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Upcoming Conferences and Seminars

The British Animal Studies Network Lives Again!

‘Wild,’ Friday 25-Saturday 26 May 2012, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Thanks to the generosity of the University of Strathclyde, BASN is being revived – and it now has its own website: www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk.

The first meeting of BASN-Glasgow will take place from 2.30pm on Friday 25 May to 5.00pm on Saturday 26 May 2012 at the University of Strathclyde in central Glasgow. There will be a small charge for attending the meeting to cover the cost of refreshments (which will be vegetarian and vegan). Details will be issued in the new year.

As with all previous BASN meetings, this one takes as its focus a key term in animal studies that it is hoped will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines. This meeting’s title is ‘Wild’. Invited speakers who are already confirmed for May are Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Hayden Lorimer (Glasgow University) and Richard Nash (Indiana University).

As well as these invited speakers we are also issuing this call for papers. If you are interested in giving a paper addressing the topic ‘Wild’ from whatever disciplinary perspective please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words with a brief biography (also of no more than 200 words). These should be included within your email – i.e. not as attachments. Please send them to basn@strath.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is 13 January 2012. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. Sadly we have no money to support travel, accommodation or attendance costs.

Topics covered at this meeting might include (but are not limited to):

•       The reintroduction of wild animals

•       Wildness as a philosophical construct

•       Wild animals in captivity

•       Wildness as a cultural trope or theme

•       Ferality and wildness

•       Encounters with the wild – safaris, walking, urban wildlife

Also, if you’d like to join the mailing list for BASN, and receive information about this and future meetings/events please go to www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/Home.aspx and click on the ‘Register for Updates’ link.

Taking Animals Apart

Exploring Interspecies Enmeshment in a Biotechnological Era

Sponsored by the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison

May 31-June 2, 2012

In our globalized, highly-industrialized society, human and nonhuman animals are enmeshed in surprising and often troubling ways. “Pharm” goats are living factories for the production of pharmaceuticals; honeybees are explosive-detectors in the “War on Terror;” and household pets – clothed and escorted in strollers – have become humanized companions. What do these sorts of enmeshments mean for us and our “human condition” as well as for our non-human animal counterparts? What do they mean for relationships among species?

The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center and Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is sponsoring a three-day conference to bring together *advanced graduate students* in animal studies, science and technology studies, and allied disciplines (English, History, Anthropology, and Fine Arts among others) to discuss the relationships between animal studies and STS. We welcome papers or projects that explore the overlap of humans and other organisms as well as their

mutual interaction with technology. Each participant will present a pre-circulated paper, article, creative composition, or dissertation chapter for constructive feedback in a roundtable discussion with peers and with scholars from the University of Wisconsin.

Our keynote speaker will be *Susan Squier* — Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University; acting director of its Science, Medicine, Technology in Culture program; and author of _Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet_.

Contact Peter Boger at boger@wisc.edu or Jen Martin at jamartin4@wisc.edu

ANIMAL DEATH: A Symposium

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Deborah Bird Rose, Centre for Social Inclusion, Macquarie University

WHEN: Wednesday June 13th, 2012

WHERE: University of Sydney Camperdown Campus

This symposium brings together cross-disciplinary voices on the topic of Animal Death. We seek papers which explore how animal and human death are conceptualised, diverge, differ and also connect in profound ways.  Papers could explore issues of sacrifice, ‘necessary’ expendability, utility, species extinction, human survival, climate change and conservation.  We are particularly interested in human and animal relationships around the nature of death.  These include (but not limited to) issues of grief (for the dead companion animal), euthanasia, rituals of slaughter, vivisection, cultures of denial, the issue of who (and who isn’t attributed a ‘soul’), post-death belief systems.

Please send 200 word abstracts to Dr Jay Johnston: jay.johnston@sydney.edu.au by January 16th 2012.

Individual papers 20 minutes.  Panels of up to 3 speakers are welcome.

Convenors: Dr Jay Johnston and Dr Fiona-Probyn-Rapsey

fiona.probyn-rapsey@sydney.edu.au / jay.johnston@sydney.edu.au

The Rhetoric of Human-Animal Relations

Workshop at the University of Oslo

May 29, 2012 – May 30, 2012, University of Oslo, Norway

With rhetoric, we make realities. And despite the complaint that humans are “a species which has at last been isolated” (Berger), the realities that humans create with rhetoric are not exclusively human. The purpose of this workshop is to investigate the rhetoric that reaches beyond the human sphere.

