scholarly journals Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy

2015 ◽  
pp. 122-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Life Itself

This essay asks about the return to nature and “life itself” in contemporary feminist philosophy and theory, from the new materialisms to feminist science studies to environmental ethics and critical animal studies. Unlike traditional naturalisms, the contemporary turn to nature is explicitly posthumanist. Shifting their focus away from anti-essentialist critiques of woman-as-nature, these new feminist philosophies of nature have turned toward nonhuman animals, the cosmos, the climate, and life itself as objects of ethical concern. Drawing on Foucault, the essay probes the ethical meanings of the term “life itself” invoked in many of these renaturalizing projects. Focusing especially on the archival matter that guides Foucault’s thinking, I suggest that we rethink “life itself” not as a transhistorical substance but as the unstable materiality of history. I then reframe Foucault’s archival, genealogical perspective through the lens of the Anthropocene and geological time. Reconceiving our archive as a fossil record, I suggest that Foucault has much to contribute to environmental challenges to human exceptionalism and the anthropogenic destruction of other species and ourselves.

scholarly journals Reading Blood Work is an Art Form: Toward an Embodied Feminist Practice of Veterinary Science and Care

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Christian Gundermann
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Advocacy Network ◽  
Clinical Control

What are the advantages of a concrete, embodied relationship between human subjects and their non-human objects of care for the veterinary process of knowledge production? The scientific reductionism that frames formal studies makes much of the knowledge gained in those studies questionable or severely limited, since many important factors of real life illnesses and their causation and cure are excluded from consideration for the sake of clinical control and traditional scientific objectivity. This essay narrates my experience with my mare Lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internet-based equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. Located between Feminist Science Studies and Critical Animal Studies, this project explores the notion of touch and raises questions about the biomedical field's present-day heavy reliance on visual diagnostics. What is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge "from nowhere" that conventional science believes in? How much of the alternative to this way of knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition?And finally, in observing and documenting the relationship at the heart of this venture around knowledge, my essay also suggest that this is a queer project where queerness is understood as the careful but radical reconfiguration of kinship in the context of Haraway’s recent call to “make kin, not babies.” 

The “bander’s grip”: Reading zones of human–shorebird contact

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 732-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny R Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Contact ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Reduction Strategies ◽  
Conservation Research ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

This article applies Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective within a multispecies ethnography of conservation encounters on the Delaware Bay. Using critical insights from decolonial feminist science studies, environmental geography, and critical animal studies, the article deconstructs technoscientific environmental knowledge production within a more-than-human contact zone. The tools, technologies, and “conspicuous innocence” of hands-on shorebird conservation research practices are described. Re-inscribing nonhuman agency and colonial histories of place, it argues that certain elements of conservation research may be fairly read as “violent” expressions of “animality/coloniality” and “anti-conquest.” It concludes by offering some harm reduction strategies for improving conservation and critical environment studies.

Biology is a feminist issue: Interview with Lynda Birke

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg ◽  
Lynda Birke
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Feminist Technoscience ◽  
The One ◽  
Materialist Feminist

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke (University of Chester, UK), one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies (HAS). This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice.

scholarly journals Sociology and Animal Studies: Human Responses to Animal Loss in Times of Disaster

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ching Velasco ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Species Boundary ◽  
Humanities And Social Sciences

A number of attempts have been made to include animals in explorations in the humanities and social sciences. This is a response to the gap where animals are much-neglected entities in the said disciplines. There have been debates pertaining to the inclusion of animals in scholarly discourses in the field of sociology. Notably, human exceptionalism has been one of the key ideological drivers which prevent a more inclusive consideration of animals in the study of our social world. The anthropocentric view of the world and society has put the needs and status of humans above all other animals. This line of thinking has implications on how humanity relates and interacts with animals in a broader context. In times of crisis, humans relegate animals as conveniently expendable or an inconvenient afterthought, which easily leads to instances of animal abandonment and even abuse. However, there has been a collective shift in the way acts of animal abandonment are perceived on social media. This article examined the responses on social media pertaining to animal abandonment during the onslaught of typhoon Vamco in the Philippines in 2020. More specifically, two themes were analyzed: outrage against negligence and compassionate treatment of animals. While this article looks specifically at the abandonment of animals, the project invites further reflection on the notions of environmental ethics and the species boundary.

