[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 pp. ISBN9780231194730.

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, editor. Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning and Teaching: Issues in Literature and Culture. 188 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-76159-2 (eBook).

[Review Essay] Animal Worlds after Uexküll: Ed Yong. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House, 2022. 449 pp.

Animals are, or are like persons, and so should not be treated as mere property. But persons are not just non-property; they are contractors. They interact with property and with other persons. This article analyses the possibilities for a range of animals to fit within market liberal society as contractors from a legal disciplinary perspective. Some animals are capable of contract-like relationships of reciprocal exchange, and can consent, in a certain sense, to parts of such relationships. However, the dangers of (...) the contractual frame, which is used to legitimate exploitation, may exceed the benefits. Some scholars have begun to explore these issues through the lens of animal labour, animals as workers deserving protections and benefits for their efforts. I analyse the application of contract to a variety of non-human animals and consider the discursive implications of this application, then draw out lessons for the ongoing use of animal labour framing. If we are to think through animals as workers, we should be careful to oppose the contractualization of that work – just as human worker advocates do. (shrink)

Riverside County, California is home to several hundred free-roaming burros (donkeys) who frequent the open spaces surrounding and between the cities of Riverside, Moreno Valley, Loma Linda, and Redlands, as well as the public parks, private properties, residential developments and roadsides in these towns. Tales of more-than-human belonging (and not-belonging) in Riverside County render visible how multispecies places are mediated by infrastructures of consumption and infrastructures of reciprocity. Where infrastructures of consumption generate callousness, infrastructures of reciprocity sustain responsibility. We investigate (...) these dynamics by tracing how two geographically close but infrastructurally distinctive spaces frequented by the area’s wild burros are storied. The semi-rural Reche Canyon Road connects California Highway 60 and the City of Moreno Valley to Riverside and San Bernardino County communities to the north. Burros who inhabit the canyon as their home range must contend with automobiles traveling at highway speeds and are frequently injured or killed there. The road’s design makes neither space nor time for the burros. In this setting, interspecies relationalities are embedded in, and curtailed by, the mundane violence of “roadkill” and its associated narratives of victimhood and tragedy. Infrastructural violence subsides notably in residential neighborhoods of the City of Moreno Valley frequented by the burros. How people and donkeys co-inhabit these neigborhoods is consistent with non-dualist practices of mutual accommodation theorized in multispecies urbanism literature. Here, more reciprocal infrastructures decelerate human and nonhuman animal mobilities, making both space and time for the emergence of more convivial patterns of multispecies cohabitation. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2023 12(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Contributor Biographies and Editorial – Dedication to Siobhan O’Sullivan (1974-2023).

This article reflects upon the preambular paragraphs of the Agreement under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) and considers the functions and role of this introductory matter. During the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea, the delegate for Colombia, Mr Charry Samper concluded that the LOSC preamble works effectively because it includes the purposes, (...) the principles and the philosophy of the Convention. The three P's. This article examines the three P's in the BBNJ context and undertakes a critical analysis of the preamble in the BBNJ Agreement to ascertain whether it encapsulates and underscores the purposes, principles and philosophy that lie behind the development of the instrument. (shrink)

Pathologizing ugliness refers to the use of disease language and medical processes to foster and support the claim that undesirable features are pathological conditions requiring medical or surgical intervention. Primarily situated in cosmetic surgery, the practice appeals to the concept of "aesthetic pathology", which is a medical designation for features that deviate from some designated aesthetic norms. This article offers a two-pronged conceptual analysis of aesthetic pathology. First, I argue that three sets of claims, derived from normativist and naturalistic accounts (...) of disease, inform the framing of ugliness as a disease. These claims concern: (1) aesthetic harms, (2) aesthetic dysfunction, and (3) aesthetic deviation. Second, I introduce the notion of a hybridization loop in medicine, which merges the naturalist and normative understanding of the disease that potentially enables pathologizing practices. In the context of cosmetic surgery, the loop simultaneously promotes the framing of beauty ideals as normal biological attributes and the framing of normal appearance as an aesthetic ideal to legitimize the need for cosmetic interventions. The article thus offers an original discussion of the conceptual problems arising from a specific practice in cosmetic surgery that depicts ugliness as the disease. (shrink)

The overarching philosophy of Black people of Africa is known by different names but Ubuntu is the most popular name. Ubuntu’s origin is attributable to Black Africans in all regions of the continent—North, West, Central, East and South. Different communities may emphasize its different aspects but they are common knowledges, values and practices. The article begins with a discussion of the philosophy of Ubuntu and its application at the micro (individual and family), meso (communal), macro (societal, environmental and spiritual) levels. (...) The roles of Ubuntu in social work education are then discussed with a focus on Africa. These roles are offering a philosophical foundation; being a source of ethics and values; being a source of knowledge including theories; offering a history of African social work; shaping social work methods; building the confidence of educators, learners and communities; shaping research; being a pedagogical approach; enriching fieldwork education; and indigenizing and decolonizing. However, there are several impediments to the full use of Ubuntu, including the colonial history of the profession, changes to African society and lack of Ubuntu-inspired educational resources. The authors recommend continuous development and use of educational resources that are created with Ubuntu philosophy as a guiding principle. (shrink)

Across the animal activist/academic community, there is an ongoing dissatisfaction with the movement’s achievements to date, or lack thereof – a sense that it has not achieved as much as expected, hoped for, and needed. While there have undoubtedly been positive changes, overall these efforts constitute a Sisyphean task given that nonhuman animals are entering the Animal-Industrial Complex (A-IC) in increasing numbers and faster than others are saved. Lack of unity, common goals, and related questions of (il)legitimacy are among some (...) of the issues identified with ‘the movement’. In response, this paper proposes a new frame for animal advocacy that can offer a legitimising context for critical animal perspectives and bring a sense of unity to the movement’s fragmented and often inconsistent goals. First, questions of movement efficacy are examined with reference to a review of the websites of 21 advocacy organisations. Efficacy is then associated with (il)legitimacy, and (il)legitimacy with framing. An exploration of how frames are currently deployed in animal advocacy is then used to support the rationale for the proposed frame of ‘(animal) oppression’. Finally, this frame’s key features are clarified with suggestions for its deployment. Critically, this new frame describes the problem to be addressed, where existing frames focus primarily on solutions and motivations. Approaching animal advocacy through oppression evokes and explains the interwoven mechanisms of the entire injustice complex, of which the A-IC is one part, opening the way to challenge not only speciesism but all institutions of discrimination. (shrink)