In some of its various definitions, rhetoric refers either to “the art of persuasion,” to a continuous process of “identification,” or to an “articulation” that tries to fix meaning in a world where no such meaning is given. In all cases, it appears that rhetoric is something humans perform with and on each other. But if humans are perhaps the only species capable of rhetoric, they are certainly not the only species affected by it. In fact, rhetoric creates the space within which our everyday practices with other beings take place. Rhetoric thus connects the philosophical “question of the animal” with our everyday interactions with animals; in both cases, the salient issue is that –and how – words and other rhetorical means  have consequences.

In this workshop, we will focus on questions like these: How do we use rhetoric to form, understand, explain, discuss, ponder, justify, challenge, and criticize human-animal practices? How do we rhetorically create, uphold, and challenge the norms that are supposed to guide our behavior towards nonhumans? How do visual and verbal rhetorics shape human-animal relations in theory as well as in practice? Finally, how does interacting with animals inspire development of other rhetorics (olfactory, tactile, performative, etc.)?

Please direct any questions to kristian.bjorkdahl@sum.uio.no.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Susan McHugh, University of New England
Mara Miele, Cardiff University
Organizer: Kristian Bjørkdahl

www.sum.uio.no/english/research/subjects/nature-and-culture/workshop-2012/

Minding Animals Conference

1-7 July, 2012

Utrecht University, The Netherlands

This conference is the second in a series of conferences about scientific, ethical and social issues related to human interactions with and uses of animals that began with the Minding Animals conference in Newcastle, Australia in 2009. The aim of this conference is to bring together academics from different areas (animal welfare, animal ethics, and animal studies in general) with politicians and a broad variety of interest groups. The conference offers a platform for exchange of information about research developments, debates about controversial political and ethical issues concerning the treatment of animals and a variety of cultural activities around animals.

Session 1: The Human-Animal Relationship

(including animals in art, literature, religion; history of the human-animal relationship; animals in the history of philosophy; psychological approaches towards the human-animal relationship, cultural aspects of human-animal relationships)

Session 2: Animal Capacities

(including animal emotions; animal cognition; extrapolation of capacities from animals to humans and vice versa)

Session 3: Animal Welfare

(including animal welfare at the interface between science and society; approaches of positive welfare; welfare assessment in practice; animal slaughter)

Session 4: Animal Ethics

(including the foundation of duties towards animals; animal welfare; animal rights; animal liberation; the killing of animals; harm of death; vegetarianism and veganism; animal experimentation; animal husbandry; chimeras and hybrids; dignity; integrity

Session 5: Animals and Sustainability

(including (public-) health aspects, social consequences, landscape, environmental effects, climate change)

Session 6: Animals and Public Policy

(including animals in the law; politics and stakeholders; the use of best practice guidance; national identity versus the level playing field; the role of ethics in politics; sustainability; current themes concerning the future of animal husbandry)

For more information, please contact: mindinganimals@uu.nl or visit www.mindinganimals.com

Cosmpolitan Animals

www.kent.ac.uk/english/cosmopolitan-animals.html

Keynote speakers: Donna Haraway / Simon Glendinning

A two-day international conference: October 26-27, 2012, Institute of English Studies, London

Recent scholarship on human-animal relationships has begun to explore our sharing, co-existing, and ‘becoming with’ animals. Such a scholarly focus brings into perspective new possibilities and permutations of cosmopolitanism, calling for a fresh awareness that animals are fellow creatures, that hosting and hospitality are not restricted to relationships between humans, and that worldliness is far from being a human monopoly. In what ways can we conceptualise cosmopolitanisms which are not solely ‘human’, and where and how are such relationships made possible? This conference, under the theme of ‘Cosmopolitan Animals’, seeks to interrogate and decentre humanist metanarratives that have dominated our thinking and ways of living, while looking to the many non-human others who populate the cosmos. Animal cosmopolitanism not only raises the serious issues of our responsibility for, and responsiveness to, animal others (Derrida), or what Isabelle Stengers calls ‘cosmopolitics’, which according to Haraway, includes our ‘bearing the mortal consequences’ for the decisions we make over animal bodies and worlds. Our rapidly inter-linking world also urgently requires coordination between the local and the international in addressing issues that concern humans and non-humans equally, including the detritus of empires and their aftermaths, new intensities of exploitation and commodification, and new pressures of migration, immigration, and circulation that severely test existing ethics of hospitality, hosting, sharing, and co-mingling.

Conference Committee: Prof. Donna Landry, Prof. Caroline Rooney, Dr. Kaori Nagai and Monica Mattfeld, (School of English), Dr. Karen Jones and Dr. Charlotte Sleigh (School of History), University of Kent, UK.

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