For Spatial Emancipation in Critical Animal Studies

Environmental Values, 2012

Derrida asks us to consider the violence we do in the name 'animals'. The violence is both material and symbolic and relies on the elision of internal distinctions between animals. This article is concerned with what constitutes a sufficient response to violence. Animal and feminist geographies challenge instrumental abstractions of space to 'raw materials'; the suppression and/or exclusion of emotional responses to space and place; and document current and alternative engagements with animals and environments. However, to challenge violence they must also address issues of power, ethical dimensions of action, and generate new conceptions of animal-human spatial relations. This article argues for a compassionate geography informed by Derridean philosophy, which reconceptualises and reconstructs animal-human spatial relations and postcolonial ecocriticism, which attends to the colonial politics of images, stories of place, and their imaginative reoccupation.

Political Geography, 2007

This paper is positioned within on-going debates about the expansion and re-theorization of political geography's ambit. It argues that animals could and should be included as subjects within sub-disciplinary research. Whilst political ecologists regularly employ animal conservation case studies to detail the complexities of struggles over resource distributions, this work often frames animals as static components of a thoroughly human sociality. This paper draws on conceptual debates within cultural geography, in particular those pertaining to ‘animal’ and ‘hybrid’ geographies. It argues that animals be viewed as dynamic beings, inextricable to political processes, and integral to the formation and operation of the political networks that regulate, protect and exploit them. This assertion is elaborated here through discussions of recent campaigns to end bear bile farming in East Asia, in particular, the work of the Hong Kong-based charity Animals Asia Foundation. This example aims to illuminate the potential strengths and limitations of arguing through a ‘hybrid geography’ lens, and aims to stimulate further debate around the standing of animals within an enlarged and enlarging political geography.

International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2009

Recent animal geographies have engaged in three overlapping themes that, to some extent, reflect differing political and theoretical leanings. First, they have focused on identities and meanings. That is of the ways certain human identities have been constructed in relation to certain animals in terms of practices such as eating, working, or hunting that stress social categories such as class, race, gender, and religion as important in construction of identities in relation to some animals. Second, studies have focused on human–animal intra-actions in terms of the political economy or political ecology of animal productions in agriculture, or struggles over resources in the developing world, but increasingly, in developed regions as well. Third, animal studies have been encouraged by developments in social theory that acknowledge a wider range of actors than just (some) people. Such approaches have pointed to very complex geographies of intra-action between people and animals in ways that questions and rethinks the human-centeredness of human geography. Such a perspective is allied to certain aspects of posthumanism, but also to nonrepresentational theory, and especially actor-network theory (ANT), though it seeks to further develop the spatialities, politics, and ethics of human–nonhuman associations.

As part of a recent academic sojourn, I joined a conference on Thinking about Animals at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. The forum offered a delightful representation of the internal workings of a social movement that has the emotionality and aptitude to create considerable change, but still faces both substantial internal discord and aggressive external resistance that prevents serious influence within the public sphere. The Sociology Department at Brock offers some of the leading voices for Animal Studies, and provided their symposium as an activist space for scholars to voice philosophical concerns with the pace of Animal Liberation and as a book launch for two new editions that summarize the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). This review essay offers attention to those two editions, a multi-volume activist project from David Nibert and Sue Coe and a single volume academic edition collected by Atsuko Matsuoka and John Sorenson. These publications, and the debates that were offered at Thinking about Animals, suggest that CAS is at an electrifying but troublesome crisis point. Like many social movements that offer activist scholarship for public consumption, CAS must avoid floundering in onanistic tendencies.

The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre (London and New York: Routledge, 2014) is an important new collection featuring critical animal studies scholars who are working within the discipline of Sociology. In this interview, Dinesh Wadiwel asks editors Nik Taylor and Richard Twine to talk more about the volume and contribution it makes – August 2014.

A Research Agenda for Animal Geographies, 2021

2017

his paper has five parts. These parts seek to accomplish two tasks—first, address the expanding studies known variously as “Animal Studies,” “Anthrozoology” and a host of other names, and, second, explore how these fields stand in relation to the popular term “animal rights.” Exploring these tasks pushes all of us to engage which dimensions of our human lives must be mobilized to engage the profoundly important fact that each and every human lives in a multispecies world that is well described as a “more-than-human world.” Our citizenship in such a multispecies world not only suggests the possibility of nonanthropocentric worldviews—our awareness of this larger community also begs a broader, more inclusive perspective than the human-centered and exceptionalist approaches that dominate our education establishment, political realms, legal systems, businesses and many religious institutions. What further begs such breadth and inclusion is the fact that personally, ecologically and thus...

2011

Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Chapter 1: Procrustean Solutions to Animal Identity and Welfare Problems Karen Davis Chapter 2: Road Kill: Commodity Fetishism and Structural Violence Dennis Soron Chapter 3: Corporate Power, Ecological Crisis, and Animal Rights Carl Boggs Part II. Animals, Marxism, and the Frankfurt School Chapter 4: Humanism = Speciesism?: Marx on Humans and Animals Ted Benton Chapter 5: Reflections on the Prospects for a Non-Speciesist Marxism Renzo Llorente Chapter 6: Thinking With: Animals in Schopenhauer, Horkheimer, and Adorno Christina Gerhardt Chapter 7: Animal is to Kantianism as Jew Is to Fascism: Adorno's Bestiary Eduardo Mendieta Part III. Speciesism and Ideologies of Domination Chapter 8: Dialectic of Anthropocentrism Aaron Bell Chapter 9: Animal Repression: Speciesism as Pathology Zipporah Weisberg Chapter 10: Neuroscience (a Poem) Susan Benston Chapter 11: Everyday Rituals of the Master Race: Fascism...

Babette Babich, "Animal Rights, Left Perspectives: Geography, Diaspora, Holocaust" Part of a Panel on Animal Rights? The Liberal Limits to Human Emancipation organized by Peter Bratsis and Bruno Gulli Where: Left Forum 2015: John Jay College of Criminal Justice, 524 W 59th St, NY, New Building,1.90 When: Sat, 20 May 2015, 3:15-5PM