Tracy McDonald

Department of History

McMaster University

Tracy McDonald is an historian of Russian and Soviet History at McMaster University. Her areas of interest include social and cultural history, micro-history, film, agrarian studies, violence, and animal studies. McDonald co-edited (with Lynne Viola, Sergei Zhuravlev and Andrei Mel’nik) a volume of documents on collectivization entitled Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929-1930 gg.: khronika golovokruzheniia (The Riazan Countryside, 1929-1930: A Chronicle of Spinning Heads), Moscow, Rosspen, 1998. She is the author of Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921-1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011). In November 2012, her book received the ASEEES Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the field of history in 2011. McDonald was one of the three founding members of the independent documentary-film company Chemodan Films. Between 2004 and 2009 she participated in the making of four films including Province of Lost Film, Uprising, and Photographer. McDonald co-edited Zoo Studies: A New Humanities (McGill-Queens University Press, 2019) with Daniel Vandersommers. She is the guest curator of the exhibition Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space at the McMaster Museum of Art which runs from 4 January to 21 March 2020.

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Judith Nicholson

Communication Studies

Wilfred Laurier University

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Judith A. Nicholson is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. She researches and teaches in the area of mobilities studies. Current research projects include the university-funded project, Reading Human Zoo Postcards, a SSHRC-funded collaboration on the history of privacy booths, and a SSHRC-funded collaboration on pedagogies for mobilities studies.

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German animal dealer, Cark Hagenbeck (1844-1913), is credited with inaugurating ethnographical shows in the mid-1870s after his business of providing nonhuman animals to European zoos began to wane. Hagenbeck coined the term, völkerschau, which translates as international show or what became known in English as human zoo. Though human zoos have origins that precede Hagenbeck’s opportunism, they gained widespread popularity in the context of 19th-century colonialism, scientific racism and mass entertainment. The exhibits travelled to major world cities and were documented in thousands of photographs, picture postcards and early films. Some of these visual artefacts are held in European museums. Others are collected by private individuals. This paper emerges from a funded research project that reads messages on the reverse side of human zoo postcards and photographs. Existing scholarship on such imagery largely examines the visual and, notably, exoticized humans who are depicted. Little attention is paid to nonhuman animals who can be seen alongside humans. They included dogs, camels, horses, water buffaloes, snakes, monkeys, goats, elephants, oxen and donkeys. What are animals doing in human zoos? In other words, how are they depicted and what ideological work might their inclusion have served? For this research project, over 100 postcards and photographs held by an Austrian collector and 40 others held by a German museum were photographed and the message side translated to English. This paper interprets how the images and messages reflected impressions of human versus animal, seen versus unseen, us versus them. This paper argues that the significance of human zoos in the past, and their continuation into contemporary carceral forms, particularly for nonhuman animals and for racialized humans, cannot be interpreted only by reading visual representations of humans.

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Taylor O’Connor

PhD Candidate, French

Penn State University

Taylor O’Connor is a doctoral student and graduate teaching assistant in the department of French and Francophone Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her M.A. in French from Penn State, and has taught at l’Université de Strasbourg in France. Her primary research interests lie in Enlightenment-era vegetarianism, however her work touches upon questions of animal activism, species egalitarianism, and new materialisms as they appear in the Francophone world both historically and in modern day. She has presented her work both in Europe and the U.S.

Taylor O’Connor will present the paper, “The Logic of Vengeance-An Anti-Anthropocentric reading of En Eaux Troubles by Jean-François Samlong.” The novel explores at length the contact zone of human and shark through the interiority of several human characters, connected through varying degrees of grief caused by shark attack. Though the human species and the shark species are overwhelmingly depicted as age-old enemies, irreconcilable to one-another… the reader may discern, through the measured unfolding of the story’s events, that there are no simple interpretations of the fleshy world. As sharks kill humans and humans kill sharks, a cycle of violence comes into focus. Who is victim, and who is aggressor… who is the predator and who is the prey… only becomes hazier as one turns the pages of Samlong’s text. The paper engages a reading of the logic of vengeance, defined here as retribution enacted in retaliation for injury or wrongdoing, as it exists in Samlong’s novel.

