Pao-Chen Tang, CMS, University of Chicago
“Of Dogs and Hot Dogs: Dialectics between Image and Language in Early Silent Shorts”

Request a copy of the paper by emailing hutch@uchicago.edu.

In the concluding paragraph of his Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues when animals, philosophically lacking language as per a tradition in Western thoughts, become “filmic organisms,” they are “transformed into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities.” My essay takes up Lippit’s insightful but perhaps underdeveloped claim and poses three related questions. First, is Lippit referring to the cinematic animal in general or specific kinds of onscreen animals? Second, how does cinema enact this process of semiotic transformation? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily turned into languages or signs? I will address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions of animals in early commercial shorts, especially dogs, in relation to Tom Gunning’s now paradigmatic account of early cinema as medium of attractions. Certain dogs on film, I argue, complicate Lippit’s claim. By no means mere languages or signs, they function as contingent events, vaudeville gags, and syntheses of attractions and narratives. The films I will examine include: Dickson and Heise’s Athlete With Wand (1894), Lumière brothers’ La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895), Méliès’ Une partie de cartes (1896), and Porter’s Dog Factory (1904) in the context of a peculiar film genre: the “sausage-making” film.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Jessica Robinson, Anthropology, University of Chicago
“Connection to the Collection: the value of human and non-human encounters in a Bahamian zoo”

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

For many Bahamians snakes are “devil’s creatures,” and an encounter with one is cause for alarm and violent response. However, native snakes in the Bahamas are non-venomous and play a valuable role in the ecosystem (in both environmental and economic senses). In order to counter the misinformation and fear over snakes the zoo keepers at a for-profit zoo in the Bahamas have rescued injured wild snakes that, after careful rehabilitation, they introduce to local children in curated “animal encounters.”  In stark contrast, these animal encounters are not shared with North American tourists who make up the bulk of the zoo’s paying customers. Instead, the tourists are treated to a marching Flamingo show, in which a photo opportunity with one of these majestic animals is a key component. The value of looking at animals is assumed to be different for tourists and locals.

Drawing on ethnographic research, this paper explores theories of value (Graeber 2001) to consider the affective ways in which encounters with these non-humans are being mobilized, on the one hand, as an active and affective literal hands-on approach to local conservation that is embedded in the landscape and ecosystem from which the animals are collected, and on the other, as a tourist experience of the “exotic” dislocated from the natural environment (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Urry & Larson 2011).

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Carl Fuldner, Art History, University of Chicago
“Touched and Retouched: Embracing Early Wildlife Photography’s Impurities”

No paper will be pre-circulated for this event. Mr. Fuldner will present a slideshow and talk about his exhibit, and then open the floor for questions and discussion.

The modern discourses on wildlife and photography are conceptually linked through their shared fetishizing of the “untouched” as a regulative ideal. In The Studio in the Field, a new exhibit opening at the John Crerar Library on the same day as our workshop, I explore the technical challenges that early wildlife photographers faced on their way to making pictures that were by turns beautiful, instructive, and convincingly naturalistic. As the exhibit’s title suggests, the untouched realms that wildlife photographs visualize are in fact carefully constructed spaces, and the myth of a pristine nature that structures the reception of these works is easily dismantled without much prodding. More interesting, perhaps, is a small subset of images that make no particular claim to purity—images that conspicuously display the interventions entailed in their making. What meaning might we glean from these images?

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

The Animal Studies workshop is proud to present
Susan Fraiman, English, University of Virginia
in a discussion of her seminal article

“Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies”

Monday, March 9, 2015
4:30 pm
Social Sciences Tea Room (SS201)

Pioneering work in interdisciplinary animal studies, much of it under the rubric of ecofeminism, dates back to the 1970s. Yet animal studies remained an idiosyncratic backwater until its twenty-first-century reinvention as a high-profile area of humanities research. This essay ties the soaring cachet of the new animal studies to a revamped origin story—one beginning in 2002 and claiming Derrida as founding father. In readings of Derrida and leading animal studies theorist Cary Wolfe, I examine the gender politics of animal studies today, especially that affiliated with Wolfe’s formulation of posthumanism. In addition to slighting important ecofeminist precedents, this approach to animal studies is remarkably anxious to distance itself both from emotional attachments to animals and from scholars working on gender, sexuality, and race. I attribute this anxiety in part to the gendered opposition, longstanding in academia, between scholarship frankly motivated by feeling and scholarship whose prestige depends on claims to “masculine” objectivity and theoretical rigor. To counter this logic, I turn to animal studies foremothers Carol Adams and Donna Haraway; despite disagreements on several key issues, Adams and Haraway share a readiness to own their debt to feminist thinking and to see their theoretical work as inseparable from emotional and political commitments to animals.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Rozenn Bailleul-Lesuer, NELC, University of Chicago

