Critical Animal Studies: Animal Liberation activism meets academia
Critical Animal Studies is a field of study exploring the relations between human animals and animals other than human from a critical, non-speciesist, interdisciplinary and total liberation perspective.
If you are reading this, you are probably already aware that the exploitation of other animals by humans is nothing new, and that its intensity has increased in the last centuries within the capitalist system.
The power exerted by humans over humans classified as ‘other’, the power exerted over the animals other than humans, and over the Earth has dramatic consequences over all of the mentioned above. Amongst these consequences are the suffering of billions of exploited sentient beings, human and not human, and also the endangering of the home of all us, the Earth, in the shape of the current climate crisis.
Because of the interconnectedness of the oppressive systems, from the lack of social justice amongst humans to the oppression of other animals by humans; from the violence amongst humans to the climate crisis and its consequences in the shape of health issues for all of the animals, the Animal Liberation movement aims for justice for non human animals, keeping at the same time a critical point of view towards the capitalist system and the inequalities inside the human species.
With this spirit in mind, the academic field of studies Critical Animal Studies raised, in order to study the relations between human and non-human animals and towards animal liberation. CAS is an interdisciplinary field. That means that it involves scholars from different academic disciplines and draws knowledge from several fields as communication, sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, law, etc. always with a non-speciesist and critical focus towards the interconnected oppression systems.
As Anthony Nocella explains at the other side of the screen, “ICAS, founded in 2001, was first named Center for Animal Liberation Affairs (CALA). It was named CALA by myself and was changed to the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) by Steve Best and myself in 2006”. The field of critical animal studies was founded in 2006 by Steve Best, Richard Kahn, John Sorenson and Nocella.
In the foundational article for this field of studies (Introducing critical animal studies, 2007), the activists and scholars Steve Best, Anthony J. Nocella, Carol Gigliotti, Richard Kahn and Lisa Kemmerer defined the 10 principles for this perspective (see image above).
One of the goals that the scholars in this discipline share is to merge the grass roots activism into the intellectual thoroughness of academia, letting one feed each other, in order to produce science-based knowledge that helps society advance towards the end of all oppressions. Nocella clarifies that “the seed in creating ICAS was wanting to give creditability to grass-roots activists and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as they were dealing with corporate repression and political repression in being given extreme prison sentences and identified as the top domestic terrorist threats by the FBI in the U.S. even though they never tried or never did harm a person. The next reason was to document and develop the theoretical foundation of the animal liberation movement just as other fields of study have done”.
As Anthony Nocella points out, “today CAS is an international field and movement with different organizations, committees, academic programs, activist collectives, book series, events, conferences, and degrees”. The scholar stresses that “everyone involved must be involved in activism and support activism. Further, I would say being an academic is different than being a scholar. An academic is an institutionalized scholar, are anti-anarchist, anti-activist, anti-total liberation, and anti-intersectionality”.
If you are interested in trying to break the barriers between the theory and the practice in this emancipation movement that is anti-speciesism, check out your nearest Critical Animal Studies organization. In Europe that is the European Association for Critical Animal Studies — EACAS, initiated by Richard Twine and some of his colleagues at Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom.
EACAS organizes a biennial conference, held each time by a different organization. Helena Pedersen, co-founder of the cross-disciplinary network GU-CAS: Gothenburg University’s Network for Critical Animal Studies in the Anthropocene and co-editor of the book series Critical Animal Studies (Brill), explains that “CAS relies a lot on collective work and alliance-building and it is necessary to create meeting spaces where scholar-activists can come together”.
EACAS’s latest conference was held in Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, hosted by the UPF Centre for Animal Ethics — CAE, a think-tank focusing on animal ethics from multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Its mission is to promote non-speciesist ethical approaches in academia, politics, media and public opinion.
Laura Fernández, PhD candidate and member of CAE’s board, was involved in the organization of the conference in Barcelona. She thinks that “EACAS conferences are very powerful and fruitful spaces to encounter with each other, to meet other activists and scholars doing research about CAS and realize that, while the process of doing research in an emerging field may look as lonely, we are a lot, and we are all working in our universities and communities having important discussions”.
Fernández points out that the EACAS conferences “are times and spaces where my motivation increases a lot. I also think attending to EACAS conferences is important to be updated about important international debates and projects in the field”. Pedersen adds that “the transition to virtual conferences in the wake of the pandemic clearly has an environmental benefit in line with CAS although there is of course also a great value of meeting colleagues in real life”.
The EACAS conference before that one was held at Lund University (Sweden) by the Critical Animal Studies Network — LUCASN. LUCASN has been active from 2016, and was formed, in the words of Jana Canavan, PhD candidate and co-founder of the network, “to create an official CAS platform at Lund University to provide a space for research exchange and discussion and to have an official group for arranging events that are open for everyone. It also consolidates the previously established Politics and Animal Journal and the CAS course that are all based at Lund University”.
As Jana Canavan mentions, each year LUCASN holds a Critical Animal Studies course in the Communications and Media Faculty of Lund University. Check it up if you want to get involved in this field of studies where activism and academia meet.
The next European event, the 7th Biennial Conference of EACAS, will be virtual and will take place on June 24–25th 2021, hosted by the Centre for Human-Animal Studies which is based at Edge Hill University. ChHAS is an interdisciplinary forum for research and activities that engage with the material, ethical and symbolic relationships between humans and other animals.
In this virtual conference, the aim is to assess and appraise progress contesting hegemonic and normalized anthropocentrism, both inside and outside the academia. The call for papers is open until 28th February and they welcome papers from all disciplines and sub-fields, and from those working independently or as part of activist movements. Maybe it can be a good time to send something and get started with Critical Animal Studies!