Nathan Olmstead

PhD Candidate, Political Science

University of Toronto

Nathan Olmstead is a doctoral student studying political science at the University of Toronto. His research interests include urban development, transhuman technology, and posthuman subjectivities. His current work focuses on the anthropocentric foundations of the Smart City movement and contemporary urban governance, the structures of inequality that these foundations support, and the need for a deconstructive and posthuman alternative. Nathan has also been an active policy researcher and consultant focusing on environmental sustainability, responsible technology, and animal welfare. His previous works have been published in Political Theology, Urban Studies, Adaptive Human Behaviour, and Neuroscience.  

In, “No Time for Idle Dreaming: smart cities, factory farms, and the politics of corralling,” Nathan Olmstead will argue that the proliferation of surveillance-based technologies and algorithmic decision-making reflects techniques and strategies are already well-established along other frontiers of the Anthropocene. More specifically, in its quest to measure, analyze, and harmonize the spatio-temporal patterns of urban life, the Smart City movement is implicated in exploitative and dehumanizing systems of control that are already dominant in industrial farming and the destruction of nonhuman animals. In both cases, assumptions about what it means to be human mobilize new technologies towards the taming and commodification of behaviour, the elimination of wasted time, and the correction or destruction of the nonhuman. He concludes with an exploration of the way the anthropocentric foundations of the Smart City intersect with, and contribute to, other systems of marginalization within urban spaces.

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dave phillips

dp has worked solo as dave phillips/dp since 1987. part of schimpfluch-gruppe since 1991 (with rudolf eb.er/runzelstirn & gurgelstøck, joke lanz/sudden infant etc.), co-founded ohne in 2000 (with tom smith, daniel löwenbrück, reto mäder), started the oneman-doom-project dead peni in 2004, the perverts in white shirts duo since 2012, co-founded fear of god in 1987 and has played in numerous other bands, projects and collaborations. dp's humanimalism is a concept that describes a developed humanoid existence that has overcome the erroneous religious, material and supremacist phases of evolution (recognised as mistakes that anticipate learning processes), acknowledges itself as part of a whole and has grown into an empathic, conscientious & connected creature allowing emotion & instinct their equal part in decision-making, moving beyond the previously dominant one-sided, reductive rational/logical/systematic/male/anthropocentric mindset, and having balanced itself within its environment by retracing an origin, with social and environmental awareness becoming inherent sensual functions. dp has been sonically active for 30+ years, has appeared on over 200 releases and has played near to 600 concerts in 50 countries.

video action 2020 (25 minutes)

video action is an actionistic and physical performance accompanied by visuals, loops and samples of voice and objects are played live over prepared sonic structures and follow a narrative. the video talks of existential, philosophical and sentient matters, on personal, social and global levels. this set is an evocation of 'humanimal', a sonic ritual, an audio-visual catharsis, a trigger of discourse, offering food for thought.

dp is also presenting a paper entitled, "an attempt to formulate why i do what i do,” in which he will attempt to explain why he does what he does.

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Colleen Plumb

Artist

Chicago

Colleen Plumb (American, born Chicago, IL) makes photographs, videos, and public video projections investigating contradictory relationships people have with animals. Her recent projects explore the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Plumb's work sheds light on abnormal behaviors of captive animals in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. By projecting videos on the street, strangers connect as witnesses and contribute to the idea that sentient beings are not meant for spectacle or display.

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Plumb's work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts in Portland, Dina Mitrani Gallery  and The Screening Room in Miami, Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona, Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, Union League Club of Chicago, and the Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Her work has been part of The Chicago Project at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago since 2005 and the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography since 2003. She has written for the Center for Humans and Nature, an organization dedicated  to exploring and promoting human responsibilities in relation to nature, and was a contributor to their book, City Creatures (University of Chicago Press, 2015). Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents our ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Her focus for nearly two decades has been an inquiry into a society whose appetite for animals, whether in flesh or in reproduction, with admiration or obsession, is voracious. Plumb's work has appeared in LitHub, Psychology Today, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo Magazine, RealSimple, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Oxford American, Photo District News, and Artillery Magazine. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught photography and video at Columbia College Chicago since 1999. Six of Colleen Plumb’s photographs are part of the AADTS exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art from 4 January to 21 March. She will give and artist’s talk at the museum, and as part of the conference on 19 March 2020, on these works and on her more recent work that documents the tensions between human and nonhuman animals. And she will be presenting her film Thirty Times a Minute on 21 March 2020.

