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Animal Studies

Seminars and Workshops page

Over the past decade, animal studies has exploded as an interdisciplinary area of research within the humanities. Focused on one of the most hotly contested debates in contemporary culture, animal studies asks, How shall we rethink and recast our relationships with other animals? This "animal turn" challenges the species limits of the humanities itself and its traditional objects of study by venturing into the terrain of human-animal hybridity, animal geographies and politics, animal ethics and aesthetics, animal alterity and affect, animal metaphors and materialities. Our seminar will engage with one particularly rich strand of inquiry that is closely related to our own work in the field: looking at animals.

Questions

  1. We begin at the beginning, with John Berger's question: "Why look at animals?"
  2. What is the fascination in the theoretical and popular literature with the gaze that passes between human and animal?
  3. How have humans represented and looked at animals in different cultural and temporal contexts?
  4. How do animals circulate as images, chimeras, and brands in the advertising bestiaries of global capitalist culture?
  5. How have new critical vocabularies enabled the study of animal life in relation to (post)colonialism, (post)modernism, and poststructuralist formulations of animal rhizomes and becomings?
  6. How has literary, visual, digital, and performance art involving animals challenged the discourse and institution of speciesism?
  7. How does the field engage ethical questions by reckoning with the absolute otherness of animal life or, alternately, by wryly recognizing the contradictions of living with companion species in contexts of late capitalism?
  8. How are species, race, gender, and class entangled in histories of power?

Bibliography

Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books.

Derrida, Jacques. 2002. "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)." Critical Inquiry 28: 369-418.

Haraway, Donna J. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Chapter on Value Added Dogs and Lively Capital)

Kalof, Linda. 2007. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion Books. (Chapter 6)

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. ("Thinking Like A Mountain")

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2000. Electric Animal: Toward A Rhetoric of Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Chapter on cinematically-mediated human-animal gaze)

Quammen, David. 1988. The Flight of the Iguana. ("The Face of the Spider")

Seton, Ernest Thomson. 1899. Wild Animals I Have Known. ("Lobo, King of the Currumpaw")

Shukin, Nicole. 2008. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. (excerpt)

Seminar Leaders

Linda Kalof is Professor of Sociology and Professor of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies at Michigan State University. Using a visual studies framework, she examines the cultural representations of humans and other animals and the links between culture and nature. She is the author of Looking at Animals in Human History, and the co-editor of The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings, Animals in the Ancient World, A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance, and The Earthscan Reader in Environmental Values. She is the general editor for two book series, A Cultural History of the Human Body and A Cultural History of Animals; the academic journal, Human Ecology Review; and the Animals and Society and Environmental Philosophy sections for The Encyclopedia of Earth.

Nicole Shukin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. She specializes in Canadian Literature, cultural studies (with a focus on theories of biopower, ecocritique, and animal studies), and poststructuralist and (post)Marxist theory. She is the author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times, and she has contributed to the edited volumes Against Automobility and Deleuze and Feminist Theory, and the journals Prairie Fire, Canadian Literature, and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. She is presently at work on a book manuscript entitled Transnatural Ecologies: Cultural, Natural, and National Resources of Global Capitalism.

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