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A Nude Horse Is A Rude Horse: The Society For Indecency To Naked Animals, Thomas Aiello

Animal Studies Journal

In 1959, Alan Abel began sending out a series of press releases to American media outlets credited to a new organization, The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. Using the language of conservative moralists opposed to the changes in postwar society, he argued that ‘naked’ animals were scandalous and needed to be clothed. Pets, farm animals, and wildlife were all included, as the organization hued to slogans like ‘a nude horse is a rude horse’ and ‘decency today means morality tomorrow’. Abel employed comedian Buck Henry to play the organization’s president, G. Clifford Prout, who gave interviews and speeches covered …

Akbar, My Heart: Caregiving For A Dog During Covid-19, Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

Animal Studies Journal

Covid-19 originates with humans’ instrumentalization of other animals, an “inconvenient truth” elided by scientists procuring a vaccine while refusing to contend with the captivity, slaughter and encroachment on wild animals’ habitats that brought the fatal disease upon us. The interlocking of homo sapiens’ and other species’ suffering is, of course, glaringly evidenced by disproportionate Black and brown death due to Covid-19 worldwide, itself intensifying the foundational pandemic of anti-Black violence.

“Akbar, My Heart” contemplates transpecies loss in a relational frame, attending to the entanglement of white supremacy with anthropocentrism at the same time that I reflect on caregiving for my …

The View From Somewhere: A Review, Robert S. Boynton

RadioDoc Review

Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from Marketplace for questioning the mainstream media's conception of journalistic neutrality. He developed his critique in his 2019 book, The View From Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, a podcast of the same name, and in several ancillary products. Wallace concludes that “objectivity is a false ideal that upholds the status quo”, and news judgement has less to do with objective criteria than with “who controls the narrative, whose narratives matter, and how the appearance of mattering is created in a society rife with entrenched inequality”.

A Covid Calendar, In Twelve Animals, Dana Medoro

Animal Studies Journal

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

How To Determine The Boundaries Of The Mind: A Markov Blanket Proposal, Michael D. Kirchhoff, Julian Kiverstein

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

We develop a truism of commonsense psychology that perception and action constitute the boundaries of the mind. We do so however not on the basis of commonsense psychology, but by using the notion of a Markov blanket originally employed to describe the topological properties of causal networks. We employ the Markov blanket formalism to propose precise criteria for demarcating the boundaries of the mind that unlike other rival candidates for "marks of the cognitive" avoids begging the question in the extended mind debate. Our criteria imply that the boundary of the mind is nested and multiscale sometimes extending beyond the …

Mai ’68 French Revolutionary And General Strike Posters, Michael Organ

Counterculture Studies

The May 1968 (Mai ’68) social and cultural revolution in France generated a distinctive collection of posters produced by students associated with various Paris-based university community workshops known as Ateliers Populaire. These ephemeral items were in the form of graphically simple, primarily monotone, silkscreen posters. As an expression of the prevailing counterculture, they represented the important role of the fine arts in expressing to the wider public, and supporting, the concerns and desires of young people involved in the widespread protests which sought to curtail restriction of individual freedom of expression on university campuses, and support the actions of workers …

Zoognosis: When Animal Knowledges Go Viral. Laura Jean Mckay’S The Animals In That Country, Contagion, Becoming-Animal, And The Politics Of Predation., Tessa Laird

Animal Studies Journal

This paper proposes a creative neologism: zoognosis, with an added g, to indicate that knowledges can be transmitted virally from animals to humans. If so, what are the animals trying to tell us? Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) provides an opportunity to find out. McKay’s prescient novel was written before, but published during, the COVID-19 pandemic, and is about a ‘zooflu’ that enables the infected to understand animals. The author has forged a poetic language based on animal sensory perceptions, what ethologist Jakob von Uexküll termed Umwelten. In doing so McKay effects a ‘becoming-animal’ …

The Contagion Of Slow Violence: The Slaughterhouse And Covid-19, Kelly Struthers Montford, Tessa Wotherspoon

Animal Studies Journal

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 (Nixon, Ward), 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 …

Greedy Bat Eaters Versus Cruel Pig Killers: The Lose-Lose Battle Of Divisive Discourse, Angela Lee

Animal Studies Journal

Unsurprisingly, the circumstances and challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic have generated strong reactions. Among the more notable, Canadian musician and animal activist Bryan Adams made headlines when he went on a tirade on social media denouncing ‘fucking bat eating, wet market animal selling, virus making greedy bastards’ and advocating for veganism. This article uses this incident as a prism through which to examine the values and assumptions informing some of the central debates within the mainstream animal advocacy movement today. Certainly, there is an urgent need for a critical re-evaluation of the policies and practices that have created …

Covid-19 And Capital: Labour Studies And Nonhuman Animals – A Roundtable Dialogue, Charlotte Blattner, Kendra Coulter, Dinesh Wadiwel, Eva Kasprzycka

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): Covid-19 and Capital: Labour Studies and Nonhuman Animals – A Roundtable Dialogue.

[Review] Penny Johnson. Companions In Conflict: Animals In Occupied Palestine. Melville House Publishing, 2019., Esther Alloun

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Penny Johnson. Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine. Melville House Publishing, 2019.

