Kim Stallwood,
ASI Animals and
Society Institute
October 2011
Organized under some 20 key categories, there are scores of links to college programs, course information, journals, organizations and so on. Many of these were not available to scholars 10 or even five years ago.
Human-Animal Studies (HAS) is growing around the world, and from my view
in Europe it’s an exciting time to be involved.
Evidence of this growth is on our HAS Links page. Organized under some 20
key categories, there are scores of links to college programs, course
information, journals, organizations and so on. Many of these were not
available to scholars 10 or even five years ago.
Look under the category HAS Conferences and you will find a link to Minding
Animals. Minding Animals International (MAI) made its mark in 2009 with an
international conference in Newcastle, Australia. Sadly, I was unable to
attend but my ASI colleague, Ken Shapiro, did. He says – as does everyone
I’ve spoken to who went – that it was a defining moment in the development
of Human-Animal Studies. Some 500 scholars, students, advocates, lawyers and
policy makers came together in the first international conference of its
kind.
MAI’s mission is to provide an international avenue for the
interdisciplinary field of HAS and acts as a bridge between the worlds of
academia and advocacy. It recognizes HAS as a moral and legal concern for
animals, which it situates within the progressive context of social justice.
MAI’s Chief Executive Officer is Dr. Rod Bennison, who organized the 2009
Minding Animals conference. I am MAI’s Deputy CEO. Ken is a member of the
Board of Directors, which also includes Giovanni Aloi and Linda Williams
(see below) and Richard Twine, Kay Peggs, Vivek Menon and Jessica Ullrich
MAI is partnered with the Utrecht University on the organization of the
second Minding Animals International conference. MAC2: Building Bridges
between Science, the Humanities and Ethics will take place at Utrecht
University in The Netherlands on July 4-6, 2012. I encourage everyone to
attend who is interested in examining the complex and multidimensional
relationships between humans and other animals. The MAI conferences are
unique international events where those from advocacy and academia meet to
share and discuss our complex relationship with animals.
Between now and MAC2 next year, a series of preconference events are taking
place throughout the world. Each one is independent; collectively, however,
they are helping to establish further HAS as an important and vital academic
discipline throughout the world.
Earlier this month, I attended two consecutive MAI pre conference events,
which illustrated the depth and range of HAS.
The first, Animal Citizens, focused on political approaches to animal ethics
and was held at the London School of Economics. The seminar organizer,
Alasdair Cochrane, began with an overview of animal ethics and how political
science can add further insight into our understanding as to what animal
rights means in a moral and legal sense. (See his An Introduction to Animals
and Political Theory, published by Palgrave Macmillan.)
Siobhan O’Sullivan, from the University of Melbourne, contrasted the ways
the same species is treated in legislation depending upon the context of the
relationship we have with them and how they are used. For example, dogs,
cats and rabbits as companion animals have different legal protections than
when they are used by science as research tools in a laboratory. She made
the case that these "internal inconsistencies" should be highlighted and
used to elevate the legal status of those who are less protected. (See her
Animals, Equality and Democracy, published by Palgrave Macmillan.)
The next speaker, Robert Garner, who teaches political science at the
University of Leicester, has researched and written about animals and the
law since 1993 with the publication of Animals, Politics and Morality (see
second edition published by Manchester University Press in 2004). His paper,
“Animals Rights in a Non-ideal World,” examined the challenges to achieving
effective legal protection for animals in the current political climate. He
made the case for an “enhanced sentience position” for animals which
afforded significantly stronger legal protection for animals than their
current legal status. In short, animals have a right not to suffer
regardless of any benefit that may accrue to humans.
The concept of animal citizenship was proposed by Will Kymlicka from Queens
University, Ontario. He asked us to imagine a plane arriving at its
destination. Everyone aboard held the legal status of citizen; however,
depending their circumstances, their status maybe as a full citizen entitled
to live, work and vote or someone, for example, who enters the country as a
student on a temporary visa with limitations on the length of their stay and
what they are legally entitled to do. Drawing from this analogy, he made the
case that animals could also have citizenship status, which, depending upon
their species and situation, afforded them particular rights. The seminar
concluded with a discussion by Steve Cooke (University of Manchester), whose
paper, “Justice for Wild Animals: Sovereignty and Partial Sovereignty,”
discussed animal citizenship as proposed by Will and his co-author Sue
Donaldson in their book, Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights
(Oxford University Press).
The second MAI pre-conference event was organized by Giovanni Aloi, editor
of the online journal Antennae. It was held at University College London.
The program, “Animal Ecologies in Visual Culture,” was divided essentially
between academics who studied the representation of animals and nature in
the arts and artists whose practice is also the focus on this relationship.
Included among the scholars were Joyce Salisbury (Professor Emerita from the
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay) and Linda Williams (Associate Professor
of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne,
Australia), who spoke respectively on the representation of mammals and
non-mammals as good and evil in the middle ages and related positions in
eco-critical theory in response to the works of Australian environmental
artists John Wolseley and Harry Nankin.
Artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, who collaborate as London
Fieldworks, described various projects in urban and rural settings that
engage ecology as a “complex inter-working of social, natural, and
technological worlds.” Based in Budapest and London, contemporary art
historians and curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes considered socialism and its
legacies in Eastern Europe and how artists represented animals and the
natural world. This focus included a consideration of Laika, the dog who was
sent on a one-way mission into orbit in 1957. Jussi Parikka focused on the
disappearance of insects and animals in early 21st century culture of
environmental waste of which electronic media waste constitutes an
ever-growing proportion.
Additional commentary was given by arts journalist Rikke Hansen and a
concluding discussion was given by Ron Broglio, assistant professor of
English and senior research scholar of the Global Institute of
Sustainability at Arizona State University, and Giovanni Aloi, lecturer in
History of Art at Roehampton University, Queen Mary University of London,
The Open University and Tate Galleries.
The day before these two conferences, the opportunity was taken by the MAI
board to hold our first in-person meeting. Included among our business was a
report from Tatjana Visak, the organizer of MAC2. These three busy days in
London reaffirmed the steady progress HAS is making throughout the world,
and both Ken and I will post further about our experiences at future events.
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