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- [Review] Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa. The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image
Research into Animal Life. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 259 pages. ISBN 9780520342347 Authors: Wendy Woodward Abstract: [Review] Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa. The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 259 pages. ISBN 9780520342347. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:25:13 PDT
- [Review] Irus Braverman. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in
Palestine-Israel. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 362 pp, ISBN 978-1-5179-1526-1 Authors: Esther Alloun Abstract: [Review] Irus Braverman. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel. University of Minnesota Press, 2023. 362 pp, ISBN 978-1-5179-1526-1. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:25:05 PDT
- [Review] Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks, editors. Bellwether Histories:
Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 242 pp. ISBN 9780295751429 Authors: Wendy Woodward Abstract: 163 [Review] Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks, editors. Bellwether Histories: Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 242 pp. ISBN 9780295751429. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:24:55 PDT
- [Review] Elizabeth Ellis, Australian Animal Law: Context and Critique.
Sydney University Press, 2022. 390pp. ISBN 978-1743328514 Authors: A. P. A. Best Abstract: [Review] Elizabeth Ellis, Australian Animal Law: Context and Critique. Sydney University Press, 2022. 390pp. ISBN 978-1743328514. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:24:47 PDT
- All the Animals: Short Fiction about Multispecies Families
Authors: Becky Tipper Abstract: The five-part short story ‘All the Animals’ imagines an array of animals who feature in the life of a fictional human family over many years. The story is inspired by qualitative research into human-animal relationships in families with children in Lisbon, Portugal. ‘All the Animals’ aims to offer a fictional ‘thick description’ of multispecies families in a particular time and place, but also to provide a reflection on the role of storytelling in human-animal entanglements. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:24:35 PDT
- ‘Dresse-toi!’ Perspectives on the (Re)Valorisation of Nonhuman Animal
Performers in Contemporary Circus Authors: Franziska Trapp Abstract: It is the aim of this article to critically assess the (re)valorisation of nonhuman animals in contemporary circus. Though contemporary circus has declared itself to be an ‘animal-free’ artform, animals have been increasingly reappearing in contemporary circus performances over the past few years. In opposition to traditional circus, neither the presentation of the talents of nonhuman animals nor the demonstration of human power and dominance are the objective, rather, contemporary circus attempts to create critical and experimental artworks that function as social commentaries on the relation between humans and nonhuman animals.This article is divided into three parts. The first provides an overview of the staging strategies of nonhuman animals in traditional circus, as well as a contextual map of the renewed interest in animal performances in contemporary circus. The second is an analysis of the contemporary circus performance Dresse-toi (2018) by Cie Equinoctis, which sets out to counter the human dominance of animals in performance through the lens of the nonhuman turn. The third part reflects on further ways to decentre the human being and the anthropocentric telos in circus. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:24:23 PDT
- 'Fire': An Australian Play Gives Voice to Animals Devastated by
Catastrophic Bushfire Authors: Rebecca Scollen Abstract: Animals on a grand scale are victims of climate change and of natural disaster. With no voice within human cultures, their plight can be silenced and forgotten once an extreme weather event is over and when media coverage of the devastation has ceased. The creative arts have an important role to play in raising public awareness of and empathy for animals impacted by natural disaster. This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of the Australian play Fire by Scott Alderdice (2017), framed by Animal Studies perspectives. The voices of the animals in Fire, as expressed through language – dialogue and narration – are the focus of the analysis to determine how the play engages in the concepts of considering other-than-human interests; imagining and representing animals and their significance; personifying species’ presence using human speech to offset facelessness; and inspiring humans to take responsibility in this time of climate crisis and natural disaster. Fire provides an exemplar for theatrical expression giving voice to animals in times of crisis. An examination of the narration and dialogue of the animal characters reveals a respectful representation of native Australian animals, who are shown to be sentient and social beings intimately entwined with the environment in which they live. The language use by the animals throughout elicits recognition and empathy and subsequently feelings of grief and of guilt. The play inspires humans to take responsibility by considering animals’ perspectives and interests; understanding their significance in the world; and performing our role to protect the natural environment. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:24:11 PDT
