Call for Session Proposals and Abstracts: EACAS Conference 2025 in Berlin, Germany

Deadline: January 31, 2025

The European Association for Critical Animal Studies (EACAS) invites session proposals and abstracts for the upcoming conference, “Actioning Change Through Education: Transforming Human-Animal Relations in Times of Crisis”, to be held in Berlin, Germany from May 2–4, 2025.

The conference will explore meaningful improvements to human-animal relationships with a focus on practical solutions.

Key questions include: 

– What role can education play in fostering just relationships between humans and other animals? 

– What societal shifts are required for an ethical and sustainable coexistence with nonhuman animals? 

– How do we connect different struggles for social justice by addressing how deeply intertwined the well-being of humans, nonhumans and our shared planet is?

– What kind of policy changes and practices are best suited to increase public awareness of the interdependence of human, animal and planetary health?

This conference emphasizes actionable approaches over theoretical discussions. Proposals offering hands-on insights, concrete strategies, and real-world examples are especially encouraged. Bridging academia and practice is essential to driving lasting change.

Possible Topics Include: 

– Public education on animal justice and environmental sustainability 

– Policy and legal frameworks to protect animals and ecosystems 

– The role of media and culture in shaping perceptions of nonhuman animals 

– Strategies for promoting plant-based diets and addressing animal exploitation 

– Cultivating empathy and raising awareness of interconnectedness with nature

We invite scholars, activists, educators, policymakers, practitioners, and artists to submit proposals focusing on actionable ideas and tangible outcomes.

Submission Guidelines

Session Proposals:

Submit a session proposal (maximum 500 words) along with a brief biography of each session chair to Dr. Kathrin Herrmann, Email: kherrma1@jhu.edu. Sessions are 120 minutes, with formats such as four 20-minute presentations followed by a 10-minute discussion or a panel format.

Abstracts: 

Submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) for a 20-minute paper to kherrma1@jhu.edu. Include a separate document with your name, email, institution, and short biography.

Deadline: January 31, 2025.

Decisions will be communicated in mid-February 2025.

Further details on registration will follow.

For more information, please contact: kherrma1@jhu.edu

Thanks to everyone who presented or attended the joint EACAS/Animal Futures conference. Many thanks also to our Estonian hosts. As soon as the talks are available online we well let you know here. Now start thinking about Berlin in 2025!

We would love it if delegates to the joint EACAS/Animal Futures Conference this week could make a donation to any of these good causes:

• Estonian Vegan Society: https://vegan.ee/tegutse/toeta/
• Loomus: https://loomus.ee/toeta/
• The latest Vegan Land Movement Campaign: https://globalvegancrowdfunder.org/vegan-land-movement-animal-agriculture-land-buyout-2/
• Freshfields Animal Rescue: https://www.nowdonate.com/checkout/x6me81w4x35b9h4v8d5d
• Institute for Animal Happiness microsanctuary: http://www.instituteforanimalhappiness.com/donate-1
• Hugletts Wood Farm Animal Sanctuary: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/huglettswood?fbclid=IwAR2S58El5tHo4_gPZIbBX01mkHImhxiAwLMQYSqzODvV1dbeUjAYtsBK-jw

Thank you and enjoy the conference!

Title: Vegan Intersectionality

Call for Paper Deadline: June 1, 2023

Date: October 7 & 8 2023

Location: Online

Schedule: TBD

Mainstream theories of social inequality frequently compartmentalize experiences, but inequality rarely works that way in real life. Instead, individuals are comprised of many different identities at once, and these identities will interact with one another in unique ways. Furthermore, multiple systems and institutions are simultaneously at work in a given society. This schema is known as intersectionality, and it is a concept that emerges out of Black feminist thought.

In animal studies, vegan scholars employ this framework to argue that one’s life chances will be shaped, not just by one’s race, class, or gender, but also by their species. Vegan scholars also recognize the influence of an additional system….human supremacy. Historical constructions of race, class, gender, and other identities shape how animals are thought about and how they are treated. Sociologists interested in human justice, meanwhile, would benefit from recognizing how human oppression is always shaped by processes of species inequality.

