Call for Papers

Decolonizing Animals: Australasian Animal Studies Association Conference 2019

 

Hosted by the New Zealand Centre
for Human-Animal Studies

 

 

Dates: July 1^st — 4^th 2019

Venue: Ōtautahi/Christchurch,

Aotearoa/New Zealand

CALL FOR PAPERS

This call is now closed.

Colonial politics and histories have shaped, and continue to shape, the contemporary worlds of humans and other animals. Languages, societies, cultures, species, landforms, ecosystems, waterways and climates all bear the marks of human imperialism, settlement, invasion, migration, translocation, globalization, colonialism and neocolonialism. What would it mean for humans to decolonize their relationships with each other and with other species? Could we ever become decolonizing animals?

The next biennial conference of the Australasian Animal Studies Association will be held in Ōtautahi / Christchurch, Aotearoa / New Zealand – a city and a country that embody the impacts of colonialism on human and nonhuman animals alike. The conference committee calls for papers that address the themes below in ways that are scholarly, creative, or activist – or all three:

• Animals and indigeneity
• Indigenous approaches to human-animal studies
• Animals in relation to migration and immigration; dislocation and exile; borders, refugees, and camps; asylum and sanctuary
• Colonial histories of animals or human-animal relations
• Decolonial politics and animals or human-animal relations
• Ecological imperialism
• Epistemological, representational, conceptual colonization and decolonization of animals in film, literature, the arts, digital media
• Violence, war, genocide, invasiveness, domination in human-animal relations
• Human-horse relationships across cultures
• Colonization, decolonization, animals, and the environmental crisis
• Indigeneity and veg*nism
• Critiques of animal consumption and food practices
• Animals and cultural conflict and exchange
• Decolonizing the Anthropocene
• Decolonizing carnism
• Decolonizing agriculture, environmental management, ‘pest’ control, animal breeding, ‘pet’-keeping, bloodsports, animal entertainment, or other human-animal practices
• Critiques of ethnocentric, imperialist, anthropocentric, or universalist paradigms for understanding animals
• Human-animal studies and decolonial studies
• Intersections between decolonial perspectives on animals and human-animal relations with those emerging from critical race studies; feminist, gender, queer, and trans studies; Marxist and neo-Marxist approaches; disability studies; etc.

Please send abstracts in the form of an email attachment (MS Word or compatible – not PDF please) containing

• your name
• your institutional affiliation (if appropriate)
• your proposed paper title and abstract (approximately 350 words)
• a brief autobiography (no more than 150 words)
• four keywords identifying the main themes of your paper

to Associate Professor Annie Potts, AASA 2019 Conference Convenor, at annie.potts@canterbury.ac.nz.