Association of American Geographers Meeting, April 2008
It is a real pleasure to join the Practical Ethics blog, and to be part of a community delving into myriad human-animal relationships.
I would like to invite those of you familiar with geography to attend the 2008 AAG meeting in Boston, and to consider submitting a paper for our session on Animal Geographies. We will have sponsorship from the Ethics, Justice, and Human Rights specialty group and Practical Ethics. Please see the CFP below for guidelines and contact information.
For those unfamiliar with the growing research into animal geographies, I would like to take a moment to provide an overview of this developing disciplinary area. Geographers have always had as one of their main focal interests a curiosity about how humans interact with the natural world - what constitutes these interactions, how they vary across time and space, and how specific interactions are contested within societies. The interactions between humans and nonhumans are one huge piece of this puzzle, and over the past ten years geographers have produced a significant body of literature on animal geographies. Examining human-animal relationships in agriculture, the ‘wild’, captive and companion situations, researchers have questioned where and how boundaries between humans and animals have been defined (e.g., research laboratory), how specific places and cultures have shaped interactions (e.g., the connections between heritage livestock breeds and local identities/economies), and the relationship between ethics and animal subjectivities (e.g., what constitutes ethical practices towards nonhumans, how does that vary from place to place, how can the animal as subject be ‘heard’?). Two excellent places to start looking into what animal geography has to offer are: Animal Geographies edited by Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel and Animal Spaces, Beastly Spaces edited by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert. I would be happy to provide additional citations to anyone who is interested.
AAG 2008 Call for Papers on Animal Geographies: Current and Future Research Trajectories
As interest in human-animal studies continues to develop within geography, researchers are moving in a variety of novel directions. We are soliciting papers for a session (or sessions) on current research in animal geographies for the 2008 AAG meeting April 15-19 in Boston. Papers may be from any geographic perspective and may address topics such as (but not limited to) technologies, law and policy, ethics, historical geographies, social theory, agriculture, methodologies, animal subjectivities, and human-animal boundary making.
Constraints of the AAG meeting format: Please note that in order to participate in this AAG session, you will have to first register for the conference on the website to obtain a PIN number and then you will need to submit your abstract and PIN number to us and we will formally submit the session. The deadline for session submissions is October 31, 2007. To that end, we ask all interested participants to register and submit their materials to us by October 1st so that we have adequate time to prepare the submission.
Please submit your materials and/or questions to
Julie Urbanik, Ph.D., julie.urbanik@gmail.com, and
Kristin Stewart, Ph.D., kristinlstewart@yahoo.com.
William Lynn :: Sep.08.2007 :: Environmental Studies, Ethics, Geography, Human-Animal Studies :: No Comments »