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Traveling to over sixty zoos in the US and Europe, I filmed elephants exhibiting what biologists refer to as stereotypy, a behavior only seen in captive animals, which includes rhythmic rocking, swaying, head bobbing, stepping back and forth and pacing. Thirty Times a Minute looks at elephants exhibiting stereotypy due to lack of adequate mental stimulation or an inability to engage in natural activities. These compulsive, repetitive movements can cause debilitating, life-threatening damage to the animals’ feet and joints.

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The durational video of these repetitive movements within environments that nearly replicate one another, are made from stationary viewpoints, and when viewed en masse, become a larger study into unified, rhythmic movement. I am interested in the notion of collection as obsession, and ways that the project’s multiplicity, in form and content can mirror the endless and obsessive state of the animals’ behavior. Elephants communicate through infrasonic sound (sounds too low for humans to hear). The audio alludes to these hidden vocalizations.

Ziba Rashidian​

Department of English

Southeastern Louisiana University

Ziba Rashidian teaches theory, animal studies, and comparative literature at Southeastern Louisiana University where she oversees the graduate program in English. She is co-editor with Jeanne Dubino and Andrew Smyth of Representing the Modern Animal in Culture (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014).

In her paper, “Beyond Precarity: Human-Animal Coexistence in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices of Chernobyl,” Ziba Rashidian focuses on the persistent reference to and presence of nonhuman animals in the observations and narratives of the interviewees. She argues that the narratives present an altered understanding of the human-animal relation. While many of the speakers were or are small farmers and while their “before Chernobyl” relation to nonhuman animals (at least domesticated animals) involved a mutuality of exchange, with the human provision of “care” to the animals and the animal provision of sustenance to the humans, in the “after Chernobyl” perceptions of survivors and of the new immigrants to the exclusion zone, nonhuman animals—both wild and domestic—are seen as surviving within the same horizon of bodily appropriation and temporal dispossession as the human beings who co-exist with them in the exclusion zone.

T.N. Rowan

PhD candidate, Environmental Studies

York University

T.N. Rowan is a PhD student in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University whose academic interests span Critical Animal Studies, Gender Studies, Arts-Based Research, Environmental Ethics, and Technology Studies. As part of their dissertation T.N. is researching world building as an Environmental Ethics methodology that can facilitate intersectional activist communities in identifying and responding to issues that matter to them. T.N. is particularly interested in depictions and responses to the interwoven trauma human and non-human animals face.

In, “Animal Studies, Darwin, and Species Skepticism,” T.N. Rowan examines one of Darwin's overlooked beliefs: species was an arbitrary idea for human convenience. Darwin's species skepticism may seem strange, but it was strongly supported by naturalists at the time and has been discussed by feminist scholar Elizabeth Grosz and many philosophers and historians of science. Species is a symbolic representation humans place onto other animals. Scholars have yet to fully engage with how species reflects and enacts an unequal power relationship that uses both difference and continuity for human benefit. Other animals are like human beings when it benefits us and not like humans when it benefits us. By returning to On the Origin of Species they complicate human-animal relationships to show the nuanced ways other animals can be understood as both like and unlike humans in a way that can benefit animals.

Joshua Russell

Department of Animal Behavior

Canisius College

Joshua Russell is an assistant professor in both the Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation as well as the Anthrozoology Master’s Program at Canisius College. He is also co-director of the Canisius Institute for Studies in Human-Animal Relationships. His scholarly work explores children’s relationships with animals, phenomenological accounts of animal encounters, and the application of queer theory to animal studies and environmental education. He lives in southern Ontario with his partner Sean and their rescue dog, Penny.

He is organizer of a roundtable. In this session, the speakers will draw on—literally and figuratively—quilting as an active and processual framework to explore our pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning about human-animal relationships across and between disciplines. Each member of the panel has unique experiences in higher education as educators and/or as students that they bring to the session in the form of presentation, discussion questions, and representation. At the same time, they will invite those present to visually represent their own disciplinary considerations and points of view—we will provide artistic supplies—in order to create a “quilt” that captures something of the “accumulated and shared experience” of those in attendance (Botha, 2009, p. 436). The quilt will be a point of discussion and reflection as we place the various squares together at the end.

