Call For Papers

The emergent field of animal and animality studies is rapidly being articulated across scholarly boundaries. We invite graduate students to enter this growing conversation and approach the topic from perspectives reflecting the broad (inter)disciplinarity of this field. Discussions will use animal studies as a conceptual lens in order to investigate issues including the boundaries between self and Other, agency and biological drive, and reason and non-reason; the codes that permeate our conceptions of non-human animals; and the implications of troubling and/or making porous the human/animal divide. Is understanding human beings as embodied subjects ontologically bound to our relationship to non-human animals? In what ways is animal wellbeing crucially implicated in how we think ourselves into and against animals? As part of these discussions, we welcome investigations into the ways that (as Val Plumwood contends) animals, nature, and racial, colonial, and gendered Others function, now and historically, as overlapping sites of difference. We also invite considerations of the relationship between the conceptual economy that posits animality as an exploitable trope and forms of Othering that render animals as salable things. In approaching these topics, we encourage participants to consider how animal and animality studies has impacted other theoretical lenses, including critical race theory and feminist, postcolonial, and ecocritical/environmental studies, as well as the attendant politics of our disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the field.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Thinking with animals / intro-species boundary disruption
  • Becoming animals and biocentric ethics
  • The boundary between domestic and wild, sentiment and terror
  • Making animals 'matter' and the role of affect
  • Animal poetry and ecopoetics
  • Animals and the nation in the nineteenth century and beyond
  • Animals and spectacle (both alive and dead)
  • Urban and wild animals and the politics of space
  • Animal geographies and environmental histories
  • Animals and transnational ecologies
  • Speciesm and racism
  • Animals and desire / animality and sexuality
  • Vegetarianism and the politics of meat
  • Animals in language / symbolic animals
  • The discourses and iconography of animals in various cultural forms
  • The uses of animals in war and torture
  • Animal studies now and its future directions

Proposals may reflect traditional and innovative formats, including papers, panels, roundtables, and community dialogues, as well as creative submissions. Please send an abstract of approximately 250 words, along with your name, department, affiliation, and e-mail address to jaime.j.s.denike@queensu.ca. For creative submissions, send 30 lines of poetry or a 300 word excerpt.

The submission deadline has now passed. Thank you to all who submitted.

Call For Artistic Proposals And Submissions

Open call for Undergraduate and Graduate student artists or artists with an emerging creative practice interested in animal studies. In looking at animals, we have othered a creature that refuses to acknowledge that it is being othered.

Artists are invited to submit up to 3 pieces of work for this interdisciplinary exhibition, Just Act Natural, to take place in June 2010 in Kingston, Ontario.

The curatorial premise of the exhibition, Just Act Natural, focuses on a developing interspecies dialogue, identifying the private lives of animals and respecting their public lives. Just Act Natural invites artists to identify the differences between instinct and intuition, to design the moral evolution between spectacle and snuggle, the conquest of domesticated animals and the answer to the question: "How do you get the animals to do that?" Artists are encouraged to consider a critical and contemporary analysis of animals and animality within art. Submissions for 2 and 3 dimensional work, performance, audio and video work will be accepted, encouraging interdisciplinarity. The exhibition will include an evening of performance and film screenings on Friday, June 26th, 2010.

Submit for each proposed work (at a maximum of three works):

  • Up to 3 jpeg images of the proposed work (or relevant work)
  • A description of the proposed work, including physical qualities, spatial and hanging needs, technical requirements, etc (max. 150 words)
  • Artist statement (max. 500 words)
  • Brief biography and/or CV

Please contact Lisa Visser (visser.lisa@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

Submissions will be accepted in email or mail format:

visser.lisa@gmail.com

341 Delaware Avenue
Toronto, ON
M6H 2T7

The submission deadline has now passed. Thank you to all who submitted.