In his Indigenous critique of the field of animal studies, Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation) describes it as having an analytic blind spot when it comes to settler-colonialism, a blind spot that manifests through universalising claims and clumsy arguments about ‘shared’ oppressions, through assumptions that settler colonial political institutions can be a neutral part of the solution, and through a failure to engage with ‘Indigenous studies of other than human life’ (20). In the same article, he calls on decolonial projects (...) to do more to include animality within their purview, to include critiques of animal agriculture and to incorporate critiques of anthropocentrism as ‘a key logic of white supremacy’. Belcourt’s critique of both Animal studies and decolonial projects on the basis of an unequal but mutual marginalisation is an important starting point for research projects like ours that hope to bring Animal studies and Indigenous studies approaches into dialogue about the cultural impacts of introduced animals. Our approach sets out to be ‘triadic’, always involving at least three sides; Settler- Coloniser, Indigene and Animal. (shrink)

Animal agriculture in the US and Canada is a colonial geography borne of imported ontologies of property, life, land, and food shaped by and reproducing agricultural power. This article primarily examines the ontologization of in-vitro meat (IVM) and, to a lesser degree, plant-based synthetic meat relative to our current food ontologies. IVM is positioned as the pragmatic solution to food-driven climate catastrophe in that it will supposedly allow consumers to eat meat without the ethical, environmental, safety, or health concerns associated (...) with agriculturally produced meat. I show that arguments for and against new meat technologies pivot on ontological claims about its realness. Those in favour claim that ‘real meat’ is nothing more than a specific chemical composition that can be divorced from the animal body and current production methods. Those against IVM claim that it cannot be separated from meat as the fetishization of meat renders these technologies intelligible in the first place, and that current production methods rely on ‘livestock’ and the slaughterhouse. IVM then represents a modified form of agricultural power in which the point of application moves from the animal body to the animal cell, and synthetic meat is an articulable invention due to the material and symbolic place of animal flesh in colonial orderings of life. The regulation of these new meat technologies will likely continue to ontologize farmed animals as meat, thereby continuing dominant relationships between agricultural power and food law. I conclude by considering whether new meat technologies ought to be ontologized as food. (shrink)

[Review] Maren Tova Linett. Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human. New York University Press, 2020. Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies. 213 pages.

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 pp.

Shocks from disasters challenge the normality of everyday life. Emotional and political reactions include anxiety and blame, but these must come together with knowledge through shared discourse to formulate responses, often immediate. The study draws on a phenomenological analysis of personal experience and discursive reactions to fires and the pandemic. It is informed by ethical and social approaches to epistemology and discourse, drawing on sociology of knowledge and studies of rhetoric. From this it is concluded that facts are agreed elements (...) for debate, as in the legal tradition, rather than guarantees of certainty. Knowledge relevant to disaster discourse arises through shared experience and robust communicative institutions, from the local to the scientific, and including the wisdom of First Nations. Disasters are uncanny because they defy everyday know-how. In disrupting the relationship of people to their milieu, they require a new accommodation among and between human and non-human actors. (shrink)

This is theof the English-language article by Yue Zhou Lin on recent Gramsci studies in China. We give his own English-language presentation of the article here below as an extended Abstract. Presentation Over the last two decades, Gramscian research in China has shifted away from seeing Gramsci as a Western Marxist, from studying the philosophy of praxis to grappling with the concept of hegemony, and from only interpreting Gramsci’s thought to examining social problems in China through Gramscian lenses. However, Gramscian (...) scholarship in China is found problematic too, namely, the misappropriation of the concept of hegemony, the lack of consideration of Gramsci’s other concepts, especially the integral State, and still relatively a dearth of studies on Chinese intellectuals using Gramsci’s concept of intellectuals. It is within this acknowledgment that the article suggests eight new frontiers that would advance Gramscian scholarship in China. (shrink)

What happens when a peer-assisted learning scheme becomes “business as usual” rather than innovation? The proctoring scheme in undergraduate philosophy programmes at the University of Leeds has been running for over 25 years, making it one of the oldest continuously running higher education peer-assisted learning schemes in the country. Over time, the centrality of the scheme in the teaching environment has changed, particularly in the shared understanding of philosophy learning and teaching and in the practical constraints of curriculum and timetable (...) space. Using the insights of teachers, students, and graduates, this report identifies the extent of success for proctoring in fostering philosophical learning and developing academic community, the two major objectives for the scheme. We also identify the conditions for success of peer-assisted learnings schemes, which our results suggest. An unexpected outcome of this project is found in identifying a challenge around “value” resulting from the fee-paying environment in higher education where peer-assisted learning may be understood as “teaching on the cheap.” These findings raise important questions for all higher education peer-assisted learning schemes about how schemes are embedded, sustained, and remain central to the learning environment in a rapidly changing education environment. (shrink)

[Review] Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, and Brett Mizelle, editors. Handbook of Historical Animal Studies. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. 637 pp. In their introduction to the volume under review, ‘Writing History after the Animal Turn? An Introduction to Historical Animal Studies’, which uses Harriet Ritvo’s 2007 article ‘On the Animal Turn’ as a key reference point, the editors describe as follows the main goal of and broader rationale for the book: "the discourses of human-animal studies and historical animal studies, just (...) like all the other disciplines involved in the reevaluation of the lives of animals and our relationship with them, past and present, are not identical. Rather, they inform one another. What we aim at with this handbook, then, is to gather and make accessible the contribution of historical research to the field of human-animal studies as well as the contribution of human-animal studies to the study of history. History as a discipline and scholarly venture, in other words, can no [more] ignore animals than animal studies can history.". As the editors and also a number of the contributors underscore, however, to bring about this rapprochement between animal studies and history, it is not enough to study ‘the lives, experiences, and deaths of animals [as] a powerful lens to understand and explain human histories, ideas, and practices’, even if in the recording and interpretation of history humans remain ‘an omnipresent factor’. Rather, animals’ own histories must take centre stage, to the fullest extent possible – given that the discourse of historiography is inescapably mediated by human perspectives. (shrink)

[Review] ‘Every Moving Thing Shall Be Meat for You.’ A review of David Brooks. Animal Dreams. Animal Publics series, Sydney University Press, 2021. 290 pp. Animal Dreams is David Brooks’s third book assailing the vast edifice of the human-animal’s obdurate refusal to rethink its relationship with other animals. It is an erudite and searching contribution to the field of animal studies, and a passionate, persuasive appeal to the mind, heart and senses to change the way of human being-in-the-world that is (...) pushing so many species to extinction and exploiting and truncating the lives of individual animals. Brooks is ‘on the side of the animal’, but experience and insight into the workings of the human animal leads him to argue not just for and on behalf of nonhuman animals, but that human animals too will benefit from ceasing to abuse other animals. In this vein, Brooks argues that the human animal is wounded in a primal, yet repressed manner by its complicity and active role in causing the ‘tide of suffering’ of other animals. This is an idea explored in the opening essay ‘The Smoking Vegetarian’ and drilled to the quick in a later essay on Derrida, ‘The Wound’. Given the human propensity for self-centredness, this is a strategy in the defence of animals, rather than a display of empathy for the human animal. It is Brooks’s steady gaze into the heart of darkness, combined with the unflinching pen, that makes Animal Dreams so eloquent a critique of the human animal and so eloquent and urgent a defence of animals. (shrink)