Given that species, class, race, gender, and other identity categories are all historically constructed using similar mechanisms (such as animalization, objectification, sexualization, depersonalization, denaming, and so on), it is important to apply an intersectional perspective to achieve a more accurate understanding of oppression for nonhuman animals and humans alike. In the fourth annual meeting of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists, we take on this important task, one that is fundamental to vegan sociological theory.

Submission Guidelines

The 2023 IAVS annual meeting will showcase research related to veganism, animal rights, and theories of intersectionality. We welcome submissions for individual presentations (15 minutes and an additional 5 for questions) or panels (45 minutes with 15 for questions) to be delivered in an online format.

Please note that all submissions should fall within the guidelines of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. We are only accepting sociological submissions; submissions that lack a clear sociological focus will not be included. To that end, all submissions must include a one or two sentence rationale clarifying how the submission aligns with sociological theory or practice.

This online conference, organised by the International Association of Vegan Sociologists will be held online and will accommodate North American, European, and Australian time zones. Proposals and queries should be sent to info@vegansociology.com by 1st June. It is expected that all potential presenters have familiarised themselves with the principles of IAVS and plan their presentations with these in mind.

Proposal Checklist:

• Name
• Affiliation (if any)
• Preferred email
• Title of talk
• Abstract (50-300 words)
• Sociological relevance (1-2 sentences)

More info: https://www.vegansociology.com/conference/

Call for papers for a symposium at the European Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference

Conference Date: Online 15-17 September 2021
Deadline for Submissions: 9 June 2021

Alison Moore and Daniel Lees Fryer

In recent years, the humanities and social sciences have witnessed an “animal turn”, an increasing interest in and centering of the lives of nonhuman animals and human-animal relations (Ritvo 2007, Pedersen 2014, inter alia), more recently situated within the context of social justice (Celermajer et al. 2021). We might expect this animal turn to have been taken up with gusto in systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and social semiotics (SFS), given their focus on language, representation, ideology and identity, but although some important work has been produced (e.g. Benson and Greaves 2005, Benson and Thibault 2009, Knight 2006), this has not yet led to a sustained subfield of SFL/SFS such as we see, for example, in educational semiotics. Inspired by the theme of ESFLC 2021 and building on the above work, we want to explore new ways that SFL and SFS can contribute to improving human-animal relations and the actual lives of individuals regardless of species, by critically addressing the statuses, roles and interests of non-human animals in society and the part that semiotic scholarship can play in understanding and acting. Our plan is to bring selected papers from the symposium together with some invited pieces to produce a special issue or edited volume.

Rationale

There is a rich history in systemic functional theory and social semiotics, as well as in related fields such as critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, of studying language and meaning as social action (e.g. Kress and Hodge 1979, Hodge and Kress 1988, Fairclough 1992, Martin 2004). Indeed a core premise of SFL has been that the study of language, text, and context is never neutral, but rather “a mode of intervention in critical social practices” (Halliday 1993: 223-224). We note that “intervention” here includes practising linguistics or semiotics in a way that maintains the status quo, whether deliberate or not. A related theme that has energised SFL/SFS is the insistence that meaning potential is unevenly distributed across participants in a culture, usually along the lines of class, gender, ethnicity, generation, and capacity (e.g. Martin 1992: 575-576). 

Nonhuman animals are participants in these cultures, too. They are our companions, our protection, our food, our entertainment, our medicine, and our (wild) imagination. Their lives, largely contingent on ours, are precarious and expendable, but their collective and individual interests are not merely subordinate to our own. While animals are probably more affected by material oppression than the symbolic oppression that helps to marginalise certain groups of humans, recent scholarship suggests we underestimate animals’ capacity – and ours – to participate together in the meaning making practices that constitute everyday multispecies life (Plumwood 1993, Celermajer 2021). But either way, our meaning making practices as humans are central to what kind of life the members of other species can live. As Thibault puts it, ”[t]he human semiotic footprint has contributed to the deeply ingrained ideological view that humans are exceptional and that other species exist to be harvested and exploited for our benefit and profit”, going on to call for humans to ‘tidy up their semiotic act’ (2020: 214). In our view, a special responsibility pertains to those who not only participate in semiotic processes but also model and teach them.

