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Human-Animal Studies Newsletter
May 2019
Dear Colleague,

Welcome to the current issue of the Animals & Society Institute's Human-Animal Studies e- newsletter. I hope that this issue has information that is of use to you. Please let me know what you'd like to see! For future editions of this newsletter, please send submissions to margo@animalsandsociety.org .
ASI News
I am on my way to join colleagues Verónica Policarpo, Nora Schuurman & David Redmalm at the International Summer School in Human-Animal Studies , to be held at the University of Lisbon. I am so excited to participate in this event and to hear the work of a group of promising young scholars. This event is just one of multiple such events happening around the world this year, including of course ASI's Human-Animal Studies Summer Institute, held with our partners at the University of Illinois. Keep an eye on our website for information about all these events!

ASI has partnered with The Culture and Animals Foundation in order to help fund individual scholars who have applied to their grant program . The program provides cash awards to aid the work of scholars and artists working in the field of human-animal studies. This year, we were excited to help fund the work of Wlodzimierz Gogloza, an Assistant Professor of Law at the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He received a grant to publish a paper called "False Parallels and Useful Lessons that explores what the animal rights movement can learn from the anti-slavery abolitionism of the nineteenth century." He writes:

Members of contemporary social movements often look for inspiration in the past, seeking examples of successful campaigns and interventions, which can inform their own approach to proper strategy and tactics. . . . The grant . . . will enable me to publish a paper explaining that most of the supposed affinities between “the abolition then and now” . . . are false and based on a superficial understanding of the original abolitionist movement and the social and political reality from which it emerged. At the same time, however, I will attempt to prove that the modern animal rights movement can indeed learn a lot from the Garrisonian Abolitionists and their intra-movement debates.

As part of the 2017 ASI Human-Animal Studies International Development Award , a master’s course titled ‘Animal Ethics & Social Justice’ was introduced at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (alongside a series of public lectures & related activities). The course and linked activities are the outcome of a collaboration between TISS and the Institute of Geography, University of Edinburgh. The course is available to Year 2 MA Social Work students every year. In its first year, the course was taught by a team of international experts assembled for the purpose, including Krithika Srinivasan, Emily Brady, Katie Gillespie, Will Kymlicka and Shanker Raman. In its second year, the course had double the number of students (45 students), and is one of the most popular optional courses in the School of Social Work at TISS. It engages with themes and issues that are new to the social sciences in India, and stimulates reflection and learning on crucial matters relating to animals, justice, nature, and society in the contemporary world. It also covers a number of topics that are specific to the Indian context (such as conflicts around animal-source foods, human-wildlife conflict, urban animals), providing students with the intellectual tools and resources necessary for considered engagement in public debate and social action on these issues. The course is currently taught by Ms Deepa Bhalerao and Prof. Manish Jha from TISS, and Dr Krithika Srinivasan from the University of Edinburgh. The plan is to offer the course every year and eventually introduced field-based learning as part of it.

Funding and Job Opportunities
Dr. Philip Marshall’s Cognitive Anthrozoology (CAZ) laboratory in the department of Psychological Sciences at Texas Tech University has a n opening for a qualified MA or PhD student interested in human experimental HAI research. Applications need to be submitted ASAP  to  The Experimental Psychology doctoral program . Questions regarding the application process or the research priorities of the CAZ lab should be directed to  philip.marshall@ttu.edu .
 
Animal Ethics is looking for a highly motivated PhD graduate who wants to do innovative work in the area of wild animal welfare. The duration of the grant is one year, to be paid in monthly payments of $2,500, totaling $30,000. Applications are open to researchers with doctorates from most nationalities and countries. The successful candidate will be expected to report to Animal Ethics regularly on their progress and submit a final financial report within 60 days of receiving the last grant payment. There are no restrictions on the location of the institution where the research will be carried out as long as OFAC compliance requirements are met. Application deadline: July 31.

Eckerd College invites applications for a one-year visiting position in Animal Studies to start in Fall 2019. Candidates should have an M.S. or Ph.D. in animal studies or a related field of study with emphasis on animals, and a commitment to the liberal arts. We seek an applicant committed to excellence in undergraduate teaching. Teaching load is seven courses per academic year (3-1-3), including sophomore/junior level courses in animal-focused classes (which might fall in the areas of society, culture, humanities, science, and animal electives) to contribute to our newly developed, interdisciplinary program in Animal Studies. Eckerd College, the only independent national liberal arts college in Florida, has a tradition of innovative education and teaching/mentoring excellence. Submit letter of application, vita, recent teaching evaluations, statement of teaching interests and philosophy, undergraduate and graduate transcripts, and contact information for three references so that letters of recommendation can be requested via http://eckerd.hirecentric.com/jobs/ . Inquiries should be sent to Lauren Highfill . Applications will be reviewed starting June 1 , but the position will remain open until filled.

