Canadian Society for Critical Animal Studies

The Canadian Society for Critical Animal Studies will host his annual meeting in Montreal on August 6-7, 2026. 

The deadline for the call for abstracts and proposal is February 1, 2026. 

Animal Control officers routinely refer to feral, stray, lost or simply wandering companion animals, as well as urban wildlife, as “at large,” oddly implying that animals are criminal, dangerous, and in need of capture, simply for being free in humanized spaces, however temporarily and whether or not voluntarily. For the 2026 meeting of C-CAS, we welcome abstracts for presentations that consider feral, stray, free-living, liminal, and wild animals from critical animal studies perspectives. We invite submissions from all academic disciplines, as well as from animal activists, creative writers, and artists. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• wild animal ethics: are we ethically obligated to intervene in the suffering of free-living animals?

• wild animals in captivity: wildlife rehabilitation centers, the wildlife trade

• wild animals in the Anthropocene: endangerment, extinction, resilience and adaptation

• urban wildlife

• co-existing with predators

• feral cat colonies and the “Cat Wars”

• animal control and the criminalization of “pest,” feral, and stray animals

• escaped farmed animals

• animal resistance and revolt

• “liminal animals” and “wild animals” in political theory

• ethnographies, autoethnographies, and memoirs of wild, stray, feral, liminal, or free-living animals

• language: how should we refer to non-domesticated animals who are not living under direct human control? Is “wild” stigmatizing? Is “free-living” idealizing?

• reclamations of the wild, stray, and feral from stigma

Please submit 500-word abstracts and 150-word presenter bios by January 5, 2026 by sending them to canadiansocietyforcas@gmail.com. We welcome proposals for individual presentations or for complete panels. We also welcome proposals for creative presentations and activist-led workshops.