In this symposium, we invite papers that respond to the animal turn, to the animal other, or more generally to the lives of nonhuman animals from a social semiotic or systemic functional perspective. We particularly welcome proposals that seek to advance nonhuman animals’ interests (though this may be a longterm goal beyond the specific academic project). Papers can include, but need not be limited to, the following topics:

• Inter- and intraspecies communication
• Animal advocacy and/or animal liberation
• Animals and the media
• Animals and education
• Animals and medicine
• Animals and the climate predicament
• Animal agriculture
• Animal studies or critical animal studies
• Animals and nationalism
• Animals and social justice
• Glottocentrism
• Critical reflection on disciplinary theory and practice

Paper proposals

Abstracts for papers should be sent to both symposium organisers (details below) by 9 JUNE. They should follow the ESFLC 2021 guidelines and contain a short title, name(s) of presenter(s), affiliation(s), a summary of up to 250 words (excluding references), and up to five key words. 

For more information, please contact the symposium organisers, or visit the ESFLC 2021 website: https://www.esflc2021.org.uk  

Contact information

Alison Moore: amoore@uow.edu.au 

Daniel Lees Fryer: daniel.l.fryer@hiof.no 

References

Benson, James D. & William S. Greaves (eds). 2005. Functional Dimensions of Ape-Human Discourse. London: Equinox.  

Benson, James D. & Paul Thibault. 2009. Language and other primate species. In Halliday, M.A.K. and Jonathan Webster (Eds) Continuum companion to Systemic Functional Linguistics, 104-112. London: Continuum.

Celermajer, Danielle, Schlossberg, David, Rickards, Lauren, et al. 2021. “Multispecies justice: theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics.” Environmental Politics 30: 119-140. 

Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and social change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. 2003 [1993]. “Language in a changing world.” In Volume 3 in the collected works of M. A. K. Halliday. On language and linguistics, edited by Jonathan J. Webster, 213-231. London: Continuum.

Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress. 1988. Social semiotics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Knight, Naomi. 2006. Appraisal in bonobo-human culture: negotiating social behavioural  parameters through evaluation with bonobo apes. Linguistics & the Human Sciences 2:355-376.

Kress, Gunther, and Robert Hodge. 1979. Language as ideology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Martin, J. R. 1992. English text: system and structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Martin, J. R. 2004. “Positive Discourse Analysis: Power, solidarity and change.” Revista canaria de estudios Ingleses 49: 179-202.

Moore, Alison Rotha. 2014. “That could be me: Identity and identification in discourses about food, meat, and animal welfare.” Linguistics & the Human Sciences 9: 59-93. Special Issue on Identity, edited by Alexanne Don. 

Pedersen, Helena. 2014. “Knowledge production in the “animal turn”: multiplying the image of thought, empathy, and justice.” In Exploring the animal turn: human-animal relations in science, society and culture, edited by Erika Andersson Cederholm, Amelie Björck, Kristina Jennbert and Ann-Sofie Lönngren, 13-18. Lund: Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies.

Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Ritvo, Harriet. 2007. “On the animal turn.” Daedalus 136 (4): 118-122.

Thibault, P. (2020) ”Interspecies relationality in the Animal Rescue genre: Multimodal resources for empathy construction in video texts.” Section E in Baldry, A. & Thibault, P. with Coccetta, F., Kantz, D. & Taibi, D. ”Multimodal Ecological Literacy: Animal and human interactions in the Animal Rescue genre.” In Vasta, A. and Baldry, A. (eds). Multiliteracy advances and multimodal challenges in ELT environments. Udine: Forum.