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 pp. The COVID-19 pandemic has secured its place as a 21st century global public health disaster. It has killed more than 6.2 million and infected close to 500 million people worldwide. Acknowledging Wuhan’s wildlife market as the ground zero of the pandemic and the devastation caused by SARS 17 years earlier, China’s Communist authorities made the long overdue decision on February 24, 2020 and outlawed (...) wildlife breeding and trade for the country’s exotic food market. This decision was commendable. Yet, breeding of wildlife for the exotic food market was only one of the five-piece captive farming operation that generated a revenue of $78 billion a year. What the Chinese authorities have retained is captive breeding for Traditional Chinese Medicine, the third largest component of the country’s controversial industry. Called a ‘national treasure’, TCM, in the minds of many, brooks no questioning. Liz P.Y. Chee’s Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China steps in this minefield with questions not about the efficacy of TCM but about the drivers of its faunal medicalization in the last seven decades. (shrink)

Imagine a future in which animals had fundamental rights to political participation and voting. What would our towns and cities look like? What kind of infrastructure would we need? And what kind of zoodemocracy would we, animals, co-author? As counterintuitive as it might seem, sometimes what is needed is not a minimal agenda. Animal rights theorists and the animal rights movement more generally have focused for decades on abolishing the farming of animals and on one-issue campaigns such as the abolition (...) of the animal fur trade. These are noble and important pursuits, but what if the driving force to produce meaningful change did not reside in looking at the horrors of factory farming, but rather in envisaging beautiful and joyful futures? What if what we needed was to provide imaginaries full of possibilities, opened to create new relationships and communities; futures that we might long for and might be willing to strive for? In this speculative article, I imagine a realistic and fictional zoodemocracy after the devastating effects of climate change hit Earth and Earth’s inhabitants with full force. The reader should imagine that the scenario portrayed in this article is situated in the 2180s and after many catastrophic events had happened. Location-wise, the article portrays different historical moments in which London, England, transitions from a human-centric polis and democracy to a zoopolis and zoodemocracy. (shrink)

This paper imagines Snake Church as a post-secular worship practice that reaches with and beyond the vilified serpent held within the limits of Judeo-Christianity. Snake Church offers a devotional practice enlivening enough to shift the languish of a post-secular world where the reasonableness of Enlightenment has crumbled into numbers like 440ppms and 1.5C. The Western empire has been revealed as stark naked, vulnerable, an old skin that cannot hold my world. Snake Church offers me a sacred opiating hope. As I (...) approach a nascent liturgy, here, in the settler-ravaged Stony Rises, home to the Eastern Maar tiger snake and Eastern brown for millennia, I wonder, what might a prayer do for these ancient locals? Snake Church is not a holy rolling out of the self, to assume the mantle of a snake who wants nothing at all to do with me and the harms of my species. Instead, perhaps, it is a shedding of my old He-God skin, freeing me to grow towards something new in this play of sacrilegious devotion. Like a drop of poison, Snake Church might change my body completely. (shrink)

This article investigates the role of hope in politics, in the context of the current climate crisis. Hoping for positive transformation may seem naïve and or a way to avoid action, but there is a close connection between hope and democratic action. Understood as a collective political practice, hope can contribute to imagining and articulating alternative futures, and motivate action. The first part of the paper explicates the relevance of the work of Ernst Bloch for the challenges of the Anthropocene. (...) It focuses specifically on learning hope as a collective political practice, the function of utopias in fostering political imagination, and the connection between political agency and hope. The second part of the paper draws on the work of the Dutch Party for the Animals to investigate how political hope can change existing political systems from the inside. In their party program and policies, the Party for the Animals gives central importance to the wellbeing of the earth and all its inhabitants, and demonstrate that a different way of doing politics, based on care and responsibility instead of economic growth, is possible. (shrink)

Drawing on the thinking of Donna Haraway and other transdisciplinary thinkers, this paper makes the case for an ‘avian Weird’ by exploring the representation of birds in the New Weird fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Distinct from the Lovecraftian ‘Old Weird’ of the twentieth century, the New Weird has been defined by VanderMeer himself as “a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about place found in traditional fantasy”. However, VanderMeer’s oeuvre is also something of a textual aviary, (...) where the avian comes to represent the entangled and monstrous ontologies of the ‘Chthulucene’. A substitute for the human-centred ‘Anthropocene’, Donna Haraway’s ‘Chthulucene’ indexes the fibrous and squishy bits of the world. Like Haraway, I am unsatisfied with the term ‘Anthropocene’, the planetary effects of which implicate more than only human life-forms: we need new translocal, transspecies, and transbiological ways of thinking. In its chthonic and tentacular etymology, the Chthulucene gestures to the imagery of Weird worlds, as well as the tangled, twiggy body of the nest. What happens when we look at the world through avian eyes? Might these tetrachromats offer a response to Haraway’s call to “see the world in hues of red, green, and ultraviolet”? In VanderMeer’s New Weird fiction, avian epistemologies reveal the possibility of monstrous survival in the Chthulucene. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals. Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, (...) respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – while simultaneously drawing on, and challenging, ideas of disability as incapacity. The second theme was love and empathy. Several of our interviewees spoke of empathy being enhanced thro We discuss these caretakers' stories of animal disability in relation to both studies of human-animal relationships, and to disability rights, as well as to ideas about what constitutes care. What these narratives emphasize is a particular sense of sharing and reciprocity, felt through the body, especially when caretakers spoke of their own ill-health. They saw disability – the animals' or their own – not as limiting, but as enabling both to flourish within caring relationships. (shrink)

