After the success of the 6^th EACAS Conference last month in Barcelona we are now looking for proposals for the next conference three day conference to be held in 2021. We are ideally looking for a new hosting country (conferences have already taken place in the UK, the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and Spain). We anticipate a conference happening in May or September 2021 and we are also interested in receiving appropriate themes for the meeting.

The organisers of the Barcelona conference look forward to passing on their experience and expertise in order to help the new team.

Please send your ideas to eacas.eu@gmail.com by September 15th 2019.

September 12-13, 2019
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
Abstracts due 31 January 2019

Keynote Speakers:
Kari Weil, Wesleyan University (US)
Derek Ryan, University of Kent (UK)

​‘I still do not think La Somnambule the perfect title – Night Beast would be better except for that debased meaning now put on that nice word beast.’ – Djuna Barnes to Emily Holmes Coleman

​‘Once again we are in a knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down’ – Donna Haraway

​If modernism heralded a moment of socio-political, cultural and aesthetic transformation, it also instigated a refashioning of how we think about, encounter, and live with animals. Beasts abound in modernism. Virginia Woolf’s spaniel, T.S. Eliot’s cats, James Joyce’s earwig, D.H. Lawrence’s snake, Samuel Beckett’s lobster, and Djuna Barnes’s lioness all present prominent examples of where animals and animality are at the forefront of modernist innovation. At stake in such beastly figurations are not just matters of species relations, but questions of human animality and broader ideas of social relations, culture, sex, gender, capitalism, and religion. Modernism’s interest in the figure of the animal speaks to the immense changes in animal life in the early twentieth century, a period where the reverberations of Darwinian theory were being felt in the new life sciences, as well as emergent social theories that employed discourses of species, and developing technologies and markets that radically alerted everyday human-animal relations. It was also a period in which new theories of human responsibilities towards animals were also being articulated with Donald Watson coining the idea of veganism in 1944.

The recent “animal turn” in the humanities invites new ways of thinking about the beasts that we find in modernist culture. Moreover, animal studies arrives at a point at which modernist studies is already in the process of redefining what modernism means. Turning to modernism’s beasts not only promises fresh ways of understanding its multispecies foundations, but also points towards how modernist studies might intervene in contemporary debates around animal life. Building on the foundational work on animals and modernism by Carrie Rohman, Margot Norris, Kari Weil, Derek Ryan and others, Beastly Modernisms invites papers on animals and all aspects of modernist culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

•    Animal Life, Species and Speciesism
•    Beasts, Beastliness and Bestiality
•    The Creaturely
•    Unstable Signifiers
•    Animal Rights, Ethics and Politics
•    Anti-Vivisection Movements
•    Bestial Ontologies and Materialities
•    Queer Animals and Sexuality
•    Anthropocentrism and Anthropomorphism
•    Human Animality and Social Darwinism
•    Animal Commodification and Capitalism
•    Race, Class, Sex and Gender
•    Religion, Myth and Animism
•    Wildlife, Imperialism and Hunting
•    Pets, Companion Species and Domestic Animals
•    Biology, Ethology, Ecology and the Natural Sciences
•    Animal Performance, Circuses and Zoos
•    Animal Trauma, Violence and Warfare
•    Extinction and the Anthropocene
•    Livestock, Agriculture and Working Animals
•    Meat Production and the Animal Industry
•    Vegetarianism, Veganism and Eating Animals
•    Modernist Animal Philosophy
•    Humanism, Posthumanism and Transhumanism
•    Early- and Late- Modernist Animals 

Papers
Individual papers should be no more than twenty minutes in length. Please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biography to beastlymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 January 2019.  

Panels
We welcome proposals for panels or roundtables of 3 to 4 speakers. Please send an abstract of 500 words and speaker biographies to beastlymodernisms@gmail.com by 31 January 2019. 

​Submissions are open to all researchers at every level of study. We particularly encourage submissions from postgraduate researchers.

We would like to announce the details and call for papers for the British Animal Studies Network Autumn conference, entitled ‘Animal Machines / Machine Animals’.

The conference will take place on the 2nd and 3rd November, and is organised by the Life Geographies Group of the University of Exeter.

As well as a number of invited speakers (to be announced) we are also issuing this call for papers. If you are interested in giving a paper addressing the topic from whatever disciplinary perspective please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words with a brief biography (also of no more than 200 words). Please send them to R.Gorman@exeter.ac.uk and G.f.Davies@exeter.ac.uk.

The deadline for abstracts is Friday 29 June 2018. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. Sadly we have no money to support travel, accommodation or attendance costs.

Meeting fees will be £25 for unwaged and £50 for waged attendees.

As with all previous BASN meetings, this one takes as its focus a key issue in animal studies that it is hoped will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines and to those working outside of academia. Topics covered at this meeting might include (but are not limited to):

• The (re)shaping of human-animal relations through (ideas about) machines.
• Animal-machine interactions, hybridities, and co-constitutions.
• Ways of thinking across machines and animals in relation to ontology, epistemology, and ethics.
• Animal bodies, agencies, and autonomies within mechanised systems.
• The role of machines in facilitating and co-producing experiences and engagements with non-human animals.
• Augmented and machinic animals in art, literature, and film.
• The ontological and affective aspects of ‘robotic pets’ and other animal-machine hybrids.

We welcome papers that deal with the theme of ‘Machine Animals / Animal Machines’ in both contemporary and historical settings, and would especially like to see papers that address these issues from contexts outside the UK. Papers are welcomed from across animal studies, including disciplines such as (but not limited to) geography, anthropology, sociology, literary studies, art history, history, science and technology studies, ethology, psychology, behavioural sciences and ecology, bioscience/biomedical research.