Kimber Sider

PhD, Performance and Theatre

University of Guelph

Kimber Sider holds a PhD in Performance and Theatre from the University of Guelph, specializing in interspecies performance, communication arts, and practice-based research. Sider is also a documentary filmmaker and the Artistic Director of the Guelph Film Festival, which is a documentary film festival that focuses on inspiring community engagement and an appreciation for the arts through connecting people with stories of global reach and local relevance.

“Speaking Across Difference: Performance as the Foundation for an Interspecies Ethics of Engagement” Ric Knowles writes, “As with intercultural performance, there is, it seems to me, an urgent need to reconsider interspecies performance as a horizontalist and rhizomatic project in which no one partner in the exchange and negotiation dominates” (i). Within performance exists the potential to bridge cultures and communities, and to speak across difference. As Knowles references here, the meeting of a human and an animal through performance is in fact an intercultural exchange, in which two ways of knowing and being in the world meet, collide, and potentially crossover, allowing each to receive a glimpse of the other. Animals have come to find themselves in a subordinate position in their encounters with humans in dominant culture. Their perspectives are rarely recognized, and when they are acknowledged it is often only in a limited sense, a sense that only allows the given animal certain elements of self and perspective. We (humans) have placed animals in these positions by forgetting (or never knowing) how to hear their stories and recognize their agency. The anthropocentric obsession with verbal language denotes that often only human perspectives are recognized and acknowledged as valid. However, in contexts where words cease to mean (such as in working with animals), meaning becomes dominantly created through the expressive action of performance. It is through performance that a shared mode of exchange is found between humans and animals, one which recognizes and celebrates animal ways of knowing and being in the world—ways that are also employed by humans. This paper explores how performance-based methodologies can be used to hear animal voices and create an interspecies ethics of engagement that works towards a horizontalist and rhizomatic exchange.

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Andrew Smyth

English Education & Renaissance Literature

Southern Connecticut State University

Andrew Smyth is Professor and Chair of the English Department at Southern Connecticut State University, where he teaches Secondary English Education and Renaissance Literature. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Foreign Studies College of Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, where he led workshops on Digital Humanities. He is currently engaged in a Fulbright Specialist Assignment—“Capacity Building for Research Leadership in English Language and Literature”—at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Among recent publications, he co-edited Representing the Modern Animal in Culture (2014); wrote “Impersonating Authority: Animals and the Reconceptualization of Anglo-Irish Social Order in Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui and Edmund Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale,” published in Representing Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Borbala Farago (2015); and co-authored “Can We Be Part of the Pride? Reading Animals through Comics in the Undergraduate Classroom,” published in Animal Comics: Multispecies Storyworlds in Graphic Narratives, edited by David Herman (2018).

In his paper “Talking Back to Militarization: The Recovery of Animal Identity in WE3” he engages with the comic WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and how it depicts the technologizing of animals—a dog, cat, and rabbit—for military purposes and the resistance they offer using and ultimately rejecting the tools of their hybridization. The gleaming high-tech conversion of these animals into living weapons illuminates the decline of traditional military weaponry, which may rust away in martial and mechanical history, and the horrible transference of such arsenals of destruction to unwilling participants in human warfare. What allows these animals to recover their identity, ironically, is the capability for human language that has been added into their programming.

The language of the nonhuman in this book opens up productive arguments about representation and empathy. While talking animals in comics is commonplace, the utilitarian insertion of language into the cognitive framework of nonhuman animals in WE3 disrupts readers’ willingness to indulge in fictional constructs and refocuses attention on the animals and how they represent themselves and their suffering through language. The military commodification of the dog, cat, and rabbit effaces their animal identity and agency, shocking us into realizing how most of our relationships with animals are likewise slanted toward modes of commodification that serve human purposes, from food to clothes to property protection to emotional support. Readers, through their engagement with animal comics such as WE3, may renegotiate the boundaries between themselves and animal others and seek a different understanding of animal consciousness, agency, and sapience. The recovery of animal identity in the comic calls for increased resistance to human exploitation of other animals and greater empathy for their plight.