The broad subject of First Nations and decolonial perspectives on animal flourishing is addressed in this paper in a reading of references to canids in Mystery Road, a film by the First Nations-Australian director, Ivan Sen, and Here Come the Dogs, a novel by the Malaysian-Australian author Omar Musa. Dingoes and other wild dogs are a prominent trope in Sen’s film and tie to seemingly perdurable debates about the rights of these animals to flourish in Australia. Dingo advocates argue that (...) dingoes are endemic to Australia, are Australia’s oldest introduced animals, and are a top predator species and so critical to the sustainability of many ecosystems across the length and breadth of Australia. In light of this argument, Australia’s biosecurity laws betray dingoes. The Act lists these animals as being pests, and therefore as animals that can be and should be eradicated. Dingo advocates point out also that what is threatening dingoes today more than the humans abiding by and enacting Australia’s biosecurity laws are other wild dogs – descendants of canids who were brought to Australia between 1788 and today and are mixing with dingoes and diluting the so-called dingo gene pool. Sen’s film discernibly engages with both of these arguments, and it does so in a way that resonates with animal studies scholar Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s critique of the so-called ‘hybridity equals extinction’ argument. Canids also appear in Omar Musa’s novel in the figure of a lone critter, Mercury Fire, an animal discarded by the greyhound racing industry. The novel draws attention to this multi-billion-dollar gambling and animal entertainment industry and to the parallels between the dogs that the industry exploits and others of Australia’s ‘underdog’ populations, who face formidable race, class, and ethnic barriers. These barriers compare with the speciesist barricades that Australia’s wild dogs and many other dogs inclusive of greyhound racing industry dogs face as they strive to flourish. (shrink)

This article reassesses the concept of a house from a non-human perspective. The two worlds that collide in this article are philosophical analyses that are “beyond the human” and sustainable engineering house design. By analyzing the houses of ten animal species for shelter/skin properties, life pedagogy, materials and resources, thermal dynamics, and structural elements, we speculate on the future of housing. The premise of this article is that “beyond the human” philosophy opens a new visage to comprehend and conceptualize what (...) a house could be. Beyond the human theorizing is defined by philosophy that has gone beyond framing an exploration internally to the benefit of themselves, as human subject. This article speculates that considering animal house construction is a way forward for thought in a changing climate. (shrink)

This is theof the double review in English by Alessio Panichi of the volumes In cammino con Gramsci by Giuseppe Vacca and La fabbrica dei Quaderni. Studi su Gramsci by Michele Ciliberto. The former analyses Gramsci’s elaboration of the philosophy of praxis, and the latter looks how Gramsci’s reading of the national history and cultural tradition of Italy informed the concepts developed in the Prison Notebooks.

This is theof the double review in Italian by Alessio Panichi of the volumes In cammino con Gramsci by Giuseppe Vacca and La fabbrica dei Quaderni. Studi su Gramsci by Michele Ciliberto. The former analyses Gramsci’s elaboration of the philosophy of praxis and the latter looks how Gramsci’s reading of the national history and cultural tradition of Italy informed the concepts developed in the Prison Notebooks.

The role of a practicing psychologist often involves uncertainty and ambiguity, and individuals differ in their ability to manage or “tolerate” this uncertainty. This study investigated the relationship between tolerance of uncertainty, pluralism and confidence in case formulation in a sample of Australian psychologists. The sample consisted of 190 Australian psychologists, aged between 22 and 69 years and comprising mostly females. This study had a cross-sectional survey design in which participants completed measures of uncertainty tolerance, pluralism and confidence in case (...) formulation. Hierarchical multiple regression was used to predict tolerance to uncertainty. The final regression model was significant and explained 39.1% of the variance in tolerance of uncertainty. The predictor variables that contributed significantly to the model were therapeutic orientation, age, pluralistic practice and confidence in case formulation. Stage of career and pluralistic philosophy did not contribute significantly to the model. Higher pluralistic practice and confidence in case formulation skills are related to higher tolerance of uncertainty. Training in pluralistic models of therapy and the hypothesis generation approach to case formulation may offer the potential to increase uncertainty tolerance in practicing psychologists. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring and Karen Lykke Syse, editors. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze. Lexington Books 2021. 242 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn. Dance of the Dung Beetles: Their Role in Our Changing World. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. 228 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Jason Hannan, editor. Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020. 334 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Austin McQuinn. Becoming Audible: Sounding Animality in Performance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 200 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Felice Cimatti and Carlo Salzani, editors. Animality in Contemporary Italian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 341 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Teya Brooks Pribac. Enter the Animal: Cross-species Perspectives on Grief and Spirituality. Sydney University Press, 2021. 262 pp.

In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor provides a secular analysis of vices which in Christian theology were thought to bring death to the soul: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. She argues that these vices are appropriately singled out and grouped together in that ‘they are destructive of the self and prevent its flourishing’. Using a related approach, I offer a secular analysis of gluttony and cowardice, examining their roles in common failures to empathise with animals. I argue that (...) these vices constitute serious moral failings, for they enable continuing complicity in animal abuse and undermine integrity. While Taylor aims to show that ‘deadly vices’ are destructive of the self, I argue that they are ultimately deadly to other animals. I offer practical suggestions for overcoming them by cultivating agentic courage and better empathy with animals. (shrink)

While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by (...) the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to the effects of both hunting and the erosion of trans-national habitats as causes of extinction, yet they also show how human affective responses to extinction can extend across geo-political borders to a more global imaginary. As such, Naeemaei’s artworks are regarded as a form of immanent critique of anthropogenic forcing. Her works adapt older traditions in Persian humanism and art to show not only how the human dominion of nonhuman animals has led to extinction, but also how this leads to an almost incalculable sense of human loss. I argue that Naeemaei’s affective imagery of loss is not simply yet another example of how the lifeworld of animals can only be understood from an anthropocentric worldview, but instead points to our inability to yet fully register the immeasurable losses of extinction and what this yet unchartered grief might imply for potential human agency. (shrink)

Drawing on the continuing work of the Nature in the Dark project, an art collaboration and publicity campaign between the Centre for Creative Arts and the Victorian National Parks Association, this paper aims to explore some of the disciplinary crossovers between art, science and philosophy as encountered by this project and to think about their implications for an environmental ethics more generally. Showcasing animal life from Victoria, Australia, the NITD video series I and II invited international artists to create video (...) works inspired by ecological habitat surveys from the Victorian National Parks land and water. Videos and photographs originally used to identify animals and population sizes are now creatively repurposed and presented to new audiences. NITD negotiate ‘the distribution of the sensible’, as they mark the domain of what is accessible to the public. This paper relates the discussion in the contemporary arts about the politics of aesthetics with the ethical conundrum of how we might care about something that is beyond our reach and we are not yet aware of, given our own perceptual blind spots. Drawing on a conversation between the philosopher Georgina Butterfield and myself as an artist and curator, this paper argues that we cannot justify setting arbitrary limits on our valuing, questioning or understanding of the non-human world, and as such it is a position both the philosopher and artist share. While it may be an ultimately unreachable goal, it is paradoxically an essential starting point for ecological ethics. (shrink)