NYU Animal Studies is thrilled to announce that we are now accepting submissions for a new award and workshop on ending factory farming. We invite graduate students and early career faculty (i.e., faculty within 5 years of graduation) in any field to submit new or recent (i.e., unpublished or published within one year of submission) work related to this topic. We will select up to three papers for a $1,000 award and funded travel to NYU for a workshop on ending factory farming. The NYU Animal Studies Workshop on Ending Factory Farming will be a one-day event in Spring 2020. Each selected author will present their work to an audience of NYU Animal Studies faculty, students, and community members. There will also be a keynote address and a dinner. This workshop will be an excellent opportunity for authors to discuss their research and meet other people working in this important and neglected space. We welcome papers in any field in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences that can contribute to our understanding about ending factory farming. Please email jeffsebo@nyu.edu by September 1 with the subject heading “Award and Workshop Submission” and the following materials in PDF format: CV, short cover letter, and 8000 word paper draft.
HAS News
A Ph. D. Summer School will be held at the University of Milan on September 4-5; it is open to Ph. D. Students, Doctors of Philosophy or research fellows whose research concerns antispeciecism, animal rights, animalism and, in general, Philosophy as an instrument to think and fight against animal exploitation. To participate you must submit your application by June 30 , by sending an e-mail to zooftoria.milano@gmail.com stating First and Last Name, University of origin, Topic of the current research, with brief description (max. 500 words), and Personal motivation for participation. Applicants will be able to read in advance the abstracts provided by the speakers and, therefore, prepare for a better experience of listening and discussion. The first day will be dedicated to our guest speakers, while on the second day the selected candidates will have about 15’ each to present their research project and discuss it with the aforementioned speakers. No registration fee is required. At the end of the Summer School, participants will obtain a Certificate of Attendance. All participants will be offered lunch on September 4 and in each of the three sessions there will be a coffee break at the expense of the University.
 
Registration is open for the Animal Law Summer Program at  Lewis & Clark Law School . Professor Kathy Hessler, along with Professors Steven Wise, JD, and Paul Locke, JD, DrPH, will be leading courses on Aquatic Animal Law, Animal Rights Law & Jurisprudence, and The Law & Ethics of Animal Testing, respectively. Students from all over the world can enroll, thanks to two of the three courses being offered this summer entirely online.
 
Are you a veterinarian, veterinary nurse (working in practice or for government or animal charities), animal welfare researcher, FE, HE, Masters or PhD student or animal charity worker/campaigner looking to gain a solid background in animal welfare science, ethics and law? CAWSEL (courses on animal welfare science, ethics and law) is comprised of 4 independent courses and you can attend as many as you choose. Courses include Welfare concepts and assessments and zoo animal behavior; law and companion animal and horse welfare; farm animal welfare, and principles of ethics in relation to animal use. CAWSEL will take place at  St. Catharine’s College , University of Cambridge.  
 
On May 18, 2019, artist Linda Brant unveiled a monument dedicated to farmed animals at the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery in Hartsdale, NY titled The Monument to Animals We Do Not Mourn . Find out more here!
New Books
Following are some of the books coming out that we are excited about!

Barlow, T., & Roberts, C. (2019). The Psychology of Dog Ownership . Routledge.
Campbell, M. (2019). Animals, Ethics and Us . 5M Books.
McHugh, S. (2019). Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories against Genocide and Extinction (Vol. 3). Penn State Press.
Tokarski, M. Hermeneutics of Human-Animal Relations in the Wake of Rewilding: The Ethical Guide to Ecological Discomforts . Springer.

To read about them, visit this link!
New Research
Journals
  Antennae #47 is now online! The new issue, number #47, is titled 'Experiment'. It is the first of two installments (the second, out this summer titled 'Interface') exploring the intricacies and rewards involved in "art and science" collaborations. This issue includes exclusive interviews with artists and scholars whose work has impacted the way we think about disciplinary boundaries, ethics, and aesthetics in modern and contemporary art. From the collaborative network-experiments of Crochet Coral Reef, and Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr's ability to challenge our conception of the living, to mathematics, color perception, storytelling, outer space, and vaccination this certainly is one of our richest issues. And, make sure to check our new flip-book format at the bottom of our home page.
 
Check out this incredible new special issue on Taxidermy in Configurations , Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2019. The issue has articles by Sarah Bezan, Susan McHugh, Laura White, Zoe Hughes, Giovanni Aloi, and Jane Desmond.

