anthropology

Cornell University

Classics

Stanford University

English

Arizona State University

Brooklyn College (MA only)

Colorado State University (MA only)

Columbia University

Northwestern University

PennState

Portland State University (MA Only)

Rice University

Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (MA only)

UC-Davis

University of Chicago

History

Cornell University

Northwestern University

Interdisciplinary Studies

Stanford University (Modern Thought and Literature)

UC-Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness)


Philosophy

Emory University

DePaul University

Penn State

University of Oregon

Vanderbilt University


Political Science

Colorado State University

Rhetoric

University of South Carolina (MA only)

University of Texas at Austin


Sociology

Colorado State University

University of Colorado at Boulder


Women's Studies

Duke University (Graduate Certificate Only)

UMass Amherst (Graduate Certificate Only)

CFP: 11th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies

Call for Presentations: 11th Annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies

March 2 – 4, 2012
Canisius College
Buffalo, New York, USA

Host Sponsors:
Animal Allies Club of Canisius College

THEME:
From Greece to Wall St.: Global Economic Revolutions and Critical Animal Studies

As worldwide economies collapse and socio-political revolutions arise in response to education tuition increases, job losses, tax increases, land rights, and religious division, governments are collapsing only to be hijacked by corporations. In the US, national and transnational banks and financial institutions are being bailed out by the government, while common people are kicked out of their homes and fired from their jobs so corporations can save money. Simultaneously, global revolutionary fervor increases against corporations, banks, and corrupt financial institutions. People are demanding their rights and their nations back. The results of this backlash are police brutality and political repression toward activists worldwide. The theme of this year’s annual North American Conference for Critical Animal Studies is based on inquiry into how economic markets locally, regionally, nationally and globally affect nonhuman animals. Can these revolutions include a critical animal studies agenda? If not, why not? If they can, how would this agenda manifest both philosophically and strategically? How does the economy affect nonhuman animals? Are there alternative ethical and transformative economic systems that promote animal liberation? How are capitalism and transnational corporations affecting nonhuman animal exploitation? How do industrial complexes promote exploitive economic practices? What tactics and strategies can be used to resist economic exploitation? How do economic crises similarly oppress human and nonhuman animals and the environment? In what ways are the resulting oppressions intersectional? How are schooling, teaching, and education influenced by economic interests which promote exploitation?

We welcome proposals from community members including, but not limited to, nonprofit organizations, political leaders, activists, professors, staff, and students. We are especially interested in topics such as the history of social movements, spirituality and social movements, nonviolence, alliance politics, freedom, democracy, and notions of total inclusion. We are also interested in reaching across the disciplines and movements of environmentalism, education, poverty, feminism, LGBTQA, animal advocacy, globalization, prison abolition, prisoner support, labor rights, disability rights, anti-war activism, youth rights, indigenous rights/sovereignty, and other peace and social justice issues.

Areas of inquiry include:The Future of Critical Animal Studies
Revolution
Occupy Wall Street
Corporatization
Global Industrial Complex
Anarchist Studies
Feminism
Activism and Tactics for Social Change
Media
Social Networking
Critical Criminology
Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA)
Speciesism
Animals in Relation to Religion and Spirituality
Abolition as Theory or Strategy
Animals and Property
Challenges to Human Domination
Sexuality and Gender
Culture, Language, and Animals
Racism
Domesticated and Wild Animals
Capitalism
Deconstructing Human and Animal
Social Constructions
Re-Defining Nature
Bio Ethics and Universal Ethics
Post-Colonialism
Geography, Space and Place
Animal Epistemology
Education and Schooling

Presentations should be fifteen to twenty minutes in length.

We are receptive to different and innovative formats including, but not limited to, roundtables, panels, community dialogues, theater, and workshops.

You may propose individual or group “panel” presentations, but please clearly specify the structure of your proposal.

Please stress in your paper/roundtable/panel/etc. how you will be focusing on the program theme and linking it to economics and critical animal studies.

Proposals or abstracts for panels, roundtables, workshops, or paper presentations should be no more than 500 words. Please send with each facilitator or presenter a 100 maximum word biography (speaking to your activism and scholarship) in third person paragraph form.

The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2012.

Accepted presenters will be notified via e-mail by January 25, 2012.