This thesis investigates how preservice teachers understand ‘challenging behaviour’ and how this knowledge informs their teaching practice. Challenging behaviour is problematised as a knowledge referent and the epistemic tensions that preservice teachers experience in coming to ‘know’ about challenging behaviour are explored. This is an in-depth, qualitative study that focuses on the experiences, knowledge and knowledge-change of five final-year preservice primary teachers before, during and after their final Professional Experience. Data was gathered via interviews, focus groups, concept maps, document analysis (...) and classroom observations. Foucault’s theories of knowledge comprised the theoretical framework of the study and discourse analysis was used for data analysis. Major conclusions reached were threefold. Firstly, this study embraced the ambiguity and complexity of ‘challenging behaviour’ by avoiding the definitional debate and instead identifying and positing three discourses of challenging behaviour. This approach was found helpful in understanding preservice teachers’ knowledge of the topic. Secondly, it was found that the preservice teachers’ knowledge of challenging behaviour was, at best, ‘confused’ insofar as it was rarely discursively consistent. Thirdly, the types of epistemic processes through which the preservice teachers reconstructed their discursively inconsistent knowledge were theorised as either ‘matching’ or ‘squishing’. These epistemic processes were cast as problematic. Both ‘matching’ and ‘squishing’ demonstrated potential to maintain epistemic equilibrium and so limit possibilities for knowledge expansion and reflective practice. Moreover, in the case of ‘squishing’, this epistemic process was found to generate confusions, which were at times unsupportive of pedagogical decision-making. Two major implications of the research concern teacher education. Firstly, because the preservice teachers’ confusions, pedagogical distress and quandaries around challenging behaviour seemed to stem from discursively inconsistent knowledge, there is a call for teacher education programs to more clearly delineate multiple knowledges of challenging behaviour. Secondly, the preservice teachers’ epistemology was characterised by an overwhelming propensity to perceive a theory/practice divide in their professional knowledge. However, for these preservice teachers, there was not such a polarity to be bridged regarding challenging behaviour. Recasting the theory/practice problem in terms of knowledge showed the preservice teachers were doing a good deal of complex epistemological work ‘in the middle’ of theory and practice. Theory was not considered irrelevant, it was mobilised to make specific pedagogical decisions during practicum. However, understandings of these ‘practical theories’ were fraught with the incoherence and confusions associated with the epistemic practice of ‘squishing’. Thus, although the preservice teachers’ knowledge indicated they were ‘working in the middle’ of theory and practice, they were not doing so with great accuracy or effectiveness. It then is necessary to offer preservice teachers more comprehensive tools to work with and understand ‘knowledge’, rather than ‘theory/practice’. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that crowds can form morally evaluable collective intentions, even without formal decision making structures and that these intentions can direct morally evaluable collective actions. Although recent philosophical work in the area of collective moral responsibility goes some way to theorising collective agency and intentional action in crowds, we currently do not have theoretically sound basis for evaluating the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness of particular crowds, even though these evaluations are regularly made. This thesis attempts to fill (...) this explanatory gap in the literature. In developing this explanation, I make a taxonomic distinction between aggregative and cohesive crowds; a distinction that is based on a claim about the specific properties of a crowd that make it capable of bearing ascriptions of collective responsibility. Simply put, cohesive crowds are distinct from aggregative crowds because their members develop and share a specific bank of common knowledge. This knowledge can often be acquired very quickly and - crucially - may come to be shared without explicit verbal or written communication. It develops through a phenomenological experience of joint attention and a sharing of beliefs. While this common knowledge includes shared understandings of the crowd’s aims and goals, it also crucially includes knowledge of the relationships between crowd members and of the capacity that they have to act together. I argue that coordinated actions in crowds are only possible when individuals know that they stand in a certain relationship with each other. Their beliefs and intentions must be shared not merely in the sense that individuals possess the same beliefs and intentions but also that each person knows that they know that they share those beliefs and intentions with the people around them. I argue that crowds become cohesive crowds when their members together develop collective awareness of their beliefs and intentions. It is this specific epistemic condition makes possible the spontaneous coordination of individual actions towards a goal that only a crowd can achieve. (shrink)

This is an abstract of the entry on “Common sense” published in the Dizionario gramsciano. There exist more than one “common senses” distinguishable by area, social stratum and period, continually enriched with scientific notions, and standing in-between folklore and the philosophy of the scholars. It is a “disorderly aggregate of philosophical conceptions” in which “whatever one likes” may be found. It must be subjected to critique, since it is often connotated by the various forms of conservatism. It is a social (...) group’s most wide-spread and often implicit ideology, and dialectically related to philosophy, meaning that a social group that aligns itself with the subalterns must enter into a dialectical relation with common sense in a mutually transformative way. Differently from Bukharin’s approach, the critique of common sense, Gramsci states, must be one of the starting points for a compendium of Marxism: forcing the introduction of new truths into common sense is proof of its capacity for expansion. At stake is the transformation of the subalterns’ conception of the world, by and through launching a struggle for hegemony involving a new common sense, culture and philosophy which, together, form a mass ideology which rendering politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass. (shrink)

This article provides a Marxist analysis of the concept of ‘common sense’. It traces the evolution of this concept – through various philosophers from Aristotle to Thomas Paine – in order to throw light on Gramsci’s own radical mobilization of the notion of ‘common sense’ as a mode of thought, and the role it plays in his broader philo-sophical system of class consciousness and hegemony. The piece seeks to both appreciate the revolutionary aspects of Gramsci’s analysis of ‘common sense’ but (...) also to draw attention to some of its limitations. Building on this, the final part examines the way in which ‘common sense’ as a concept has been mobilized – contra Gramsci – by the ruling classes of our own epoch; how it becomes a key component in the ‘political correctness gone mad’ narrative and a way, therefore, of justifying some of the most reactionary initiatives – from the xenophobia which feeds anti-immigrant bigotry to the neoliberal austerity measures which have flayed the living standards of those at the bottom in order to enshrine the wealth of those at the top. (shrink)