Sexual Difference, Gender, and (Microscopic) Animals: A Commentary on Ebeling’s “Sexing the Rotifer”

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-322
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractIn this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or “rotifers,” emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Posthuman Curriculum Studies: The Twilight of Humanism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
New Materialism ◽  
Curriculum Studies ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The World ◽  
Intellectual Movements

Although humanism still prevails in much of Western thought, it is being challenged in numerous intellectual fields, political realms, economic policies, and cultural activities. Posthumanism is beginning to emerge within the area of curriculum studies. Posthumanism questions the binary mode of thought that human exceptionalism rationalizes. Posthumanism introduces new approaches to thinking about humans within the world that are emerging: these include postcolonial thought, new materialism, the non-human turn, critical animal studies, affect theory, disability studies, and to some extent environmental studies. The term “posthumanism” doesn’t cover just the intellectual movements listed above. To use “posthumanism” as a catch-all term would ignore the nuances of each of these new developments, and it would erase the limitations of posthumanism itself. Posthumanism intersects with other movements, but to fairly cover these other recent intellectual developments, they should be treated on their own terms and not within the confines of just posthumanism.

Intimate Bureaucracies: Roadkill, Policy, and Fieldwork on the Shoulder

Hypatia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Koelle
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Road Ecology ◽  
Painted Turtle ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The World ◽  
Tribal Governments

Over the last twenty years, wildlife biologists and transportation planners have worked with environmental groups and state and tribal governments to mitigate the effects of human transportation arteries on animal habitats and movements. This paper draws connections between this growing field of road ecology and feminist science studies in order to accomplish two things. First, it aims to highlight the often unacknowledged roots that the interdisciplinary field of animal studies has in feminist theory. Second, it seeks to contribute to conversations in the humanities and social sciences on roadkill and on wildlife biology by steering us into a world of practice that foregrounds mundane details. I approach this topic through interdisciplinary methods, including interviews with tribal and state wildlife biologists and participation in fieldwork on a western painted turtle tagging project. Although engaging in science and formulating policy are often understandably regarded by nonspecialists as practices that distance observers from their topic, in the world of roadkill prevention, I argue that the opposite is the case. What I call “intimate bureaucracies” are formed: arrangements of papers, policies, and people that bring a world of counting, and accountability, into being.

Fetus, Flesh, Food: Generating Bodies of Knowledge in Rabbinic Science

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-210
Author(s):  
Rachel Rafael Neis
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Reproduction ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Bodies

The tractates of Niddah, Bekhorot, and Hullin investigate the generation of material bodies through ritual and status frameworks concerned with purity, dietary rules, sacrifice, property, and kinship. Drawing on insights from feminist science studies and new materialisms, I chart how nascent or emergent bodily materials were parsed in rabbinic science to then be theoretically donated, married, killed, ingested, or otherwise disposed. I show how the rabbis envisaged bodily products along a spectrum, drawing only a thin line between offspring (valad) and other material entities, with determinations of materiality and species factoring into such distinctions. Besides the content of rabbinic knowledge, I consider the conditions in which these knowledges were formulated. Feminist science studies and new materialist analyses of knowledge-making and agency offer approaches that go beyond dualist framings of active, knowing subjects (e. g. rabbinic men, humans, Romans) versus passive known objects (e. g. non-rabbis or women, non-human entities, or non-Romans). These approaches allow us to account for the ways in which rabbinic thinkers, from ca. the second through late fourth centuries, were entangled with and shaped by the “bodies” of their knowledge. Collectively, these approaches to the generation of bodily material and to the production of rabbinic knowledge thereof, make for a late ancient biology that differs from contemporary, “common sense,” Euro-American intuitions about the distinction between living and nonliving, between human and nonhuman, and between knower and known. Furthermore, this biology queers accounts of generation that rely on same-species, hetero-sexual reproduction.