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

Ancient Egyptians left researchers of the 21st century a most valuable gift in the form of a vast repertoire of iconography, rich both in quantity and quality. A myriad of representations, from the solemn settings of temples and funerary offering chapels, to the more mundane media that are stone flakes and pot sherds, are at our disposal and provide plentiful material for us to evaluate of the role of birds in the lives of ancient Egyptians. It has often been assumed that these birds had a dominant role in Egyptian culture since they figure so prominently in both literary and artistic compositions. Is this prominence reflected in the actual daily lives of ancient Egyptians or is bird imagery a purely metaphorical, propagandistic, and symbolic construct? The research I have conducted during the past few years has led me to review a plethora of data involving the birds, which may have been pragmatically exploited along the Nile Valley, from the actual avian bones recovered in archaeological assemblages, to administrative accounts and personal letters recording ad hoc needs for fowl. It should come as no surprise that most of the evidence, especially the written material, has come from institutional settings, revealing that birds were an essential components of offerings presented to the gods. What about the Egyptians themselves, most especially the non-elite: did they eat birds? Did they have birds in their backyards? If so, which birds? Where did they come from? Proposing possible answers to these questions is challenging to say the least, considering that the demographic under consideration is for the most part silent in the record. During this workshop, I look forward to presenting my views on how the ancient Egyptian villagers incorporated birds in their lives, and how these interactions changed over time.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Jay Geller, Divinity, Vanderbilt University
in collaboration with the Jewish Studies workshop and the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies

Request a copy of the paper by emailing kpflaum@uchicago.edu.

An excerpt from Professor Geller’s paper:

The animalization of “the Jew” did not begin with the biologization of “Jew hatred” by racial antisemitism. Rather over the past two millennia a vast menagerie of verbal and visual images of nonhuman animals (pigs, dogs, vermin, rodents, apes, etc.) have been disseminated to debase and bestialize Jews. Analogies and/or identifications of Jews with either particular animals or animality in general, almost always derogatorily, had long accompanied discourse about and iconography of “the Jew.” These forays into the wild often appropriated their figuration from scriptural sources or subsequent Christian midrash (legend), although everyday practice was no less a source (e.g., Jewish dietary prohibitions, the routine castration of pigs, distinctions between mongrels and the aristocratic breeding of dogs). While the history of that unnatural Jewish bestiary will be sketched in the next chapter, it is not, however, the primary object of Bestiarium Judaicum. Instead this study focuses upon the deployment of such animal figures by Jewish-identified, pre-eminently Germanophone, writers during the Era of the Jewish Question in order to inquire, given this history, about what may be going on when they are telling animal tales and composing animal poems.

Light refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Katharine Mershon (kpflaum@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Alex Blanchette, Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Tufts University

Gestation crates

“The Production of Animal Boredom on the American Factory Farm”

My current research projects are concerned with capitalist natures and the industrialization of labor and life in an allegedly post-industrial United States. My book-in-progress, provisionally titled Porkopolis: Standardized Life, American Animality, and the “Factory” Farm, is situated in the workplaces and wake of some of the world’s largest integrated meat corporations, which annually produce 7,000,000 animals in a 100-mile radius region of the Great Plains. On the one hand, the book is a microscopic examination of the cultural politics of bio-industrialization as labor inheres in the fissures of the porcine species—for example, in the pig’s reproductive instincts, its growth ratios, or its fat. On the other, it is an expansive ethnographic portrait of forms of imaginative totalization that underlie the making of the modern hog across every moment of its existence from pre-life to post-death. Moving from genetics facilities to slaughterhouses to bone-processing factories, Porkopolis depicts how the industrial hog is the product of an ongoing struggle over the state of American animality—including that of the human animal—with wide-ranging consequences for rural community, ecology, and agriculture.

Refreshments, none involving pigs, will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Giovanni Aloi, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Lucien Freud, Still Life with Aloe (1949)

“Why Look at Plants?”

Monday, January 12, 2015
4:30 pm
Social Sciences Tea Room (SS201)

This workshop will consist of a presentation followed by a discussion. The attached essay, “Of Plants and Other Secrets” by Michael Marder, should be read in advance.

New definitions of plant intelligence and plant agency have over the past thirty years already made a mark on the scientific record but have yet to substantially capture the imagination of scholars in the humanities. How productive would a different consideration of plants turn out to be for Animal Studies? What challenges are involved in further rethinking animal ontologies? What impact would a different consideration of human-plant relationships have on broader environmental/eco-issues/systems?

In line with the intent of the animal studies workshops, I will be interested in using this slot to map and develop some ideas for a book I have been commissioned to write on plants and contemporary art (very early stages). I intend for the main tenet to revolve around a critical questioning of the ontology of human-animal relationships. The book will argue that Animal Studies agendas continue to predominantly focus on mammalian species, subscribing to an intrinsic and unproductive anthropocentrism that substantially fails to adequately evaluate our relationships with invertebrates and most importantly plants.