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Vasile Stanescu

Communications & Women and Gender Studies

Mercer University

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Vasile Stanescu is Assistant Professor of Communication at Mercer University; he also serves as faculty in the department of Women and Gender Studies. Stanescu is co-senior editor of the Critical Animal Studies book series published by Rodopi/Brill, the co-founder of the North American Association for Critical Animal Studies (NAACAS), the former co-editor of the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, and former co-organizer of the Stanford Environmental Humanities Project. Stanescu is the author of over 20 peer-reviewed publications on critical animal studies. His current research interests include Critical Animal Studies, food studies, decolonialism, animals and gender, climate change, and the topic of in vitro meat. Stanescu’s research has been recognized by The Woods Institute for the Environment, Minding Animals International, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Culture and Animals Foundation, the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, among others.

In his paper, “‘She’ or ‘They:’ Animals and the Trans and Non-binary Question,” Stanescu argues that forced gender categorization harms not only humans by re-essentializing gender in an exclusively dichotomous framework based on biological sex characteristics; it also harms animals themselves by obscuring their own possible queer desires in an enforced heteronormative norm of forced mating. All meat is based on the reality of forced mating and/or forced impregnation. Such actions constitute violence even within a cisgender binary of heteronormativity as it violates the animals' ability for sexual consent, refusal, and bodily integrity. However, it also elides the possibility of queer animal identities, asexual animals, gay animals, non-binary and trans animals. Of the over 70 billion land animals raised and killed each year, some of them must surely be queer. For them, the forced mating causes a double-violence: not only is their refusal violated —indeed ignored as if it does not exist— they also experience the violence of imposed and required heteronormativity and enforced cisgendering.

Donna Szoke

Visual Arts

Brock University

Donna Szoke is an artist-researcher, her body of work on invisible animals explores what is invisible in the visual realm in order to explore immanence and non-visual knowledge. She creates artworks that she thinks about as being transformational objects, objects that can shift us into new ways of perceiving. The leap of perception through an art experience changes our understanding of the world. Donna Szoke creates expanded animation, media art, video, drawing, and collaborations. She investigates immanence, embodied perception, and the fluidity of lived experience. She is Chair & Associate Professor, Visual Arts, at Brock University where she received the Faculty of Humanities Award for Excellence in Research and Creative Activity in 2017. www.donnaszoke.com

In her presentation “Invisible Animals,” she looks at how artworks about invisible animals enact embodied and affective experience for wider society that drives public witnessing and well-being. Through an analysis of Crary’s utility of ghosts, and Derrida’s notion of hauntology, she describes the productive functionality of invisible animals haunting consumer culture. She further explores the multiple roles of invisible animals as Marxian dispossessed workers, as ongoing containers of their own alienated labour, and taking up Sontag, as productive-unproductive expenditures. Further comparing her geo-locative works to narratives of power and invisibility, she touches upon the elided histories of animals in warfare. Arendt’s concept of natality gives productive grounds to shared embodiment and empathy through projection as a medium of co-presence. Fabulations, hallucinations, ghosts and other invisible animals prove productive subjects to frame media art as an agent of poetry, figuring these non-human animals with a privileged interiority. Her art practice tackles ethical issues about invisibility, manifesting an aesthetics of care. The continuum between the visible and invisible speaks not just to the thing-ness of the world but to perception itself.

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Tracy Timmins

PhD Candidate, Environmental Studies

York University

Tracy Timmins is a doctoral candidate at York University under the supervision of Dr. Justin Podur. Her research investigates encounters and relationships between humans and eastern grey squirrels in Toronto. She contributes to transspecies urban theory and develop recommendations for supporting just interspecies relationships and co-flourishing in cities. Her doctoral research has been supported by York University, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, the Donna and Adrienne Pocock Memorial Award and SSHRC Insight Grant: Crossing Boundaries: Encounters with Urban Wildlife in the Greater Toronto Area.

In her paper, Timmins examines encounters and relationships that can develop between some liminal animals and humans. She argues that some liminal animals, in this case, eastern grey squirrels, can become a part of multispecies communities in Toronto and, in doing so, establish mutually rewarding relationships with some humans. Eastern grey squirrels also experience risks navigating their habitats like vehicular traffic and predatory dogs and cats. Some humans who encounter squirrels in need are compelled to help them. They often seek out information on the Internet about what to do and may take them to the Toronto Wildlife Centre or other rehabilitators for care. In the process, they become more engaged with the issues confronting our rarely considered urban co-residents. I conclude with some thoughts about how humans might coexist with liminal animals in ways that support mutual well being.