scholarly journals Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Serenella Iovino ◽  
Serpil Oppermann
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Environmental Humanities ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Intellectual Movement ◽  
Ethical Perspectives

        The proliferation of studies bearing on the intellectual movement known as the "new materialisms" evinces that a material turn is becoming an important paradigm in environmental humanities. Ranging from social and science studies, feminism, to anthropology, geography, environmental philosophies and animal studies, this approach is bringing innovative ways of considering matter and material relations that, coupled with reflections on agency, text, and narrativity, are going to impact ecocriticism in an unprecedented way. In consideration of the relevance of this debate, we would like to draw for Ecozon@'s readers an introductory map of the new paradigm and introduce what can be called "material ecocriticism." We will illustrate what we consider to be its main features, situating them in the conceptual horizons of the new materialisms. From this genealogical sketch, we will examine the re-definitions of concepts like matter, agency, discursivity, and intentionality, with regard to their effects on ecocriticism and in terms of their ethical perspectives.   Resumen   La proliferación de estudios procedentes del movimiento intelectual conocido bajo la rúbrica de "nuevos materialismos" pone de manifiesto que la materia está influyendo en el giro paradigmático de los recientes estudios medioambientales en el ámbito de las Humanidades. Desde los estudios científicos y sociales al feminismo, la antropología, la geografía, pasando por los estudios sobre animales y las filosofías del medio ambiente,  este enfoque incorpora formas innovadoras de aproximarse a la materia y a las relaciones materiales que, acompañadas de reflexiones sobre la agencia o capacidad de acción, el texto y la narración, van a producir un impacto considerable y sin precedentes en la ecocrítica.   En consideración a la relevancia de este debate queremos ofrecer a los lectores de Ecozon@ un mapa introductorio a este nuevo paradigma. En el presente artículo trataremos las que consideramos son las características fundamentales de la ecocrítica de la materia y las situaremos en el horizonte conceptual de los nuevos materialismos. A partir de este esbozo genealógico, examinaremos las redefiniciones de conceptos como materia, agencia en tanto capacidad de acción, discursividad e intencionalidad y las  relacionaremos con sus efectos en la ecocrítica y en la ética.  

scholarly journals 'What cats have to dream about'?: Challenging anthropocentrism in 'A dream of a thousand cats', 'Teeth' and 'Princess Mononoke'

Kultura ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 88-111
Author(s):  
Danijela Petković
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Theoretical Work ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Recent Theoretical Work ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Animated Film

Relying on recent theoretical work in the field of critical animal studies and ecocriticism, the paper discusses several fantasies across different media and genres (a comic book series, a young adult novel, and an animated film), whose common characteristic is a critical stance towards anthropocentrism, also known, tellingly, as "human exceptionalism", "human supremacy", and "human chauvinism". The selected corpus consists of Neil Gaiman's "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", Hannah Moskowitz's "Teeth", and Hayao Miyazaki's "Princess Mononoke". Dissimilar as they are, these fantasies share common thematic concern with the relationship between the human and the nonhuman - primarily animals - as well as commitment to challenging the notions of natural, just and desirable human supremacy over all other forms of life. In the selected works, human exceptionalism is challenged by unmasking human exceptional brutality at its root, and, perhaps more unnervingly, by the exploration of the fundamental kinship between human and nonhuman animals. Although these popular fantasies do not voice explicit or simple ecological messages, due to the abovementioned concerns, they function as ecocritical texts as well. In the context of the global environmental crisis, it is in this ecocritical potential that some relevance of fantasy arguably lies.

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