The long standing and still highly influential mindreading framework claims that social cog- nition is best understood as an ability to predict and explain others’ behavior in terms of their mental states. This ability is explained by appealing to mental representations and inferential reasoning via rule-based knowledge. However, recent enactive work on social cognition questions most, if not all, of the main assumptions on which mindreading is founded. Enac- tivism’s emphasis on the structural coupling of the brain-body-world constitutes the foundation (...) of the framework, which rejects the representational and inferential reasoning claims of the mindreading framework. For enactivists, social cognition is best explained in terms of the direct embodied and embedded interactions an agent has with her socio-material world. In continuing this work, the thesis provides new developments of the enactive project for investigating and explaining social cognition. The thesis utilizes two approaches to achieve this goal. First, it dialectally defends enactivism vis-a-vis the mindreading framework. It does this by both securing established enactive claims from criticism, and by developing new objections against the mindreading framework. Secondly, the thesis offers new enactive interpretations of empirical developmental data, and presents new ways of investigating three central areas of debate within the field of social cognition: the metaphysical basis of social cognitive processes, the false-belief test literature, and the concept of empathy in relation to therapeutic practices and autism. The thesis is composed of five different, but thematically intertwined papers. The first paper targets the constitutive basis of social cognition by attempting to dissolve the causal-constitutive fallacy through appealing to a diachronic conception of constitution. This move both secures established enactive claims and develops a more thorough account of what is meant by enactive constitutive claims. The second paper then examines infant social cognitive capacities, arguing cognitivist explanations of these capacities rely on fallacious as- sumptions regarding the nature of perception. The paper then offers an alternative enactive and ecological account of these capacities. The third paper argues both innate and construc- tivist mindreading accounts of the folk psychological know-how required to reliably succeed on false-belief tests fall prey to an infinite regress problem. The paper ends by briefly pre- senting an alternative enactive, narrative explanation of the empirical data. The fourth paper then shifts focus to examine the concept empathy and practice of empathizing. It argues there are advantages to conceiving of empathy as enactive and exploratory, in the sense that when we empathize with others we understand them in a deeper and richer way, through exploring their self-authored narratives. Finally, the fifth paper re-examines our understand- ing of autism by integrating the enactive framework with a neurodiversity approach to cognition. It argues this integration can help us better understand how neurotypical social practices and institutions effect the development, and well-being, of autistic individuals. Through these substantial expansions of established enactivist accounts, and by offering new objections to the mindreading framework, the thesis provides reasons to prefer an enactivist framework in exploring human abilities for social cognition. (shrink)

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: Introduction: Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Covid-19.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Susan Mary Pyke. Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 314 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Jody Berland. Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2019. 328 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Penny Johnson. Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine. Melville House Publishing, 2019.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: [Review] Dara M. Wald and Anna L. Peterson. Cats and Conservationists: The Debate over Who Owns the Outdoors. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2020. 153 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10: Covid-19 and Capital: Labour Studies and Nonhuman Animals – A Roundtable Dialogue.

COVID-19 has brought to the fore the violence faced by slaughterhouse workers and those they are charged with slaughtering. This article argues that COVID-19 has wrought an acceleration of the slow violence of state organized race crime, in spreading rapidly through the slaughterhouse and to surrounding racialized communities. We show that zoonotic pandemics are the result of state organized race crime, and that abattoirs are locations of inseparable animal and racial violence. We then analyse how the law and state institutions (...) have positioned slaughterhouse work as essential, contra workers’ claims and general knowledge that meat is an inessential ‘item’. We argue that this demonstrates the mechanics of state organized race crime and accelerates the speed of slow violence, while maintaining its insidious and routine nature. We then consider the #Boycottmeat movement which includes slaughterhouse workers, whom despite having a vested interest in this industry, have advocated for meat boycotts and a transition to plant-based diets as a matter of personal and collective safety. (shrink)

This poem reflects upon the year 2020, the death of an animal-activist in Canada, and the murderous effects of COVID-19 on non-human animals.

We present a critical description and analysis of the conceptual framework and political processes by which regulators set electricity distribution prices in Australia. Prices have increased greatly after the market restructure in the 1990s, contrary to the rationale behind that reform. Our paper is both interpretive and analytical. We find that the regulators’ methodology, which combines accounting asset valuation and financial theory, not only invites “gaming” by the networks but, more remarkably, is technically misconceived on its own theoretical terms. We (...) interpret the regulatory framework as innately one-sided and preordained to favour electricity network owners. Electricity market ‘reforms’ have brought not only higher prices but also social hardship and disruption. It is important that their foundations be questioned, not only from alternative political and sociological perspectives but also in terms of the financial logic on which they supposedly stand. Ostensibly independent and sophisticated submissions to regulators have been contrived by vested political and economic interests to sway regulators’ decisions. By tilting the regulatory regime, the electricity networks have harmed not only household consumers but also business and industrial electricity users, which of itself raises questions of whether there are actually economic benefits. Our questioning of the internal validity of the utilities regulators’ rational economics methodology is a provocative and potentially effective form of criticism because it cannot be waved away as ideological, political or ‘unscientific’. (shrink)

Philosophy, theology and engineering are each characterised by striking, yet similar, low participation rates by female academics. While these disciplines seem very different, and so the diagnosis of the causes of this under-representation might likewise be expected to differ, we show a commonality of analysis in the diagnoses of, and responses to, women's under-representation. In each, we find a shared argument that concepts and methodologies central to that discipline are gendered male. We also find a shared response which urges engagement (...) in projects of critical re-imagination. We conclude with a case study of critical re-imagination in philosophy and draw some lessons from its successes and failures for the potential of gendered innovations to transform male dominated disciplines. While critical re-imagination of key concepts, presuppositions, and methodologies in these disciplines may be a necessary condition for improving participation rates by women, it is by no means sufficient. (shrink)

Open Dialogue is a need-adapted approach to mental health care that was originally developed in Finland. Like other need-adapted approaches, Open Dialogue aims to meet consumer’s needs and promote collaborative person-centred dialogue to support recovery. Need-adapted mental health care is distinguished by flexibility and responsiveness. Fidelity, defined from an implementation science perspective as the delivery of distinctive interventions in a high quality and effective fashion is a key consideration in health care. However, flexibility presents challenges for evaluating fidelity, which is (...) much easier to evaluate when manualization and reproducible processes are possible. Hence, it remains unclear whether Open Dialogue and other need-adapted mental health interventions can be meaningfully evaluated for fidelity. The aim of this paper was to critically appraise and advance the evaluation of fidelity in need-adapted mental health care, using Open Dialogue as a case study. The paper opens a discussion about how fidelity should be evaluated in flexible, complex interventions, and identifies key questions that need to be asked by practitioners working in need-adapted mental health care to ensure they deliver these interventions as intended and in an evidence-based fashion. (shrink)

The global pandemic needs to mark a turning point for the peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand. How can we make sure that our culturally diverse nation charts an equitable and sustainable path through and beyond this new world? In a less affluent future, how can we ensure that all New Zealanders have fair access to opportunities? One challenge is to preserve the sense of common purpose so critical to protecting each other in the face of Covid-19. How can we centre (...) what we have learnt about resilience within Māori and wider Pacific communities in our reforms? How can public understanding of Covid-19 science create a platform for the future social valuing of expertise? How can we ensure that the impact of Covid-19 in New Zealand results in a more sustainable, and inclusive workforce–for instance by expanding our perceptions of the value of our workers through promoting digital inclusion? To meet these challenges, we must reimagine our existing traditions of thought, breathing new life into perennial concepts and debates. Our paper indicates some of the ways that Philosophy is central to this collective reimagining, highlighting solutions to be found across our rich philosophical traditions. (shrink)

