Kiwi chicken advocate talks with Californian dog companion

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Potts ◽  
Donna Haraway
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Laboratory Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Companion Species ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The University

An influential feminist scholar in the field of human-animal studies, Donna Haraway (Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz) has over the past couple of decades provided ground-breaking critiques of such subjects as twentieth century primatology (and its links to race, gender and first-world/third-world politics), the place of nonhuman animals in laboratory science, and the phenomenon of pedigree dog breeding. Her most recent work focuses on our relationships with ‘companion species’, a term Haraway employs in her analysis of the diverse forms of human-animal interactions and exchanges that are part of everyday life. Drawing from ecological developmental biology, she suggests that companion species are the fruit of ‘multispecies reciprocal inductions’. In the following interview with Annie Potts (Co-Director, the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies), Donna Haraway discusses her views on, amongst other things, feminism and multispecies issues, human exceptionalism and posthumanism, and the pleasures of ‘becoming with’ our companion species.

Animating the Bible’s Animals

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ken Stone
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Species Difference ◽  
Biblical Interpretation ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Biblical Literature ◽  
Companion Species ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Biblical Texts

This chapter discusses the potential relevance of interdisciplinary animal studies for biblical interpretation. The story of Jacob and his family in Genesis 25–32 is examined from the perspective of a “critical animal hermeneutics.” Three features of such a hermeneutics, characteristic of contemporary animal studies, are emphasized: (1) the constitutive importance of “companion species,” emphasized by Donna Haraway, including in Israel’s case goats and sheep; (2) the instability of the human/animal binary, emphasized by Jacques Derrida and other thinkers; and (3) ubiquitous associations between species difference and differences among humans, particularly, in the case of biblical literature, gender and ethnic differences. Each of these features is used to read the story of Jacob and several related biblical texts.

Animal Studies and the Early Modern Period

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Mennell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
Unique Manner ◽  
Human Animal

The burgeoning field of animal studies has facilitated the exploration of human-animal relations across a variety of disciplines. Following the animal turn in humanities scholarship, a number of studies published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have demonstrated that animals reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of the early modern period in a unique manner due to a shift in the ways in which animals were viewed and valued. This shift was largely caused by the increasing commodification of animals, the discovery of new creatures through global exploration, a renewed interest in investigating and documenting all earthly beings, and an enhanced concern for animal welfare. A range of early modern texts reflect this shift in the perception of animals through engaged interaction with conceptions of the human-animal divide and interrogation of human exceptionalism. Animals also inhabit a multitude of early modern texts in a less prominent manner because, as is the case in the modern world, animals lived alongside humans and were a fundamental part of everyday life. While these texts may not at first seem to reveal much detail about the lives of animals and how they were viewed in the early modern period, the field of animal studies has provided a method of bringing nonhuman beings to the fore. When analyzing the representation of nonhuman beings in early modern texts through the lens of animal studies a thorough consideration of the context in which such texts were written and investigation of the lived experience of the animals they seek to portray is required in order to capture, what leading animal studies scholar Erica Fudge terms, a holistic history of animals.

scholarly journals What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Stone
Keyword(s):  
Game Design ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Game Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Cause And Effect ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Humanism

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

“A Winged but Grounded Bird”: Morrison’s Mixed Treatment of Animality in The Bluest Eye

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Rachel Warner
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Bluest Eye ◽  
Language History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Mixed Treatment ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
New Models ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal

Abstract This literary analysis of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), answers the call issued by scholars in the growing interdisciplinary field of animal studies to privilege nonhuman animal others as its central analytical focus. It thus examines the productive and harmful overlaps between Black subjects and animality and determines how Morrison speaks to both a history of racist dehumanization as well as manners of ameliorating such oppression. In prioritizing the intersection of human subjectivity and nonhuman others, the article explores new models for human-animal relationships, including animals as sensual partners and animals as looking subjects. Ultimately, this article looks to Morrison’s canonical novel portraying the scapegoating practices that can destroy Black girlhood to unearth the profound significance of nonhuman others to language, history, and communities.

scholarly journals Animal roles and traces in the history of medicine,c.1880–1980

BJHS Themes ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 11-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANGELA CASSIDY ◽  
RACHEL MASON DENTINGER ◽  
KATHRYN SCHOEFERT ◽  
ABIGAIL WOODS
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Experimental Medicine ◽  
Human History ◽  
Turn On ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Communities

AbstractThis paper argues for the need to create a more animal-centred history of medicine, in which animals are considered not simply as the backdrop for human history, but as medical subjects important in and of themselves. Drawing on the tools and approaches of animal and human–animal studies, it seeks to demonstrate, via four short historical vignettes, how investigations into the ways that animals shaped and were shaped by medicine enables us to reach new historical understandings of both animals and medicine, and of the relationships between them. This is achieved by turning away from the much-studied fields of experimental medicine and public health, to address four historically neglected contexts in which diseased animals played important roles: zoology/pathology, parasitology/epidemiology, ethology/psychiatry, and wildlife/veterinary medicine. Focusing, in turn, on species that rarely feature in the history of medicine – big cats, tapeworms, marsupials and mustelids – which were studied, respectively, within the zoo, the psychiatric hospital, human–animal communities and the countryside, we reconstruct the histories of these animals using the traces that they left on the medical-historical record.

