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 the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

The conference will be hybrid, register here (free and open to all). If you join us remotely, here is the zoom registration.

Free vegan food will be served.

The conference will take place in the Cinéma de sève (1400 De Maisonneuve West) and on zoom. The reception and lunches will be in the SHIFT Centre for Social Transformation.

Program

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

Wednesday August 5

2:30 - 3:45 p.m. - Welcome and Opening Keynote: Stephanie Rutherford (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Christiane Bailey

Stephanie Rutherford, “Canids and Canada: Wolves, Coyotes and Regimes of Violence and Belonging”

4:00 – 5:15 p.m. - Artist-Activist Talk: Shannon Johnstone (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Deborah Hardt

Shannon Johnstone, “Photography, Animals, and Activism: Centering Animals Through an Ethics of Sight”

5:15 – 6:30 p.m. – Shannon Johnstone Photography Exhibit and Reception (Shift)

Thursday August 6

8:30 - 9:00 - Continental breakfast (Shift)

9:00 – 10:30 a.m. – Wild Animal Attacks (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford

Emelia Quinn, “When Animals Attack: The Comedy and Camp of Wild Animal Revenge”

Susmita Roy, “Who Produces the ‘Tiger Widow’? Ecology, Patriarchy, and Systemic Marginalization”

Ian Hanesworth, “Wolf Mothers & Man Things: Agency, Emotionality, and Personhood in Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Story’”  

10:30 – 10:45 a.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)

10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Feral Intimacies: Care and Control in Interspecies Relations (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Emelia Quinn

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”

12:15 – 1:15 p.m. – Lunch (Shift)

1:15 – 2:45 p.m. – Wild Politics (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Chloë Taylor

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”

2:45 – 3:00 p.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)

3:00 – 4:30 p.m. – Vermin, Pests and Invasive Species (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford

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”

Friday August 7

8:30 - 9:00 Continental breakfast (Shift)

9:00 – 10:15 a.m. – Keynote: Catia Faria (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Chloë Taylor

Catia Faria, “Compassion by Design: Aligning AI with the Welfare of Wild Animals”

10:15 – 10:30 a.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Media Analyses (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Parth Pant

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 p.m. – Lunch (Shift)

1:00 – 2:30 p.m. – Wild Horses (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Tayler Zavitz

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 – 3:00 p.m. – (extended) Coffee/tea Break (Shift)

3:00 – 4:30 p.m. – The Future of Wildness (Cinema de Sève)

Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford

Stephanie Eccles, “Farmed Animals in Extreme Weather Events: Disaster Response Pathways and Foreclosures of Wildness”

Sal Renshaw, “Saving By Any Other Name: Sanctuaries, Arks, and the Governance of Animal Lives in the Anthropocene”

Agata Kowaleska, “Feralizing: Reimagining Future Liberations in Europe”