Alongside the growing emergence of Animal Studies revisionist perspectives, an animal revolution has also taken place in the contemporary art gallery. In June 2000 the New York Times ran a two-page feature with the headline ‘Animals have taken over art, and art wonders why’. Since that time, and for a number of reasons, animals have become increasingly present in art. Alive, taxidermied, in formaldehyde, on canvas, or sculpted, the postmodern animal has thus far raised a number of pivotal questions about human-animal relationships in the anthropocene. Alongside this animal revolution, a number of artists have already begun to shift animal studies paradigms to the botanical world. Seeking to explain this new interest for plants, which has been developing in contemporary art, and aiming at unveiling its productive potentialities, my book will propose a new contextualization of plants in art, situating the main argument at the intersection of Art History, Visual Cultures, Critical Plant Studies, Animal Studies, Posthumanism, and Foucauldian studies.

Giovanni Aloi is a Professor in Modern and Contemporary Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby’s London and New York, and Tate Galleries in London. In 2006, he founded Antennae, the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture of which he is Editor in Chief. Counting thousands of readers around the world, the Journal is today the international reference point for the debate on animals in the arts. Aloi completed his PhD on the subject of taxidermy in contemporary at Goldsmiths University of London in 2014 and is currently reconfiguring his thesis in the form of a monograph to be published in 2016 (Routledge). His first book, Art & Animals, part of the series ‘Art &…’ by IB Tauris, was published in November 2011.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Cassie Freeman and Ashley Drake, Comparative Human Development, University of Chicago

Monday, December 1, 2014
4:30 pm
Social Sciences Tea Room (SS201)

This workshop will not have precirculated materials.

“Zoo Visitors’ Subjective Meaning-making Across Four Species”

The zoo as an institutional setting is a unique context to explore how people think about animals. While a few studies have explored philosophical and historical implications of zoos (e.g., Malamud, 1998; Rothfels, 2002) there is little empirical inquiry on this topic. This is surprising given their prevalence and the estimated 175 million people who visit them each year (AZA, 2012). In this project we seek to address this gap in the literature by describing how zoo visitors interpret their experiences at several exhibits through their use of language. Data was collected on zoo visitors observing four species (chimpanzees, African wild dogs, meerkats, and Bolivian gray titi monkeys) during real time visits at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo. These species were selected because they are in groups of four or more, vary in size, and vary in habitat space, all traits which have been found to affect visitor behavior and feelings about conservation (Bitgood et al., 1988; Margulis et al., 2003; Fernandez et al., 2009; Ross et al., 2012). Through analysis of their speech and behavior, we hypothesized that zoo visitors will more frequently attribute subjectivity to chimpanzees and wild dogs than to titi monkeys and meerkats due to the structural similarity of chimpanzees to humans and wild dogs to companion dogs. In contrast, we hypothesized that titi monkeys and meerkats would be described more frequently by their physical characteristics because they resemble adorable inanimate objects (Serpell, 2003). Our general discussion will include general visitor behavior as well as visitor descriptions of the animals, attribution of subjectivity, and understandings about the animals. Through this description of visitor speech and behavior across encounters with four species, the data collected provides a novel approach to interpreting how zoo visitors think about animals.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.

Carly Lane, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago

Monday, November 17, 2014
4:30 pm
Social Sciences Tea Room (SS201)

Request a copy of this work-in-progress by emailing hutch@uchicago.edu.

“‘The Starry Heavens Above Me and the Moral Law Within’: Transcendentalism’s Claim Against Deep Ecology”

Presented in collaboration with the Theology and Religious Ethics Workshop

I open this paper with a brief but sympathetic survey of the instincts and aims of Deep Ecology. I argue that on its own terms Deep Ecology can neither justify its necessity or make coherent progress on its own stated goals: Dismissing the ‘transcendent subject’ as so much metaphysics, and “anthropocentrism” as a moral/ecological threat, Deep Ecology undermines its own conditions of possibility. Turning to the very philosophical sources Deep Ecology understands itself against, I develop an account of the relatively-transcendent (which is to say responsible, undetermined, free) subject and her aesthetic-cum-ethical judgment. I show this form of judgment to be at work—albeit contradictorily—throughout Deep Ecology literature. Borrowing from Arendt, I defend the appropriateness of this form of judgment, not least for community formation and political action. I conclude by tracing the intimate relationship between this form of judgment and poetic thinking: As an exemplary alternative to Deep Ecology I proffer the poetic thought of Henry David Thoreau who sounds out his aesthetic-ethical judgments that we might be recalled to our humanity, in both society and the natural world.

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free and open to the public. Persons with disabilities who may need assistance to attend should contact Bill Hutchison (hutch@uchicago.edu).

Find our full workshop schedule here.