This article is a review of the book Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World edited by Nicola Pizzolato and John Holst, which brings together contributions from specialists in Gramscian educational thought from different language-regions: English, Italian, French and Latin American. Seeking to contextualize the book, the articles reconstruct the main features of the reception of Gramscian thought in the Anglophone world. This shows the vast Anglophone tradition in employing Gramsci not only in the political or cultural field, but (...) also in the educational one. It also suggests that this tradition has reached our days, the Anglophone world being one of the main spaces in the study and use of Gramsci. The article, furthermore, outlines Gramsci’s legacy as a truly international challenge. In this sense, the book suggests a Gramscian problem that has gained an important influence in Gramscian studies over the last few decades, particularly in Italy and the Anglophone world: that of translation. This translation among intellectuals from various countries is not, to paraphrase Gramsci, “perfect” but it is essential in order to understand and assume our contemporary political-pedagogical challenges. (shrink)

Our paper investigates the conservation and planning implications of the use of an individual flagship species. The koala was chosen, as an example, in a community education intervention in a regional Australian city. Educating the community to accept changes in planning laws aimed at the protection of a single species such as the koala has never been an easy task. We examine the approach used to educate the Ballarat community in doing just that. We outline the power of this iconic (...) Australian mammal, the koala, in promoting conservation and changes in planning regulations. We highlight the flow-on conservation and educational benefits of flagship and umbrella species in a world where conservation is very often overpowered by other interests and priorities. (shrink)

My contribution intends to confront Gramsci’s reflections on the new forms of capitalism and subjectivization as formulated in Americanism and Fordism with Benjamin’s notion of “second technique”. Both Gramsci and Benjamin understood the development of capitalist modes of production as a field of tension between the proletarian revolution and a new form of capitalist art of governing. This art of government, which includes alternatives within the capitalist system, corresponds with Gramsci’s “passive revolution” in politics and with Benjamin’s description of Baudelaire (...) as “his own impresario” on the level of forms of life. With their analyses of capitalism, both philosophers announced some characteristics of neoliberalism. (shrink)

For Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin, whose texts from the time of the fascist terror in Europe are still widely discussed, philology was an indispensable instrument of their criticism. Philological criticism, which gained a political and epistemological dimension in their works, plays a crucial role in their analyses of fascism, questions of historiography and their examinations of Marxism. The writings that emerged during this period, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Benjamin’s Arcades Project, are known to have remained fragments. In this article, (...) the focus is on the philological impulse on which these writings were based and which, as will be shown, corresponded to a specific structure of thought in which matter and method tend to fuse. (shrink)

While Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” has long been considered one of the fundamental texts of translation theory, Gramsci’s important remarks on the question of translatability were not noted in the canonical studies of the history of translation theory nor, for a long time, in Gramscian studies themselves. Nevertheless, the notion of translatability plays a crucial role in the general economy of the Prison Notebooks. This paper proposes a dialogical reading ‘against the grain’ of three constellations of (...) some of Gramsci and Benjamin’s key concepts regarding the nature of translation and its philosophical presuppositions and implications. These constellations revolve around the Gramscian notions of hegemony, of translation between ethico-political contexts, and of reciprocal translatability; they are here read through the Benjaminian notions of translation as generative of the ‘afterlife’ of a literary work, as participating in a ‘pure language’ that functions as translation’s ‘horizon’, and as constituting an ‘echo’ of the original text in a new linguistic and historical context. The encounter of Gramsci and Benjamin is not only on their points of clear convergence but also on those points where they might seem to diverge: this forms the basis for translation and transposition between their respective thought-worlds – a translation that at the same time represents an attempt to open their works up to their immanent transformation. (shrink)

[Review] Natalie Porter and Ilana Gershon, editors. Living with Animals: Bonds across Species. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018. 266 pp. Living with Animals, as the dust jacket avers, ‘is a collection of imagined animal guides – a playful look at different human-animal relationships’. The collection has an international range from dogs in Australia, to sacrificial cattle in Madagascar, chimpanzees in West Africa, tamed hyenas in Harar, and returning birds in Buenos Aires. At the same time the reader learns more about (...) animals in processes and places we might take for granted – training service dogs, marketing rescue dogs, introducing a gorilla into a zoo troop – or prefer to deny – dealing with pigs in a factory farm, artificially inseminating cows and horses, responding to mice and ferrets in laboratories. (shrink)

[Review] Hope Ferdowsian, Phoenix Zones: Where Strength is Born and Resilience Lives, Chicago University Press, 2018. 212 pp. It was a Sunday morning in mid-September. I was woken up by the sound of rain. Thick, steady, there to stay, at least for the day. For a moment I wondered whether I should skip my morning run but decided against it. I wanted to honour the rain at a time when parts of the world were so desperate for it. The streets (...) were empty of humans, the rest of nature relishing the much- needed soak. I thought of resilience. (shrink)

[Review] Paula Acari. Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of Meat. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 356 pp. There are many audiences for Paula Acari’s new book on the persistence of meat as edible matter, Making Sense of Food Animals, and not all of them academic. One of the striking facets of this well-researched, clearly argued and empirical analysis, drawing on 41 interviews with Australian meat eaters and meat producers, is the lessons for animal advocacy organisations for (...) rethinking their messaging strategies. Central to the book’s argument is Acari’s challenge to narratives of transparency and visibility, often employed by such groups, made famous by activist Linda McCartney’s claim that ‘if slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian’. Acari demonstrates, drawing on interview data and a robust interpretation of Foucauldian theory, that both looking and knowing are easily absorbed into the ‘already encoded eye’ of a human gaze that comes pre-trained by the ‘normalised entitlement’ of animal exploitation ; as such, without a ‘de- or re-coding’ of that human gaze, calls for more transparency of slaughtering merely reinforce rather than disrupt the sense of animals’ edibility. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff advises those advocating for change, it is unwise to utilise the stories of those whose power you wish to disrupt. Recirculating such stories strengthens the existing cognitive models and the beliefs which rest upon them. To challenge such cognitive codification, which, in relation to the edibility of animals, has ‘been socially, culturally and economically normalised over centuries’, requires a more radical approach that highlights existing mechanisms of power, and has ‘rigorous, comprehensive strategies ready to challenge and refute them, not simply piecemeal responses as part of an apparently balanced discussion or debate’. Acari’s book is a useful tool in helping animal advocacy groups rethink their campaigns to construct new messages that might ‘land’ with meat eaters, whose cognitive models continue to ‘make sense’ of animals as edible. What Acari hopes is that we reach a ‘heterotopia’ where it makes ‘no sense’ that animals are edible. As she readily admits, this is a ‘big nut to crack’. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, nor try to be more effective in our efforts. (shrink)

[Review] Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfield, editors. Equestrian Cultures: Horse, Humans, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity. Animal Lives Series, University of Chicago Press, 2019. 276 pp. Differences in equestrian cultures have recently been brought home to me. My horse moved to a newly established yard which soon developed into one catering only for endurance racing horses. The horses were kept in small pens, only permitted into the stony field every second day. Human attitudes to the horses were functionalist (...) with the horses always for sale to the highest bidder from the UAE. Galahad is back now at a happy hacking yard where the horses stand out all day, graze in green grass and function as a herd. One of his paddock mates, however, is a horse rescued from the notorious bush-racing. Horses, mostly stolen, are drafted into gang culture and raced at night near Cape Town. Three instances of horses living differently, yet always commodified as ‘products of modernity’, as Guest and Mattfield put it in their introduction. (shrink)

[Review] Laura Jean McKay, The Animals in That Country. Scribe 2020. 288 pp. How do animals experience their lives and their worlds? How can we know? How can we represent their interests if we can’t know? Should we be trying to speak on their behalf at all?