The latest edition of Anthrozoös, 32(3), is now online! This issue has articles by

Guest editors: Yamini Narayanan (Deakin) and Krithika Srinivasan (Edinburgh)
 
In the last few years in India, cows have been mobilised prominently in efforts to ‘restore’ the geophysical Indian state as a Hindurashtra, or a racially ‘pure’ Hindu nation. The ‘protection’ of the cow, an animal paired with upper-caste Brahmins in certain interpretations of Hindu scriptures, has been deployed by Hindutva sympathisers as a way of othering ‘non-belonging’ communities in this reconstituted Hindu state, and for acts of exceptional violence against Muslims and Dalits who are framed as slaughterers of cows. Caste has also been deployed in making of a ‘hyperbolic vegetarian’ Hindutva state (Ghassen-Fachandi 2009) based on ideas of social pollution and marginalisation, rather than principled animal ethics. In Sri Lanka too, the cow is politicised as a symbol of Buddhist culture, and to marginalise non-venerating Muslims (Stewart 2013).

In this special issue, we aim to advance these important conversations by exploring what provocations - and opportunities - arise by seeing nonhuman animals not only as instruments of sectarian violence in South Asia, but indeed, also as subjects of such violence. Cows, for instance, might ostensibly be subjects of protection from slaughter. A caste logic nonetheless operates wherein Jersey cows might be more likely (than indigenous breeds) to being sold into the meat trade (Govindrajan 2018, Narayanan 2018). What’s more, the socio-economic realities of dairying intersect with the holy status of the cow with far reaching negative impacts on the lived experiences of these animals which are subject to illegal transport (for slaughter) precisely because of protections bestowed by their holy status (Srinivasan and Rao 2015). Most crucially, the entire dairy industry rests on what has been theorized as the sexualised and gendered extraction of the reproductive labour of cows and bulls (Gillespie 2014). As such, we aim to unravel how species, caste, religion, gender, sexuality, and other elements of identity might intersect to reveal deeper ways of understanding identity-based violence and speciesism as real, interconnected, and indeed, even compatible logics of oppressions. We aim to broaden the politicisation of ‘animals’ in human geography and cognate fields by engaging with geographies of caste, gender, nationalism and religious fundamentalism, and in turn, making caste, extremism and ultranationalism the concern of animal social scientists in/of South Asia.
 
The special issue has two mandates. One, we ask how discourses of species, gender, caste, religious, sexual, and ethnic identity intertwine and overlap to sustain narratives and practices of purity, exploitation, exclusion, and violence directed at people and nonhuman animals in South Asia. Two, we explore how alliances between animal advocacy as a social justice movement, can be mediated with other movements such as the feminist, Dalit rights, and other social justice movements in South Asia. How can a politics of ‘avowal’ (Kim 2015) between these diverse groups be imagined and negotiated? We seek abstracts of 150-200 words from scholars of geography, anthropology, sociology, politics, animal studies, and law, among others. Please send to K.Srinivasan@ed.ac.uk and y.narayanan@deakin.edu.au by June 15 . Full call for submissions can be found here.

The interdisciplinary journal  Animals  invites submissions to a special issue on the following topic: Animal Ethics: Questioning the Orthodoxy. Guest editors: Herwig Grimm and Susana Monsó (Messerli Research Institute Vienna). Deadline for submissions: September 30 .
It has become commonplace to refer to the success of animal ethics and the animal turn in philosophy. Since Singer and Regan published their ground-breaking works more than forty years ago, animal ethics has become an institutionalised field of research. This is mirrored in the appearance of entire journals, book series, text books, BA, MA and PhD programmes, conferences, research institutes, etc. devoted to it. To use a metaphor, animal ethics is no longer a toddler, but a teenager, full of energy, beginning to question its heritage and its future. This Special Issue aims to channel this rebellious spirit in order to help lay down the foundations for a prosperous adulthood. Therefore, we invite submissions that call into question the orthodoxy in animal ethics. With this Special Issue, we aim to deliver an overview of new solutions to canonical problems and new problems that were previously unseen. We expect to map out new directions in the field of animal ethics and contribute to clarifying the self-understanding of the discipline. Please kindly note that for submissions to this special issue there is a word limit of 8,000 words (references not included). Further information can be found in this  link . Informal inquiries can be sent to:  susana.monso@vetmeduni.ac.at

The editors are organizing a special issue on the psycho-social impact of human-animal interactions (HAIs) on health in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health . The venue is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that publishes articles and communications in the interdisciplinary area of environmental health sciences and public health. This Special Issue, guest edited by Aubrey Fine, is open to any subject area related to the psycho-social benefits of human-animal interactions. The listed keywords suggest just a few of the many possibilities. Manuscripts should be submitted online at  www.mdpi.com  by  registering  and  logging in to this website . Once you are registered,  click here to go to the submission form . Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website. Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. Please visit the  Instructions for Authors  page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this  open access  journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions. Deadline for manuscript submissions:  September 30 .
Upcoming Meetings
Are you going to a conference this year? If so, we would love your help with distributing ASI flyers to promote our human-animal studies programs! If you’d like to help, please email margo@animalsandsociety.org . Thank you!


