The Rise of Critical Animal Studies

Education for Total Liberation, 2019

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...

Animals, Disability, and the End of Capitalism, 2019

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.

A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities, 2018

In this piece I wrestle with the question of what a sociology of other animals is for. For me, this is tied to a bigger question of what kind of research we do -and how we do it -in the neoliberal university. In my view, we need to develop some clarity (although not uniformity) in purpose about why we, as sociologists, study human relations with other animals. While there are some excellent tools available in sociological thought to study the various ways humans interact with other species, and the institutions within which this interaction occurs, my view is that if our aims are not in some way emancipatory for the animals involved, then we should rethink our focus and avoid sociological questions about animals altogether. To do otherwise, is to collude with master narratives that position animals as either irrelevant or as existing primarily, if not exclusively, for human benefit. I say this because approaches claiming to be apolitical and that do not seek, in some way, to better the lives of other species, ultimately reconstitute animals as objects, in this instance, objects to be studied. Just as ethical researchers have a duty to dignify their human participants and not treat them as exploitable commodities, the same needs to apply to sociologists who work with/for (other) animals.

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.

Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature, 1993

Despite a growing awareness of the destructiveness of the human species and the precarious position in which such destruction puts all inhabitants of the earth, there has been shockingly little discussion of the fundamental forces that have led us to the brink. While multinational corporations and grassroots activists alike have stressed the urgency of a change in behavior, few have stressed the need for a serious change in attitudes and values. Those who do critically examine the underlying motivation for and psychology of destructive action tend to focus their attention on single issues, mimicking, in some ways, the very system at which their critique is aimed. Until recently this has been the trend among those engaged in the struggle for both women's and animal liberation.! Feminist theory, in all of its variety, focuses on the primacy of women's oppression, often to the exclusion of parallel concerns. Similarly, animalliberationists, by focusing on the pain and suffering of one group while often ignoring the pain and suffering of others,2 have situated themselves firmly in the tradition of single-mindedness so common in Western institutions. Such exclusivity not only clouds the expansive nature of oppression, but also hinders the process of undermining such oppression and ultimately liberating all those oppressed.

In this piece I wrestle with the question of what a sociology of other animals is for. For me, this is tied to a bigger question of what kind of research we do – and how we do it-in the neoliberal university. In my view, we need to develop some clarity (although not uniformity) in purpose about why we, as sociologists, study human relations with other animals. While there are some excellent tools available in sociological thought to study the various ways humans interact with other species, and the institutions within which this interaction occurs, my view is that if our aims are not in some way emancipatory for the animals involved, then we should rethink our focus and avoid sociological questions about animals altogether. To do otherwise, is to collude with master narratives that position animals as either irrelevant or as existing primarily, if not exclusively, for human benefit. I say this because approaches claiming to be apolitical and that do not seek, in some way, to better the lives of other species, ultimately reconstitute animals as objects, in this instance, objects to be studied. Just as ethical researchers have a duty to dignify their human participants and not treat them as exploitable commodities, the same needs to apply to sociologists who work with/for (other) animals.