- Birds Beyond Words: Fantastic Animals and Other Flights of Imagination
Authors: pattrice jones Abstract: In ‘Nature in the Active Voice’, Val Plumwood called for a ‘thorough rethink’ of the logic of domination that has authorized both colonialism and the exploitation of animals (113). But this mandate creates a conundrum: that logic elevates mind over matter and cognition over emotion. If Audre Lorde was right that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (110), then we are unlikely to succeed in undermining that logic by rethinking it. We need practices that will expose the tedious nonsensicality of human supremacy while simultaneously awakening our capacities for empathy, imagination, and full-bodied ecological reasoning. Plumwood noted the power of poetry, but nonverbal methods of cognition and communication such as music, dance, and visual art may be even more vital to the struggle to think truly differently. Underground currents of art and activism including Dada, Tropicália, Afrofuturism, and surrealisms from around the world may offer both instructive and cautionary lessons. Kiwi and other category-defying animals, whose minds are very different from our own but whose ideas may be legible through their ways of being in the world, may be especially important instructors in the praxis of eco-logic.Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice,” 113.Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 110. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:23:59 PDT
- Forest Birds on Pasture: Meddling Marketing and Conflicting Cultures
Authors: Natalie Lis Abstract: Chickens are problematically embedded in the West and Global North as farm animals. Structures built for containing chickens including henhouses, industrial poultry sheds, shading devices and mobile poultry sheds, place chickens – naturally forest birds – into pastoral farming settings that are at odds with natural chicken familial structures and behaviours. I assert that structures built for containing chickens influence human–chicken labour. I support this claim through an investigation of chicken labour at poultry farms. I advance the concept of labour in human–animal studies by looking at labour culture from sociology and labour history scholarship centred around humans. How humans labour with animals contributes to the continuation of animal farming. The long history of chicken farming impacts cultural ideas about small-scale chicken keeping which have led to large-scale agribusinesses using marketing and promotional material in a way that masks more prevalent industrial practices. The structures built for the poultry industry are designed to further the status quo of industry even when working to reimagine that same industry. A critical analysis of how poultry husbandry structures are used in marketing reveals how human labour culture ultimately forces forest dwelling chickens into pastoral farming. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:23:47 PDT
- Mateship with Animals: Writing Nonhuman Animals as Channels for
Substitution and Expression Authors: Carrie Tiffany Abstract: This paper reflects on my childhood fixation with nonhuman animals and considers my father’s relationship with the family dog as an example of a retreat to a traumatic wound. In my later work as a park ranger, I was confronted by the conditions by which certain nonhuman animals were categorised as those to be culled, or to be cared for. These memories, together with inspiration from Freud’s case studies, informed the writing of my second novel, Mateship with Birds. This novel is interested in what nonhuman animals might represent and where the divisions between nonhuman animal and human experience begin and end. I use psychoanalytic theory to draw attention to the role of nonhuman animals in formulating desire in the text and to explore how they are positioned to fill the gap between need and demand where human desire appears. I am aware that my writing about nonhuman animals does not reveal a great deal about nonhuman animals, but about myself. The nonhuman animals are portals through which I reclaim, reanimate and ultimately re-embody the trauma of my childhood. The novel, and my examination of it, concludes that love in human relationships with nonhuman animals can be a powerful conduit for empathy. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:23:35 PDT
- Introduction: Animal Cultures
Authors: Laura Jean McKay et al. Abstract: Creative writing, transdisciplinary literary animal studies, and law-anthropology don’t often appear in the same sentence, but this interdisciplinary mingling is where we as editors meet in animal studies. We were particularly enthused by discussions that emerged during the Australasian Animal Studies Conference, held at the University of Sydney in November 2023, providing a rich source from which to consider the conference theme: ‘Animal Cultures’. Keynote speaker, Carol Gigliotti, wondered about the animal cultural research ideas that can be taken with us to ‘make lives better for animals, both wild and captive'. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:23:26 PDT
- Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial
Authors: Melissa Boyde et al. Abstract: Animal Studies Journal 2024 13(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial. PubDate: Mon, 17 Jun 2024 19:23:17 PDT
