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Call for Applications: Race and Animals Summer Institute 2016

2015 August 28
by Shared by Steve Rust

Race and Animals

Summer Institute

June 6-17, 2016

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

Deadline December 1, 2015

Lori Gruen, Claire Jean Kim, and Timothy Pachirat invite you to apply for “Race and Animals,” a two-week institute to be held June 6-June 17, 2016, hosted by Wesleyan Animal Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

The “Race and Animals” summer institute seeks to foster critical discussions on theoretical, historical, and political understandings of how power works to constitute racialized and animalized subjects.  We encourage applications from:

  1. Those working on current projects addressing the intersection of race studies and animal studies.
  2. Those working on current projects focusing on race who are interested in exploring connections to animal studies.
  3. Those working on current projects focusing on animals who are interested in exploring connections to race studies.

We welcome applications from all fields of study.  Applicants should either have their Ph.D.s or other terminal degrees (e.g., MFAs or JDs) or be advanced graduate students at the ABD stage of their graduate work.

10-12 selected scholars will attend daily lectures and engage in structured daily discussions with the institute organizers and visiting speakers.  They will also have the opportunity to present and receive feedback on their own research.  Required readings will be distributed in advance of the institute.  Participants will be provided with dormitory style housing and will receive $500 each to offset travel expenses.

To apply, please send a single .pdf file containing the following documents to these addresses (lgruen@wesleyan.edu; cjkim@uci.edu ; pachirat@polsci.umass.edu).  Both the subject line of the email and the attached pdf should read “Race and Animals Application- LAST NAME”

  1. A cover letter (not to exceed 750 words) discussing your interest in race studies and animal studies. You should highlight past and current projects of relevance (publications, syllabi, etc.) and offer a concrete explanation of what your unique contribution to the institute would be.
  2. A current curriculum vitae.
  3. A short writing sample or other work product that engages with race studies, animal studies, or both.
  4. The names, institutional affiliations, and email addresses of at least two references.

The deadline for applications is December 1, 2015.

About the Organizers:

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy, Chair of Philosophy, and Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University.  She also coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies.  She is the author of 3 books, including most recently Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015); the editor of 5 books, including The Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014) and Ecofeminism:  Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth with Carol J. Adams (Bloomsbury, 2014).  With Kari Weil, she co-edited “Animal Others” a special issue of Hypatia (2012).

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies, social movements, and human-animal studies.  She is the author of Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge, 2015), Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale, 2000), and numerous essays on race and animals.  In 2013, she co-guest edited a special issue of American Quarterly entitled, Species/Race/Sex.

Timothy Pachirat teaches in the Department of Political Science at UMass Amherst.  His book, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University Press, 2011), is a widely acclaimed political ethnography of the massive, repetitive killing of animals carried out by a largely immigrant workforce.

About the Visiting Speakers:

Colin Dayan is Professor of English, Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities, and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She is the author most recently of With Dogs at the Edge of Life (forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2015).  She has also authored The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton UP, 2011), a Choice Outstanding Academic book; The Story of Cruel and Unusual (MIT/Boston Review Press, 2007); Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 1995, 1998; Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987); A Rainbow for the Christian West (University of Massachusetts Press, 1977).

Maria Elena Garcia is director of the Comparative History of Ideas and associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. She received her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University and has been a Mellon Fellow at Wesleyan University and Tufts University. Her first book, Making Indigenous Citizens: Identities, Development, and Multicultural Activism in Peru (Stanford, 2005) examines Indigenous and intercultural politics in Peru. Her work on Indigeneity and interspecies politics in the Andes has appeared in multiple edited volumes and journals such as Anthropology Now, Anthropological Quarterly, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Her second book project, Dancing Guinea Pigs and Other Tales of Race in Peru, examines the intersections of race, species, and capital in contemporary Peru.

Jared Sexton  is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Film and Media Studies. He has published articles in journals such as African American Review, American Quarterly, Art Journal, Cultural Critique, Radical History Review, and Social Text, and essays in various anthologies on contemporary politics and popular culture. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism and a co-editor of a special issue of Critical Sociology on “Race and the Variations of Discipline,” and has contributed occasional pieces to magazines like Artforum, ColorLines, Jadaliyya, and openDemocracy.

About Wesleyan Animal Studies:

From 2010-2015, Wesleyan Animal Studies, in partnership with The Animals and Society Institute held an annual summer fellowship program for scholars pursuing research in Human-Animal Studies. The fellowship program was started by the Animals and Society Institute (ASI) in 2007 and directed by Margo DeMello; it was hosted by Lori Gruen and Kari Weil since coming to Wesleyan; and over the years funded over 60 fellows. The ASI-WAS Human Animal Studies Fellowship Program will celebrate its 10th year by hosting a conference at Wesleyan in October 2016.

WAS has sponsored a number of speakers and events, including two conferences, and offers a cluster of courses.

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