Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From Statement To Purpose: An Interview With Bill Siemering, Neil Verma

RadioDoc Review

This article is an interview between RadioDoc Review Editor Neil Verma and Bill Siemering, founding Director of Programming at National Public Radio and lifelong proponent of public radio. Siemering and Verma discuss Siemering's role at the founding of NPR, his earlymcareer in Wisconsin, WHYY Philadelphia, WBFO and KCCM, as well as his enduring work in community radio development in Africa.

Cover Page, Table Of Contents, Editorial And Contributor Biographies, Sally Borrell, Clare Archer-Lean

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 11(1): Cover Page, Table of Contents, Editorial and Contributor Biographies.

Mutual Rescue: Disabled Animals And Their Caretakers, Lynda Birke, Lori Gruen

Animal Studies Journal

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 – …

Wild Dogs And Decolonization: Ivan Sen’S Mystery Road And Omar Musa’S Here Come The Dogs, Iris Ralph

Animal Studies Journal

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 (2013), a film by the First Nations-Australian director, Ivan Sen, and Here Come the Dogs (2014), 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 …

Snake Church, Sue Hall Pyke

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

Learning Hope In The Anthropocene: The Party For The Animals And Hope As A Political Practice, Eva Meijer

Animal Studies Journal

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, …

Zoolondopolis, Pablo P. Castelló

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

[Review] Mieke Roscher, André Krebber, And Brett Mizelle, Editors. Handbook Of Historical Animal Studies. Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2021. 637 Pp., David Herman

Animal Studies Journal

[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’ (1–18), 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 …

Breed(Ing) Narratives: Visualizing Values In Industrial Farming, Camille Bellet, Emily Morgan

Animal Studies Journal

In this study, we consider how farmed animals, specifically pigs and chickens, are visualised in literature designed for circulation within animal production industries. The way breeding companies create and circulate images of industrial animals tells us a lot about their visions of what industrial animals are and how they believe animals should be treated. Drawing upon a wide range of material designed for circulation within animal production industries, from the 1880s to the 2010s, this paper examines how representations of pigs and chickens contribute to stories of perfection and advance ideals of power, race, gender, and progress. We demonstrate that …

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

Animal Studies Journal

Animal Studies Journal 2022 11(2): Cover Page, Table of Contents, and Contributor Biographies.

Indigenous, Settler, Animal; A Triadic Approach, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Lynette Russell

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

(Animal) Oppression: Responding To Questions Of Efficacy And (Il)Legitimacy In Animal Advocacy With A New Collective Action/Master Frame, Paula Arcari

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

[Review] Tom Tyler. Game: Animals, Video Games, And Humanity. University Of Minnesota Press, 2022. 152 Pp., Michael Swistara

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Tom Tyler. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 152 pp.

[Review] Antoinette Burton And Renisa Mawani, Editors. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary For Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 240pp., Peta Tait

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, editors. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. 240pp.

[Review] Maren Tova Linett. Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, And The Human. New York University Press, 2020. Crip: New Directions In Disability Studies. 213 Pages., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

[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] Dominic O’Key. Creaturely Forms In Contemporary Literature: Narrating The War Against Animals. Bloomsbury Pub., 2022. 202 Pp., John Drew

Animal Studies Journal

[Review] Dominic O’Key. Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals. Bloomsbury Pub., 2022. 202 pp.

Creativity And Cross-Institutional Collaboration In The Digidex Community Of Practice, Kat Cain, Karen Miller, Kristy Newton

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Responding to industry need, the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) sector-wide approach to developing digital dexterity established a unique practitioner-led network and Community of Practice (CoP). This paper focuses on how a core-group (Digital Dexterity Champions) within the cross-institutional CoP has self-formed a flourishing learning culture that fosters creativity. We explore aspects underpinning the creative collaboration evident within the Champions culture. In sharing stories of creative library practice, we highlight the generative power of initiatives that nurture a sharing culture. We argue for the value of supporting cross-boundary spaces that enable individuals to work creatively together.

[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., Michelle Hamadache

Animal Studies Journal

[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 …

‘Cultured’ Food Futures? Agricultural Power, New Meat Ontologies, And Law In The Anthropocene, Kelly Struthers Montford

Animal Studies Journal

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 …

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach And Ron Broglio, Editors. The Edinburgh Companion To Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 Pp., Wendy Woodward

Animal Studies Journal

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

[Review] Liz P.Y. Chee. Mao’S Bestiary: Medicinal Animals And Modern China. Duke University Press, 2021. 288 Pp., Peter J. Li

Animal Studies Journal

[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 (Worldometer). Acknowledging Wuhan’s wildlife market as the ground zero of the pandemic and the devastation caused by SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) 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 (National People’s Congress of …

The Number Game: Counting Kangaroos, David Brooks

Animal Studies Journal

Well over one million kangaroos are shot each year in New South Wales, around half of them for the kangaroo ‘industry’, a harvest underpinned by the annual supply of population estimates sustaining the widespread impression that kangaroos are a ‘pest’, ‘in plague proportions’. Each year these figures, added to historical tables (typically from 1990 onward), are published as part of the state’s Quota Report, upon which the following year’s shooting quota is based. Drawn from aerial surveys, these estimates are nevertheless characterised by the persistent incidence of extraordinary annual population growth rates, well in excess of biological possibility. This …

‘Her Brains Are All Over Her Body’: Jeff Vandermeer’S Avian Weird, Toyah Webb

Animal Studies Journal

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” (2008, 31). 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 …