Please send proposals/abstracts and biographies electronically using MS Word and as an attachments in Times Roman 12 point font to:

Stephanie Jenkins
Co-Conference Chair
scjenkins@gmail.com

Logistics Contact:
Morgan Jamie Dunbar
dunbarm@my.canisius.edu

Conference Schedule Contact:
Sarat Colling

(h/t Lib Now)

Communication Studies and Animal Studies: A request

As most of you know, I am mostly housed in a department of communication studies these days. Anyway, I have been looking around at animal studies within the world of communication studies, rhetoric, etc. I have found some things, but do any of you have suggestions for things for me to look into, syllabi, people who are doing work at these intersections, etc. Also, if any of you are doing the work at these intersections, let me know.

What does Critical Animal Studies have to offer?

The very short answer is obvious: A lot.

As I am writing this paper on CAS and queer theory, I keep thinking about this. My paper is very much about how certain aspects of queer theory help us think through certain issues in CAS. Queer theory does more than simply make visible an abject subject (though it certainly would do enough if it was all that it did), it also provides insights, tools, and methodologies for other fields of research and inquiry. So, I am trying to think through some of the things that CAS can offer to other lines of inquiry, besides simply bringing forth and giving weight to a repressed subject (that of course never being a 'simple task'). For example, I think CAS has allowed me to think through the questions of the biopolitical. The many problems I have with Agamben aside, I think he gets right that the biopolitical is rooted in an anthropological machine. Critical animal studies gives us tools for understanding that anthropological machine, and hopefully tools for dismantling it, as well. Moreover, CAS has given me the ability to understand the central importance of the issue of opacity. I think I have often talked about how wonderful I think Glissant's book, The Poetics of Relation, is. One of the major themes in the book is the political affirmation of opacity. CAS gives us ways to begin to think of ethics and politics with beings who obviously maintain their opacity.

There are many other areas (I am pretty tired right now), but I think we will shortly be seeing more and more research projects that uses CAS to think through and extend projects in other fields, at the same time those fields will continue to influence critical animal studies.

intersectionality and animal studies

Without a doubt one of the biggest moves in animal studies these days is to talk about intersectionality. There are basically two ways this gets talked about: One is a discussion of the fact that the vegan/animal rights movement tends to be predominately white (my brother pointed this usage out to me when I was talking about this with him earlier). But the other way is to discuss the methods by which speciesism intersects with other oppressions. The classical example (perhaps the first example) would be Carol Adams' The Sexual Politics of Meat, which deals with the intersection of sexism and speciesism. And while interlocking oppressions (or, oppressions that are enmeshed but still discrete and semi-autonomous) are certainly important, intersectionality has traditionally carried with it a level of subjectivity that seems to be missing in these discussions. To clarify, when Crenshaw first developed the term (and the way it has been updated by Collins), intersectionality referred to a way that interlocking oppressions produced/shaped a subjectivity that exceeded the sum of those oppressions. So, the experience of a black could not be reduced to either the experiences of a white woman or a black man, or even those experiences combined. And while the term has developed a level of plasticity in the last two decades of its existence, in all the work deploying the term I am aware of, intersectionality continues to have a level of subjectivity to it. However, when most animal scholars are using the term, they are not saying that, for example, female animals have a unique intersection of oppression that is different from male animals or female humans (though this might be an interesting topic). What animal scholars are usually saying is that racism, sexism, classism, etc are bound up with speciesism. Now, I think that intersectionality is perhaps a confusing term to be using in these contexts, maybe even a misleading term. Maybe we need a different term, or if animal scholars are going to insist on using the term, at least they need to address the changes the term is undergoing in their work.

Update: My brother points out that in later works by Carol Adams, she does talk about the sort of intersectionality I mean. In that she talks about how female cows and chickens are particularly and uniquely abused because of their gender and species status. Though, I don't think she uses the term (which is more than fine). Fair enough, and vastly important. Still, my larger point remains. Most people who use this term in animal studies tend to gloss over the differences of thinking about intersectionality as a way of relating multiple oppressions to subjectivity to analyzing the way multiple oppressions sustain each other. If people are using the term in more traditional ways, that is fine. But I think people who are shifting its focus should deal directly with that issue. That's all.

Gone for the weekend, but I still need your help

A couple of nights ago I made a post about programs friendly to doing animal studies, particularly 'critical animal studies' (whatever that means). I am trying to compose a list that I can maintain for people. Any information you want to give me would be great.

I'm looking mostly for two things. (1) A place that doesn't seem hostile to doing your MA thesis or PhD thesis on animals. (2) I am particularly looking for places where there is faculty (maybe even other students) working on questions of animals. That is to say, a place where you can do your work without feeling entirely alone.

So, please leave comments or send me an email. And I will be back around early next week.