Emily Wanderer

Anthropology

University of Pittsburgh

Emily Wanderer is an anthropologist of science who works primarily in Latin America. Her research integrates medical and environmental anthropology to address how ideas of identity and place in the world are implicated in the practice of life scientists, as well as the ways human and non-human lives intersect and are transformed in scientific practice. She is the author of numerous articles including, “The Axolotl in Global Circuits of Knowledge Production: Producing Multispecies Potentiality” Cultural Anthropology 33(4) 2018: 650-679 and “Bioseguridad in Mexico: Pursuing Security Between Local and Global Biologies,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(3) 2017: 315-331. Her first book, The Life of a Pest, tracks the work practices of scientists in Mexico in labs, fields, and offices, arguing that through the study and management of these life forms biologists moved biopolitics and biosecurity beyond a concern with human life to include animal, plant, and microbial worlds.

Her paper, “Life without Conditions: Model Organisms and New Human Biologies,” analyses how axolotls, a salamander native to Mexico, are reinterpreted not as exceptional, but rather as models demonstrating that regeneration and plasticity are fundamental biological processes that should be considered potential attributes of human bodies as well. I examine the new connections across species lines that are being developed in regenerative biology, and how the work of these scientists has consequences for our understanding of both human and nonhuman life forms. The paper considers what it means to interpret both human and axolotl bodies as plastic and flexible, particularly as the near extinction of the axolotl in the wild demonstrated the limits to their own biological flexibility. What are the moral and ethical dimensions of plasticity and the implications of this research for human and animal life? How do the cultural, political, and economic contexts in which regenerative biologists work shape their imagining of what the biology could or should be?

Sebastian Williams

PhD Candidate, Modernism & Bioethics

Purdue University

Sebastian Williams is a PhD candidate at Purdue University, studying modernism and bioethics. His dissertation is on Parasitic Modernism: Bioethics, Dependency, and Literature, with a special focus on animal studies, disability studies, and the history of medicine and science. He currently teaches introductory film, and he’s an editorial assistant for Shofar, a Jewish studies journal. His publications include, “Rogue Bodies: Disabled Antiheroes and the Pop-Culture Saga in Vikings” (co-authored with Alexander Long). Journal of Popular Culture, forthcoming and “The Gothic Grotesque: Disability and Monstrosity in Faulkner’s Sanctuary.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2019, forthcoming.

In his paper, “‘Monstrous Vermin:’ Becoming the Modernist Parasite,” takes as a starting point Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Unlike how the verminous Gregor ultimately dies in The Metamorphosis, in Lispector’s The Passion According to GH, the vermin becomes a source of mystical transcendence. And, in West’s The Dream Life of Balso Snell, the protagonist parasitically worms his way through the bowels of the Trojan Horse, creating a somatic map of Western civilization and pondering the fable of St. Puce—a fiction flea that lived on Christ’s body. For each of these authors, the parasite is not a repugnant, lowly creature, as it instead offers a way of refiguring how we conceptualize the networks of human and nonhuman animals that exist in our environment. In short, the modernist parasite is a subversive reversal of anthropocentric assumptions in the early twentieth century.

Mandy- Suzanne Wong

Author & Independent Scholar

Bermuda

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Mandy-Suzanne Wong is an award-winning author and independent scholar. Her fiction chapbook Awabi won the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series Competition. It was published by Digging Press, USA, in 2019. Her novel Drafts of a Suicide Note was chosen as a finalist for the 2018 Permafrost Book Prize, shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writers’ Project Literary Award, named a semi-finalist for the Conium Review Book Prize, and awarded an honorable mention in the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Published in 2019 by Regal House Publishing, USA, this novel was an award-winning finalist for the American Book Fest 2019 Best Book Award in the General Fiction category, a finalist for the Eyelands Book Award, and a PEN Open Book Award and Foreword Indies Book Prize nominee. She is also the author of the artist essays in the catalog for the exhibition Animals Across Discipline, Time & Space at the McMaster Museum of Art 4 January through 21 March 2020.