scholarly journals Re-imagining Bleeders: The Medical Leech in the Nineteenth Century Bloodletting Encounter

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G.W. Kirk ◽  
Neil Pemberton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Medical History ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Species Identity ◽  
Central Object ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Do So

While some historians have noted the absence of animals in medical history, few have made the animal the central object of their historical gaze. Twenty years ago W.F. Bynum urged medical historians to follow historians of science in paying attention to the role of non-human animals in the material practices of medicine. Yet few have responded to his call. In this paper we again ask the question: what work can the non-human animal achieve for the history of medicine? We do so in the light of the conceptual possibilities opened up by the rapidly emerging field of ‘animal studies’. This interdisciplinary and sophisticated body of work has, in various ways, revealed the value of the ‘animal’ as a tool for exploring the co-constitution of species identity. We asked ourselves, surely, in our present biomedical world, this must be an area that we as medical historians are best placed to comment on; and what better place to start than the well-known, yet surprisingly little-studied, medical leech?

Human-Animal Studies in Australia: Current Directions

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Mulcock ◽  
Natalie Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Future Challenges ◽  
Group A ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Effective Network ◽  
The University ◽  
Relationships Management

AbstractIn 2004, Natalie Lloyd and Jane Mulcock initiated the Australian Animals & Society Study Group, a network of social science, humanities and arts scholars that quickly grew to include more than 100 participants. In July 2005, about 50 participants attended the group's 4-day inaugural conference at the University of Western Australia, Perth. Papers in this issue emerged from the conference. They exemplify the Australian academy's work in the fields of History, Population Health, Sociology, Geography, and English and address strong themes: human-equine relationships; management of native and introduced animals; and relationships with other domestic, nonhuman animals—from cats and dogs to cattle. Human-Animal Studies is an expanding field in Australia. However, many scholars, due to funding and teaching concerns, focus their primary research in different domains. All authors in this issue—excepting one—are new scholars in their respective fields. The papers represent the diversity and innovation of recent Australian research on human-animal interactions. The authors look at both past and present, then anticipate future challenges in building an effective network to expand this field of study in Australia.

scholarly journals Comparative Literature, Companion Species and the Camel

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-69
Author(s):  
Charis Olszok
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
Companion Species ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Central Term

This article brings together theories of both real and literary animals’ readability within Animal Studies and of untranslatability within comparative literature more broadly. Through a focus on Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī’s al-Tibr, in comparison with Mahasweta Devi's ‘Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay and Pirtha’, I read the central human-animal encounters through both their cultural specificity and the wider ‘animal tropes’ to which they point, situating them within local tradition and the flows of world literature. I then shift to an examination of how both texts, through interspecies encounter, theorize the very processes of readability and comparability which they invite. Animals, I suggest, emerge as sites of ‘secrets’, hinting at the dictates of censorship as they shield symbolic import, or at the local which must be preserved from appropriation, and, above all, at a dimension of ‘otherness’ which can never be fully grasped. In al-Tibr, I examine this through a reading of the camel as ‘ āya’ (sign), a central term within Arabic cosmology, and, in ‘Pterodactyl’, through Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's influential reading of ‘ethical singularity’ in the story.

Religion and Animals

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron S. Gross
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Animal Ethics ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Human Animal

What do animals have to do with religion? This article answers this broad question with special attention to issues related to animal ethics and animal philosophy. Topics covered include the religious dimension of human-animal relationships; the role of animals in human self-imagination; the formation of religions based on human-animal relationships, especially in responding to the dilemmas and tensions raised by killing animals for food and sacrifice; and central issues in the method and theory of critically studying animals and religion. Working at the intersection of the history of religions and animal studies, this essay provides grounding in the subfield of “animals and religion,” as well as references to a wide range of work on the study of animals. The article also cites studies of the subject in both the religions of traditional peoples, including the Cree, Koyukon, Naxi, Nivkhi, and Tuvan, and the so-called world religions, including Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions; Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions; and Daoist traditions.

Provincial Life with Animals

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Village Life ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract The relationship of peasants and villagers with their animals in the premodern era is a missing chapter in the history of human-animal relations. Works on peasant culture ignore animals, and works on animals neglect their place in rural lives. This article, based on the depiction of premodern peasant and village life in hundreds of local-color novels and stories of the early nineteenth century, begins to fill in this gap in animal studies scholarship. It reveals that many of the defining boundaries between humans and animals introduced in the ideologies of modernity are fuzzy, fluid, or indeed nonexistent in premodernity, where animals are seen as subjects, companions, and, often, parts of the family.

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