Sex and Nature: 1800-2018. June 10-11, University of Exeter.

Middle Eastern Animals: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times. June 27-28, University of Vienna. Pre-registration is required. Please contact Dr. Onur İnal ( onur.inal@univie.ac.at ) for registration or any further information.

Decolonizing Animals: AASA 2019.  June 30 — July 3, Ōtautahi/Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand.


ASI-UIUC Summer Institute in Human Animal Studies. July 14-21, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

European Summer School “Interspecies Relationality ." July 28-August 4, University of Kassel.

Animal Rights and Animal Politics in Asia: International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS 11). July 16-19, University of Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands.


APA Summit for Animals. August 8-11, Chicago.

Ph. D. SUMMER SCHOOL: Zoophthoria. The exploitation and destruction of animals. September 4-5, Milan. Email for more information: zooftoria.milano@gmail.com

Beastly Modernisms . September 12-13, Glasgow, Scotland.

27 th Annual Animal Law Conference : “Representing Animals: Elevating Animal Status.” October 25-27, Portland, OR. http://animallawconference.org


Embodied Equines. Nov. 13-15, 2019, Cal Poly Pomona. Any questions may be directed to  equinehistory@gmail.com .

Animals in Ethnography . November 21-22, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

British Animal Studies Meeting: 'Movements.' November 22-23, University of Leeds.
Calls for Papers: Conferences
The British Animal Studies Network's upcoming meeting, 'Movements,' will be held at the University of Leeds on November 22-23, under the direction of Lourdes Orozco, Jonathan Saha and Tom Tyler. If you are interested in giving a paper addressing the topic ‘Movements’ from whatever disciplinary perspective please submit your title, with an abstract of no more than 200 words and 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 j.saha@leeds.ac.uk . The deadline for abstracts is July 19 . Presentations will be 20 minutes long and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. We would welcome papers that deal with such issues in contemporary and historical settings, and would especially like to see papers that address these issues from contexts outside the UK, including the Global South. Papers are welcomed from across animal studies, including disciplines such as (but not limited to) geography, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, art history, classical studies, history, science and technology studies, ethology, philosophy, psychology, behavioural sciences and ecology.
Calls for Papers: Books
Animals and Race -- Edited collection, by Jonathan W. Thurston
When Iago informs Brabantio that “a black ram is tupping your white ewe” (I.i.87-88) in Shakespeare’s Othello, he is doing more than identifying the two protagonists’ races. He is referring to the early modern agricultural fact that black wool was undesirable, as per Leonard Mascall, and that black rams would threaten the livelihood of shepherds by decreasing the profitability of a flock of sheep. In this way, the black ram becomes a metaphor not just for interracial taboo but for generational corruption and loss of social capital due to racist structures of power. The study of nonhuman animals and the study of human race are often quite distinct for scholars across disciplines. However, perhaps there is more overlap than one would think. In what ways has race formation been tied to animals? Why do animals often become implicated in racial slurs? What does it mean for there to be a black panther representing a black political group or even standing in as the token black superhero? What does it mean to have a mostly black cast of voice actors in the original The Lion King, except its star role? This collection will look closely at the ways that critical animal studies and critical race studies intersect, tracking the blurring of concepts like race and breed. It will ask how race has always been tied into questions of the animal–human divide. How has knowledge of animals informed our knowledge of race, and vice versa? How have codes of animal behavior affected our racial discourse and our race thinking? And how have these two seemingly disparate approaches danced with each other in academia? These are only a few of the questions this book will attempt to tackle. I invite chapters that approach animals and race from a wide array of cultures, periods, and disciplines. Topics that are not anglocentric and are before the twentieth century are welcome. Send abstracts of around 250 words and a brief academic biography to Jonathan W. Thurston ( thurst39@msu.edu ) by July 1. The chapters themselves (5,000-8,000 words) will be due in January 2020. Book proposal will be sent first to Routledge’s Human-Animal series.

As you can see, there is a tremendous amount of activity and progress going on today in the field of human-animal studies, and we always invite your input and participation. Your donation to the Animals & Society Institute will enable us to continue to expand the field in many more ways and work in conjunction with others around the world who share these goals.

Thank you for supporting our Human-Animal Studies efforts!







Margo DeMello
Human-Animal Studies Director
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