Animals at Large: Critical Animal Studies perspectives on wild, feral, and free-living animals

Animals at Large: Critical Animal Studies perspectives on wild, feral, and free-living animals is co-organized by the Canadian Society for Critical Animal Studies, the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en éthique (CRÉ), the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University and the Department of Criminology of Toronto Metropolitan University.

This event is co-sponsored by the Groupe de recherche en éthique animale et environnementale (GREEA), the Observatoire québécois en droit animalier (OQDA) based at the Université de Sherbrooke, the Killam Research Fund, the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Alberta, and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts and Department of Criminology. 

The conference will be hybrid, register here (free and open to all). 

Program

Animals at Large: Critical Animal Studies perspectives on wild, feral, and free-living animals

August 5

5:00 – 6:15 – Welcome and Opening Keynote: Stephanie Rutherford, “Canids and Canada: Wolves, Coyotes and Regimes of Violence and Belonging”

6:15 – 7:30 – Opening Reception 

August 6

8:30 - 9:00 Arrival/Continental breakfast, coffee/tea/juice available

9:00 – 10:30 – Sanctuary and Salvation

• Darren Chang, “Contesting Wildness: The Farmed Animal Sanctuary as Liminal Contact Zone”
• Sal Renshaw, “Saving By Any Other Name: Sanctuaries, Arks, and the Governance of Animal Lives in the Anthropocene” 
• Stephanie Eccles, “Farmed Animals in Extreme Weather Events: Disaster Response Pathways and Foreclosures of Wildness” 

10:30 – 10:45 – Break

10:45 – 12:15 – Wild Animal Attacks

• Emelia Quinn, “When Animals Attack: The Comedy and Camp of Wild Animal Revenge”                                            
• Ian Hanesworth, “Wolf Mothers & Man Things: Agency, Emotionality, and Personhood in Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Story’”
• Susmita Roy, “Who Produces the ‘Tiger Widow’? Ecology, Patriarchy, and Systemic Marginalization”

12:15 – 1:15 – Lunch 

1:15 – 3:15 – Wild Politics 

• Pablo Castello, “The Territorial Rights of Wild Animals: Justification”
• Esther Palm, “Travail Animal et critique du sauvage en théorie politique”
• Christiane Bailey, “Renouncing violence and doing politics with wild and liminal animals in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Animals and the Right to Politics”
• Agata Kowaleska, “Feralizing: Reimagining Future Liberations in Europe”

3:15 – 3:30 – Break 

3:30 – 5:00 – Vermin, Pests and Invasive Species 

• Emily Major, “The Boogeymen of Our Forests: Anti-Possum Rhetoric and the Construction of Fear in Dominant Conservation Messaging in New Zealand”
• Zoei Sutton & Kate Hall, “Feral Catastrophe: Analyzing the Narrative Construction of Australian Cats” 
• Lauren Corman, “Criminal/Animal: Trump’s Criminalization of Immigrants and Vilification of Nonhuman Animals”

August 7

8:30 - 9:00 - Arrival/Continental breakfast, coffee/tea/juice available

9:00 – 10:15 – Keynote: Catia Faria, “Compassion by Design: Aligning AI with the Welfare of Wild Animals”

10:15 – 10:30 – Break 

10:30 – 12:00 – Media Analyses 

• Mathieu Chaput & Jacinthe Dupuis, “The Communicative Constitution of Liminal Animals in the ‘Deer Saga’”
• Briana Magnuson & Tony Weis, “HPAI in the Wild: A Critical Analysis of Media Coverage of the Panzootic Crisis”
• Branislava Vičar, “The Conservation Discourse of Native Animal Species as Nationalist Narrative: The Case of the Marble Trout”

12:00 – 1:00 – Lunch 

1:00 – 2:30 – Wild Horses

• Sabine Sassner, “Movement vs. Behaviour: Visibility and Agency of Equines”
• Lucy Horswill, “From ‘Semi-Wild’ to Surplus: Language and Disposal at British Drift Sales”
• Kelly Struthers Montford & Chloë Taylor, “Wild Mustang Prison Programs in the American Southwest”

2:30 – 2:45 – Break 

2:45 – 4:15 – Intersection of Behavioural Ecology and Critical Animal Studies: The Ethical Costs and Benefits of Primate Research in Wild, Free-Ranging, and Rehabilitative Contexts

• Facilitator: Mikaela Gerwing; Presenters: Nève Djevalikian-Couture, Italo Ferreira Perreira, Maya Moghrabi, Viviane Aurora Oliviera, & Brogan M. Stewart 

4:15 – 4:30 – Break 

4:30 – 6:00 – Feral Intimacies: Care and Control in Interspecies Relations

• Misha Solomon, “Goon at Love Park”
• Ishaan Selby, “‘Big, Furry, Asymmetrical Balls’: Wildness, Feral Sex, and Ownership in Marian Engel’s Bear”
• Jesse Arsenault, “The Wildness of Interspecies Desire in South African Literature and Law”

6:30 – 8:00 – Conference dinner