Frances Power Cobbe

Frances Power Cobbe (b. 1822–d. 1904) was an Anglo-Irish journalist, religious writer, feminist activist, and leading antivivisectionist. She was among the best-known feminist writers and thinkers of her day. She was a prominent spokeswoman for the improvement of Victorian women’s educational and employment opportunities; a witty defender of so-called redundant women; an incisive critic of the Victorian idea of marriage; and a passionate advocate for women’s suffrage and right to bodily integrity. She published essays on these topics in prestigious periodicals and wrote over twenty books on Victorian women, science and medicine, and religious duty, as well as innumerable essays, pamphlets, and tracts for the antivivisection movement. She was a pioneering journalist who wrote the second-leader for the London Echo on the same wide variety of social and cultural topics that animated her highly regarded signed work in the periodical press. She founded two antivivisection societies, the Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection (known as the Victoria Street Society) in 1875, and the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1898. Both societies comprised nationally organized branches that undertook campaigning, demonstrated against institutions that licensed vivisection, and produced and distributed mass publications, many of them by Cobbe herself. She brought her considerable journalistic know-how to her extensive work as leader of these organizations, evident especially in the productivity she was able to sustain over decades of activism and her success at placing essays in leading periodicals. She was instrumental in the passage of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), which created a regulatory framework for the use of live animals in scientific research, which she came to see as facilitating abuse rather than protecting animals. She advocated for improved legal protections for laboratory animals until her death. She also wrote carefully to advance the Matrimonial Causes Act (1878), which created new mechanisms for granting child custody and maintenance orders to wives separated from violent husbands, and continued to advocate for women’s autonomy in marriage and as mothers. Based in London for much of her career, Cobbe moved to Wales with her life companion, Mary Lloyd, in 1884 after receiving a substantial legacy from an antivivisectionist supporter. There she continued to write and publish, primarily on her antivivisection causes. She is buried with Lloyd in a double grave at Llanelltydd, Wales, in Lloyd’s family churchyard. Cobbe’s journalism, particularly on domestic violence, was at the center of the scholarship that first brought her writing to the forefront of feminist knowledge in the 1990s. More recently, scholarly frameworks that have reshaped feminist history-making, a revitalized interest in the Victorian Woman Question, and compelling new explorations of LGBTQ identities and life experiences, as well as new approaches to the Victorian periodical and newspaper press, have reframed our understanding of her spirited style and compelling ideas. Scholarship on Cobbe in sexuality studies remains limited, perhaps owing to the scant archival sources. New explorations of LGBTQ2S identities and life experiences may well spur new research into Cobbe’s life and relationships. She is increasingly an integral part of informed understanding of 19th-century feminism, journalism, and reform. Vitally, too, Cobbe’s central role in the antivivisection movement, which had long given her a global popular prominence in animal welfare and rights history, has made her writing and activities of growing academic interest in the field of critical animal studies.

Colonizing Animals

Animals were vital to the British colonization of Myanmar. In this pathbreaking history of British imperialism in Myanmar from the early nineteenth century to 1942, Jonathan Saha argues that animals were impacted and transformed by colonial subjugation. By examining the writings of Burmese nationalists and the experiences of subaltern groups, he also shows how animals were mobilized by Burmese anticolonial activists in opposition to imperial rule. In demonstrating how animals - such as elephants, crocodiles, and rats - were important actors never fully under the control of humans, Saha uncovers a history of how British colonialism transformed ecologies and fostered new relationships with animals in Myanmar. Colonizing Animals introduces the reader to an innovative historical methodology for exploring interspecies relationships in the imperial past, using innovative concepts for studying interspecies empires that draw on postcolonial theory and critical animal studies.

The iAnimal Film Series

This article explores the innovative use of virtual reality (VR) technology in nonfiction documentary film formats by animal-advocacy organizations. I examine the potential of the VR medium to communicate the living and dying environments of factory-farmed animals, and to generate viewer empathy with the animal subjects in their short, commodified lives from birth to slaughterhouse. I present a case study of the iAnimal short film series produced by Animal Equality, which made its public debut at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. Employing a critical animal studies framework, I engage Kathryn Gillespie’s work on witnessing of the nonhuman condition as a method of academic research, and apply to it the embodied experience of virtual witnessing through virtual realty.

Carnistic Colonialism: A Rhetorical Dissection of “Bushmeat” in the 2014 Ebola Outbreak

This article argues that a fusion of critical animal studies and postcolonial critique affords food systems scholars a richer understanding of Western media narratives regarding a “bushmeat problem” during the 2014 Ebola outbreak. To do so, I perform a rhetorical analysis of expert, journalistic, and editorial texts disseminated through outlets with high economic and/or social capital in North American and Western European countries. My analysis demonstrates three overarching themes in these texts regarding the intersections of bushmeat and Ebola, which I describe as: 1) biosecurity; 2) conservation; and 3) development. By invoking an ethic of anti-speciesism and decoloniality, I not only demonstrate the colonial logics at play in the 2014 Ebola outbreak, but also name an insidious ideology fundamental to food systems discourse in postcolonial contexts: carnistic colonialism.

LEARNING FROM NONHUMAN ANIMALS: TOWARDS AN ETHICS OF POSTHUMANITIES

Throughout the debated discourse of humanism, humans were considered as the only species endowed with reason and moral values. The result was an andro/anthropocentric humanism that divided everything into hierarchies and confined everything within boundaries. European model of higher education has undoubtedly been an enforcement of humanist ideas and ideologies which established certain humans as exceptional and superior to other ‘non-privileged’ humans and nonhuman animals. In this era of posthumanism all the imposed and imbibed boundaries between the human and nonhuman are being questioned, challenged and eliminated to create an open network of cross-species encounters. In this context this article through the theories of Posthuman philosophy and Critical Animal Studies proposes a shift towards posthuman ethics of inclusion and understanding in the field of classical humanities in India. This can be achieved by employing postontological methods to create and understand nonhuman representations. Theories and studies by posthuman scholars like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, Graham Harman form the basis of this paper. This article is an acknowledgement as well as an advocation of the shift happening across disciplines from humanities to posthumanities, which however is yet to make a movement in education in India.

Including the animal standpoint in critical public relations research

In this paper we argue that adopting critical animal studies perspectives in critical public relations can not only be very fruitful, but that it is also a necessity if the aims of the latter are to be achieved. To this end, this text introduces the challenges and opportunities that the field of critical animal studies brings to critical public relations studies. First, a short explanation of what critical animal studies is and why it can contribute to critical public relations studies is provided. Then the main fields of research where this contribution can be most relevant are discussed, including ethics, discourse studies and political economy. The final aim of this theoretical paper is to expand research within the field of critical public relations by including a critical animal studies approach. Eventually, the authors suggest that embracing the animal standpoint in critical public relations is an essential step to furthering the study of power, hegemony, ideology, propaganda or social change and to accomplishing the emancipatory role of research.