For further details of the British Animal Studies Network go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk

We are happy to announce that the 6th European Conference for Critical Animal Studies will take place at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

It will be organized by the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics and the research group CRITICC at the Department of Communication.

Organising committee conists of Núria Almiron, Eze Paez, Catia Faria, Daniela R. Warldhorn and Laura Fernández.

CfHAS PhD candidate Abi Masefield (UK) offers a review of the recent Fifth European Conference for Critical Animal Studies, held at the Pufendorf Institute, Lund University, Sweden 26-28th October 2017

NONHUMAN ANIMALS IN SOCIETY:
EXPLORING NEW PATHWAYS FOR RESISTANCE, CHANGE, AND ACCOMMODATION

The European Association for Critical Animal Studies (EACAS) www.eacas.eu

Photo: Terry Hurtado

This was my first Critical Animal Studies (CAS) Conference and set against the backdrop of bright Autumnal Lund I was certainly not disappointed. The stated aim of this conference was to ‘display how scholarly work can contribute to eliminate the domination and oppression of all animals’. It was very much an international event with over 125 people attending from over 19 countries spanning 5 continents, and the event was impressively managed by the 6 strong organizing committee (The full programme can be found at: https://animalsconferencelund.wordpress.com/).

Spread over three full days, the skeleton of the conference was structured around a quartet of key note presentations by Zipporah Weisberg; Jo-Anne McArthur; Erika Cudworth and Matthew Cole; and Volker Sommer. In between these deep-dives, the classical conference structure of parallel panel presentations prevailed to flesh out the content and provide an abundance of opportunities for researchers to both share their work and digest the rich offerings of others. Personally, I had not anticipated just how important the feedback I received following a presentation of my own research (at Edge Hill University – exploring the intersections of coloniality and speciesism in development discourse around tackling hunger and malnutrition and ‘the right to food’ with ‘the right to not be food’) would be in terms of helping me to prioritise the relative significance of certain messages as well as to fire up my motivation.

Photo: Tereza Vandrovcová

Coffee breaks (known as ‘fika’ in Swedish and sometimes accompanied by a delicious sweet treat to energise participants) often felt too short to continue conversations and a delicious dinner at Kao’s vegan restaurant in Malmo provided a much needed breathing space for further discussion.
Of course, a conference is experienced from specific vantage points. Looking back, this one was nothing less than a richly orchestrated three-day firework display of explosive ideas, sparking questions and colourful interactions. As a researcher embarking on the daunting adventure of a PhD the overall effect was both dazzling and inspiring.

The key note presentations were each fascinating in their own way. However, one in particular stood out by resonating with my own research and introducing me to a key thinker who I had somehow failed to register so far in the wanderings of my literature review. So I am especially grateful to Lund for acquainting me with Erika Cudworth and her insights into the ‘theoretical and political challenges to exclusive humanism’ and the animalization inherent not only in colonialism, but in the entire ‘civilizing process’ in which we are all caught up and thereby alienated from our animal selves. Erika’s paper setting out a ‘posthumanist manifesto’ and call for a ‘strategy of terraism’ starts from both the ‘bodied nature of the human’ and the ‘shrinking of the idea of the human as we know it.’ Needless to say, I have been hungrily exploring her writing in the weeks since the conference.

Photo: Tereza Vandrovcová

So many other ideas have continued to resonate through my thinking long since the conference ended. Zipporah Weisberg’s discussion of animals’ capacity to care as an additional confirmation of their agency has opened my awareness (as a Terran) in reconnecting with animals. Jo-Anne McArthur’s powerful images have reinforced my appreciation of the requirement to resist the urge to turn away. David Pederson’s ‘Meat-a-Physics’ has made me more determined than ever to better understand meat as a core identifier of humanism. Iselin Gambert and Tobias Linne’s exploration of the entanglement of milk with colonial power and white supremacy drew important connections. And whenever I hear ‘the news’ before long I am reminded of Terry Hurtado’s examination of the connection between dehumanisation and animal suffering in times of war and the characterisation of war as the animalisation of humans (the exclusion of the human enemy from the moral community).

The conference also pushed participants to think more about the potential value of Marxist perspectives for critical animal studies (particularly Adorno with reference to the human’s forgotten ‘likeness to animals’) and invited participants into urban spaces as well as among camel and chimpanzee communities.

Photo: Tereza Vandrovcová

With the conference drawing to a close, inevitably, and just like every delicious feast, satiation began to set in and I started to realise that my mind was getting tired. But as my youngest daughter always reminds me, no matter how full we may feel, there is always a room for a desert. So, it was with EvaMarie Lindahl’s innovative and deeply moving performance piece, set in the Bishops House gallery and evolving from her practice based doctoral project in which she rewrites art from the perspective of the non-human animals who are standing inside the frame. EvaMarie is a Malmo based artist and doctoral student with the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University. This unexpected experience, transporting those present to an entirely different realm, made the perfect closure for a weary brain, as it spoke to somewhere entirely different – perhaps more embedded in my animal self.

As thoughts turn to the next CAS Conference – Barcelona in 2019 – EvaMarie’s performance also lights up the tremendous creative possibilities presented by the opportunity to go bolder, re-imagine and further de-civilize the very institution of the Conference (carnference?) – one that remains so firmly rooted in the ‘civilizing’ project. To harness the performance itself to contribute to destabilising the classical divides of human and animal, mind and body, theory and practice, academic and activist that gave rise to the birth of Critical Animal Studies in the first place.

But before time moves on, what remains to be said is one final and truly heartfelt THANK YOU to Lund for making possible an unforgettable exchange with such wonderful people. This conference was a special moment – the sort that occur only occasionally in life, but will be treasured for long after.

Abi Masefield (PhD Candidate, Centre for Human-Animal Studies, Edge Hill University, UK)
January 2018