[Review] Rosemary-Claire Collard, Animal Traffic . Duke University Press, 2020, Xv + 181pp., John Simons

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Rosemary-Claire Collard, Animal Traffic . Duke University Press, 2020, xv + 181pp.

[Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life And The Birth Of The Mind. New York: Farar, Straus And Giroux, 2020. 336 Pp., David Herman

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Nature In The Dark - Public Space For More-Than-Human Encounters, Jan Brueggemeier

Animal Studies Journal

Drawing on the continuing work of the Nature in the Dark (NITD) project, an art collaboration and publicity campaign between the Centre for Creative Arts (La Trobe University) and the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA), 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. …

Habitat Mosaic, Adrienne Corradini

Animal Studies Journal

In this creative work a young fox and a hunter’s daughter negotiate the emotional and physical landscape of a rural Australian property.

Empathy, Animals, And Deadly Vices, Kathie Jenni

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

'Fulfilling Your Dog's Potential': Changing Dimensions Of Power In Dog Training Cultures In The Uk, Nickie Charles, Rebekah Fox, Harriet Smith, Mara Miele

Animal Studies Journal

This article explores the workings of power in dog training cultures through an analysis of UK dog training manuals from the mid-19th century to the present. We focus on gundog and companion dog training cultures, investigating the dog-human relations they assume, the changing conceptions of human-animal relations they represent, and the inequalities and relations of power in which they are embedded. Rather than thinking about changing training practices in terms of a shift from dominance to positive training, or from instrumental to affective relations, we argue that training cultures reveal how inter-species inequalities are conceptualised and reproduced in a range …

[Review] Teya Brooks Pribac. Enter The Animal: Cross-Species Perspectives On Grief And Spirituality. Sydney University Press, 2021. 262 Pp, Donovan O. Schaefer

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Teya Brooks Pribac. Enter the Animal: Cross-species Perspectives on Grief and Spirituality. Sydney University Press, 2021. 262 pp

[Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance In Worlds Of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 Pp., Tessa Laird

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Deborah Bird Rose. Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 240 pp.

[Review] Marcus Byrne And Helen Lunn. Dance Of The Dung Beetles: Their Role In Our Changing World. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. 228 Pp., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn. Dance of the Dung Beetles: Their Role in Our Changing World. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019. 228 pp.

Multispecies Disposability: Taxonomies Of Power In A Global Pandemic, Darren Chang, Lauren Corman

Animal Studies Journal

This paper bridges critical conversations regarding animal exploitation and racialized violence that have been occurring throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply Claire Jean Kim’s analysis of taxonomies of power to help make sense of the interwoven multispecies catastrophes of racialized animalization and animalized racialization, such as the violence experienced by various species of nonhuman animals, as well as East Asians and other People of Colour in the West, whether in public spaces, in media, on farms, or inside industrial animal slaughterhouses or meatpacking plants. We conclude by arguing that Kim’s ethics of mutual avowal provides a productive way for social …

[Review] Jody Berland. Virtual Menageries: Animals As Mediators In Network Cultures. Cambridge Mass: Mit Press, 2019. 328 Pp., Prof. Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Jody Berland. Virtual Menageries: Animals as Mediators in Network Cultures. Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 2019. 328 pp.

[Review] Susan Mary Pyke. Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing. Palgrave Studies In Animals And Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 314 Pp., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Susan Mary Pyke. Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 314 pp.

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Contributor Biographies.

Persona Non Grata, Philip Armstrong, Annie Potts

Animal Studies Journal

This essay tells the story of the authors’ relationship with a rescued marsupial raised from a baby in Aotearoa New Zealand, in sections interspersed with an account of this species’ history in our country. This animal belongs to a species designated a noxious pest here, a population subject to an especially sustained, thorough, and popularly-supported campaign of vilification and destruction, even by the standards that apply in New Zealand, where the dominant environmental ideology is very intensely focussed on eradication of introduced species. So in deciding to take responsibility for this creature, the authors committed to keeping her both hidden …

Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping Affect In The Works Of Naeemah Naeemaei, Linda Williams

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

Learning To Read Equine Agency: Sense And Sensitivity At The Intersection Of Scientific, Tacit And Situated Knowledges, Sanna Karkulehto, Nora Schuurman

Animal Studies Journal

The aim of this essay is to address the challenges and problems in communicating with horses and interpreting their communication in everyday handling and training situations. We seek ways to learn more about equine communication and agency in the prevention of cruelty against animals and in enhancing animal welfare. We ask how it would be possible to learn to read the subtle signs of equine communication and agency in a sensible, sensitive, and ethical way to increase the health and wellbeing of horses that humans interact with. We have placed this theoretical examination in a multidisciplinary framework that consists of …

[Review] Austin Mcquinn. Becoming Audible: Sounding Animality In Performance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 200 Pp., Annie Garlid

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Austin McQuinn. Becoming Audible: Sounding Animality in Performance. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 200 pp.

[Review] Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring And Karen Lykke Syse, Editors. Environmental And Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze. Lexington Books 2021. 242 Pp., Teya Brooks Pribac

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Tomaž Grušovnik, Reingard Spannring and Karen Lykke Syse, editors. Environmental and Animal Abuse Denial: Averting Our Gaze. Lexington Books 2021. 242 pp.

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Melissa Boyde

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Contributor Biographies.