This article takes a genealogical approach to the material origin of what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘anthropological machine’, analyzing the dispositif by which the ontological and axiological dualism between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ first took place in archaic societies. Using some key concepts of René Girard’s anthropology, it is possible to argue that this dualism is rooted in the violent practice of victimage sacrifice. In other words, I claim that the anthropological machine is originally performed by (...) a sacrificial dispositif. Though in modern society the human/animal dichotomy is performed by other dispositifs, the trace of this origin remains in the form of what Gianfranco Mormino calls sacrificial survivals. An analysis of the survival of the violent parameter of equality demonstrates that making a conceptual shift to equality as equal vulnerability is the key to creating a break with the long-lasting effects of the sacrificial dispositif. Continental and feminist approaches to animal studies reflect deeply on vulnerability since it appears to be a promising dimension with which to ground human-animal relations in non-violent ways. If we link these attempts with the Girardian context, it is possible to understand their radical potential for creating socio-political change. (shrink)

This article outlines how nonhuman animals are framed by the emotions of drama, theatre and contemporary performance and considers a distinctive tradition in western culture of enacting animal characters who function as surrogate humans. It argues that, contradictorily, while animal characters confirm anthropocentric emotionalism, drama also contains pro-animal values and concern for animal welfare. Animals embodying emotions in theatrical languages are part of the way animals are used in the traditions of western culture and to think and philosophize with, but (...) they also indicate thinking about the emotions in theatrical performance. The article considers if, however, staging living animals can challenge or utilize anthropocentric emotionalism and whether such practices can support the ethical effort to draw attention to other animal species. (shrink)

Human interactions with nature reveal contradictions and misunderstandings based upon anthropocentric colonising behaviours. Cultural forms such as film and media have played a key role in creating and perpetuating negative affect towards nonhuman species, particularly apex species, shark, crocodile, bear, and snake. From early Hollywood films through to contemporary online series, these majestic species have been subjected to vilification and denigration onscreen, resulting in speciesism, subjugation and colonisation of animals, whilst simultaneously extending human ‘authority’ over nature and perpetuating fear – (...) particularly of apex species. A range of hybrid genre textual examples from screen and media, from fictional and factual film and television will illustrate these paradigms. An ongoing issue is the anthropomorphising of species onscreen. Drawing upon extensive work since 2009 with international classifications systems, this paper will also examine the positionality of the American Humane Association in monitoring the role and treatment of ‘animal actors’ in film; developing a compelling empirical case for the necessity for reform in classifications systems, expanding classification Codes to include non-anthropocentric perspectives and the rights of nature with regard to nonhuman actors in public awareness. The necessity for a nuanced understanding of ontological damage to species is currently not a classifiable theme under any existing classification systems. An outcome of this article is the proposed development and implementation of a new classification symbol designated as ‘Animal Shield’. This interdisciplinary article will be presented from the perspectives of an environmental ecologist and cultural film studies scholarship, building upon research into decolonising nature. (shrink)

Under what conditions does the killing of a nonhuman animal qualify as euthanasia? In this paper, I elaborate an original nonprescriptive definition of nonhuman animal euthanasia which avoids the conceptual confusions surrounding the use of this expression. Such a definition imposes strict limitations on the notion of nonhuman animal euthanasia. On the one hand, the nonhuman animal whose life is ended through an act that legitimately qualifies as euthanasia is normally a sentient domestic animal. On the other, the painless and (...) merciful nature of the termination of a nonhuman animal’s life is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it to count as a genuine instance of nonhuman animal euthanasia. (shrink)

This 8-page pamphlet/zine is written in the form of a diary for the month of October, 1997, and was published by Bull Ant Press, Bowral (1997). In it the author comments widely on contemporary education issues, in particular the modern trend towards the corporatisation of education, a process he sees as devaluing independent and critical thought in favour of wall-to-wall assessments and examining, utility, bureaucratisation, and education reflecting "corporate and market place ideologies and practices".

The period of social change from the 1960s to the 1980s saw a flowering of utopian novels, from Huxley's Island (1962) and Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1964) through to Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975) and Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). These works were infused with a vision of an ideal world structured as a decentralised network of small villages or precincts. In each novel, local, participatory decision-making was the key to a utopian "good place" both for people and for (...) ecological communities as a whole. The need to reharmonise with ecological systems saw a rejection of wasteful technologies which cater to consumerism. Instead, these utopias explored "high-tech, low-tech" societies. "High technology" (in the sense of sophisticated technology) was particularly encouraged for certain utopian purposes, such as biotechnology to improve ecology and agriculture. Technologies or sciences that might ravage the natural world were excluded, leading to a return to "low technology" (in the sense of simple, low-impact technology), such as bicycles for transport and manual labour for food production. Each of these utopian works was environmentally thoughtful, if not radical, in its suggested path to a better world. But did these communalist visions sufficiently challenge both the oppositions (nature/society) and the hierarchies (man's interests before others) that have proven so destructive in the current age, or is a further radical shift needed in our vision of a reharmonised planet? (shrink)

The ability to produce and consume stories is a commonplace yet remarkable human activity. No wonder, then, that thinkers from vastly diverse fields are so interested in our narrative practices. Some argue that storytelling helps us to make sense of our lives and actions, while others claim that narratives are crucial in shaping or creating our identities. yet in all this discussion, the nature and core properties of stories are rarely put under philosophical scrutiny in the way that Gregory Currie (...) does in Narratives and Narrators: A philosophy of stories. (shrink)

As an introductory work of a PhD research project, this paper is about methodological choice. It is argued that hermeneutics or interpretive philosophy is proper for studying how accounting is practiced in its cultural contexts. This paper then introduces Geertz's conception of interpretive culture. It is argued that Geertz' s interpretive cultural thought suggests an alternative perspective for an attempt to understand how management accounting is implicated in its organisational cultural context. Thereafter a research agenda for the research project is (...) determined. (shrink)