- [Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives of Animals. New York
University Press, 2022. 289 pp. ISBN 9781479815449 Authors: Wendy Woodward PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:57 PST
- [Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of
Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. ISBN 9781316513712 Authors: Wendy Woodward PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:47 PST
- Not Another Plant-Based Documentary: A Critical Review of Eating Our Way
to Extinction Authors: Melissa Plisic Abstract: Despite mounting evidence that industrial animal agriculture is a formidable force of climate change and mass extinction, many humans remain impervious to this knowledge. Eating Our Way to Extinction is a timely documentary that takes this issue head on. This film review is guided by Alexandra Juhasz’s explanation of media praxis as ‘an enduring, mutual, and building tradition that theorizes and creates the necessary conditions for media to play an integral role in cultural and individual transformation’ (299). Eating Our Way to Extinction attends to some of the most popular strawman arguments against veganism and is widely accessible. That being said, it falls short of its sociopolitical potential because it is beholden to the capitalist-colonial norms of self-interested individualism, promotion of consumerism over movement-building, and using Indigenous peoples as a means to an end. Eating Our Way to Extinction contrasts a worldview based on extraction and domination with one that could actually shift the tide of climate change. It then follows the logic of the extractive worldview by promoting self-interested solutions to a problem that is only exacerbated by capitalism. The fact that Eating Our Way to Extinction acknowledges that Indigenous peoples are more adept at living in an ecologically harmonious way, then silos its viewers into the very mindset that is driving the problem is where the documentary falls flat. At its heart, Eating Our Way to Extinction relies on the Western colonial logics of individualism and capitalism that undercut the social justice demands of veganism. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:38 PST
- Sites of Cultural Production in Response to Mass Extinction
Authors: Stephanie S. Turner et al. Abstract: This conversation, mediated by Tara Nicholson, considers Stephanie Turner and EvaMarie Lindahl’s research in cultural representations of extinction and investigations of more-than-human forms of storytelling through an art historical lens. In response to Lori Gruen’s classification, extinction is a distinctive loss of ‘animal cultures’. It is more than biodiversity destruction or a static inventory of a species’ death. Nonhuman ways of building bonds, reproducing, teaching offspring, constructing homes and mourning the dead, are all systems of knowledge lost in extinction (Gruen et al. 2017). This conversation offers compassionate ways of bearing witness to species destruction and a space for empathy and kinship. The authors ask, how can dialogue between science and art lead to new understandings of the ‘wicked problem’ of mass extinction during climate crisis' Examining methodologies of cross-disciplinary storytelling and cultural production, this exchange connects museum practice, large-scale public artworks and artistic research as types of embodied knowledge to promote public awareness surrounding the acceleration of species extinction. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:27 PST
- It’s About Us: Extinction, Contradiction, and the Mourning of Modernity
in David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet Authors: Alex Ventimilla Abstract: Despite their worldwide viewership, popular eco-documentary treatments of biodiversity loss and the ecological grief they evoke have received scarce attention from critics. Addressing this gap in scholarship, this article posits that understanding the grief and mourning affected by these cultural texts requires attention to the numerous contradictions inherent to the form. More concretely, this paper argues that a thorough exploration of the contradictory nature of the eco-documentary, as a media genre that is imbricated in the modernity whose impact on the natural world it critiques, renders the genre into a critical junction at which to interrogate the cultural meanings of the mass extinction of biodiversity. This is done through an analysis of David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet. This study suggests that popular ecodocumentary representations of biodiversity loss such as this remain entrenched in an anthropocentric instrumentalism characteristic of the modernist paradigm. Acknowledging the unwavering popularity of such films, this study concludes by positing that it is through attentiveness to rather than a wholesale rejection of eco-documentaries like A Life on Our Planet that scholars and viewers alike stand to grasp the extent of the fallacy and the fall of modernity and its worldview. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:15 PST
- Rhetorics of Species Revivalism and Biotechnology – A Roundtable
