Mapping Animality II: Considerations of Animal and Human Space
Seminar Organizer(s):
- Sundhya Walther (University of Toronto), Sarah Henderson (University of Toronto)
Across disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic boundaries, scholars have united to ask: where is the animal? From the animal’s place in philosophical discourse, to its position as one of literature’s key metaphorical concepts, to the troubling presence of animal bodies in contemporary art, the animal’s centrality to centuries of human discourse is undeniable. At the same time, the dwindling space that animal bodies occupy in the world is increasingly under human surveillance and control. At this juncture of science and the humanities, of visual and literary arts, of wildness and enclosure, of flesh and machine, is it ever possible to locate the animal?
This panel will operate in conjunction with Mapping Animals I, which is more broadly interested in the politics of cultural representations of animality. While we share these interests, we wish to orient them more particularly around questions of space. This panel invites papers that consider the physical, ontological, or ethical location of the animal from a diversity of perspectives.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Tracking devices that create animal maps
- ‘Crittercams’ and the documentation of animal perspectives of space
- The location of animality in the body
- Reservation of land for wildlife
- Animals in human space (strays, feral animals, urban wildlife, companion animals
- Practices of enclosure (zoos, circuses, laboratories, factory farms)
- The animal within the human
- The location of the animal in philosophy, literature, or visual art
- The position of the animal vis à vis the human
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: animal; space; ecology; technology; surveillance; posthumanism; conservation; food; speciesism; ethics; representation; mapping; enclosure