In the USA, Mandy-Suzanne’s short fiction has appeared in Quail Bell, The Deck Hand, The Island Review, The Spectacle, The Hypocrite Reader, Conclave, Dark Matter, Five on the Fifth, and elsewhere. Her story “Persimmon Wonderseeker and the Mystery of the Deadly Lambshade” was shortlisted for the UK’s Aeon award, and her story “Coconut octopus (Amphioctopus marginatus)” took first prize in the 2018 Eyelands International Flash Fiction Competition hosted by Strange Days Books in Greece. Her essays have appeared in Sonic Field, Volume!, The Hypocrite Reader, anthologies from Open Court and Routledge, and several other venues. Her first literary nonfiction monograph, Listen we all bleed, was named a finalist and awarded an honorable mention in the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize Competition. Artificial Wilderness, her literary nonfiction chapbook, won the Selcouth Station Environmental Chapbook Competition and will be published by the UK’s Selcouth Station Press.

Mandy-Suzanne was a founding editor of Evental Aesthetics, a journal of philosophy which she still serves as an editorial consultant. In September 2019 she joined Manqué Magazine as a regular columnist. She holds a BA from Wellesley College, an MM from the New England Conservatory of Music, and a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives on the coral-caressed mid-Atlantic island of Bermuda, where she was born.

She will be reading from her work Awabi, reading for Thirty Times a Minute, and presenting a paper entitled “Artificial Wilderness: Empathy in Field Recording.” Empathy with nonhumans starts with paying attention: acknowledging that not-just-human beings exist and inviting their exhortations to interrupt our private telenovelas. An obvious way to do this is to listen to their voices. There are as many ways to listen as there are listeners, but all listening takes effort. Listening means being quiet and not tuning out; disattending from your preconceptions to attend to what you’re hearing; and admitting that by coexisting with such a sound, the utterance itself and the being who voices it claim your compassion, empathy, and more. Listening approaches activism when we listen for those claims in others’ interruptions. Conspiring with dave phillips' South Africa Recordings, I wager that listening to nonhumans—and listening to them in art: a painstaking, emotional, risky practice—can help us learn to hear them in ways that could make them get under our skin. 

Miranda Workman

BIO TO COME.

Is part of a roundtable organized by Joshua Russell. In this session, the speakers will draw on—literally and figuratively—quilting as an active and processual framework to explore our pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning about human-animal relationships across and between disciplines. Each member of the panel has unique experiences in higher education as educators and/or as students that they bring to the session in the form of presentation, discussion questions, and representation. At the same time, they will invite those present to visually represent their own disciplinary considerations and points of view—we will provide artistic supplies—in order to create a “quilt” that captures something of the “accumulated and shared experience” of those in attendance (Botha, 2009, p. 436). The quilt will be a point of discussion and reflection as we place the various squares together at the end.

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Charlton Yingling

Department of History

University of Louisville

Chaz Yingling is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Louisville. His first book will investigate race and religiosity in the Spanish Caribbean during the Haitian Revolution. His next two co-authored projects will explore dog attacks against black populations across the Americas, and intersections of cattle with the rise of slavery and destructive legacies of consumption to the present. He has conducted research in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Spain,

the Vatican, the United Kingdom, and Australia, and his articles appear in Past & Present, History Workshop Journal, and The Historical Journal, among others.

In his paper, “Cattle Agency Amid Colonialism and Capitalism,” he argues that British colonists recreated cultural preferences for beef and cheese to bolster ideas of masculine dominance also derived from robustly restrictive racial codes. From these first profitable English colonies similar systems of cattle and chattel developed in less profitable colonies of North America. Cattle and chattel slaves thus became extremely connected by labor and imposed mutual definitions. Colonial cattle penning enabled sugar profit, coincided with racialized slavery, and expanded increasing beef economies of the Atlantic World. As amoral manacles of commerce locked, cattle nevertheless continued to resist. We should heed the dissent of those animals whose actions shaped the confines foundational to capitalist commodification. In our current moment of climate change, driven partly by appetites that drive methane emissions, academic disciplines must contend with how cattle consciousness shaped a shared mammalian past and present to challenge rationales that cause millions of cows to suffer today. Academia must overcome reflexive skepticism that dismisses animal actions as environmental determinism or instinct. Without considering cognition, historical causation remains silenced.

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