Dialogue Authors: Eva Kasprzycka et al. Abstract: This informal dialogue contextualises and explores contemporary practices of nonhuman animal gene-modification in de-extinction projects. Looking at recent developments in biotechnology’s role in de-extinction sciences and industries, these interdisciplinary scholars scrutinise the neoliberal impetus driving ‘species revivalism’ in the wake of the Capitalocene. Critical examinations of species integrity, cryo-preservation, techno-optimism, rewilding initiatives and projects aimed at restoring extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth and bucardo are used to map some of the necessary restructuring of conservation policies and enterprises that could secure viably sustainable – and just – futures for nonhuman animals at risk of extinction. The authors question what alternatives are being ignored in the wake of technoscientific responses to the climate emergency, and interpret the motivations, tactics and tools responsible for commodifying nonhuman animals down to the cellular level. Our conversation on the messy relations within endangered ecologies offers alternative approaches to environmental governance and strategies for addressing the climate and biodiversity crises today. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:45:02 PST
- No Going Back: Un-Fixing the Future of De-Extinction
Authors: jessie l. beier Abstract: ‘Extinction is a colossal problem facing the world’ proclaims the Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences website, adding, ‘And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it’. For Colossal, this involves combining the science of genetics with ‘the business of discovery’ in order to bring back the woolly mammoth, which will not only help ‘rewild’ lost habitats, but also contribute toward ‘making humanity more human’. De-extinction is the process through which extinct species can be brought back into existence, often with the goal of reintroducing species to the wild and restoring ecosystems. While still in its nascent state, the science of de-extinction is currently expanding and advancing through, for instance, projects like Colossal’s, raising numerous ethical, social and technological debates about what defines a species, and thus its regeneration; how such definitions shape conservation paradigms; and, ultimately, what we mean when we talk about life, death and species extinction. With their commitment to ‘reversing climate change’ while also ‘advanc[ing] the economies of biology and healing through genetics’, Colossal’s work has not only been deemed ‘game-changing’ in terms of “saving” endangered species, but also in terms of ‘future proofing’ the environment by reshaping how the world thinks about the power of genetics for solving pressing challenges in the life sciences today, including the challenge of extinction. In this de-extinction example, then, the problem of extinction is actualized in relation to solutions aimed at enacting further control over the planet, this time by ‘rewinding’ and ‘reversing’ ecological destruction, so as to fix the human-caused disaster, and in so doing, fix the future. In this essay, I trace the line between ‘the business of discovery’ and ‘making humanity more human’ in order to draw out what I see as some of the broader refrains and fixations that have come to infect future-oriented ecological discourse in these times of dying. Looking to the example of Colossal, I examine the ways in which extinction, and the corollary project of de-extinction, has become at once a territorializing force that works to re-install monohumanist fantasies of planetary control, and a potentially deterritorializing force for letting go and giving up. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:44:51 PST
- The Violent Narrowing of Animal Life
Authors: Tony Weis Abstract: Mainstream environmentalism has long prioritized wild animals and their habitats while paying little attention to the explosive growth of global livestock production and consumption. However, this blind spot to livestock is changing quickly, in large part because of the rising general awareness of the resource and emissions intensity of animal-based foods and how it relates the interwoven crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. This paper considers both the fertile ground for animal advocacy to be found in the mounting scientific evidence about environmental inefficiencies of animal-based foods, and the need to be attentive to the risks it bears. The principal danger of efficiency-centred narratives is that if they are largely focused on climate change and biodiversity loss, the goal of reducing relative associated impacts can appear in a way that helps to further stoke the growth of industrially produced birds, which should be understood in relation to the already well-established poultrification of global livestock supply and demand. This paper highlights the importance of challenging this partial lens and response, and stresses the need to connect macro-scale environmental concerns to critical reflection about the ways that animal lives are organized in industrial livestock production. The concern for declining wild animal populations among environmentalists is a key lever for this, as industrial livestock can be shown to bear on the loss and fragmentation of habitats while at the same condemning a large and growing share of all birds and mammals to a short and agonizing existence. What emerges is an indelible image of a pathological mode of production that is violently narrowing how other animals get to inhabit the earth. PubDate: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 19:44:40 PST
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