CFP: Animalhouse: Animals and Their Environs

--EXTENDED DEADLINE: FEB 15, 2020--

We welcome paper submissions of no more than 3,000 words, that are prepared for a blind review, and suitable for a 15-20 minute long presentation. Applications will be accepted from graduate students as well as scholars unaffiliated with a university. 

Email your submission (in PDF format) to [email protected] with “Animalhouse Submission” in the subject line. In your email, please include the following details: (a) author’s name; (b) paper title; (c) institutional affiliation; (d) contact information; and (e) abstract of no more than 250 words. Please do not include your name on the paper you are submitting. 

 CFP (Extended Deadline: Feb 15, 2020):

The relationship between animals and their environs has become one of the paramount political concerns of our time. A recent UN Report asserts that climate change currently threatens one million plant and animal species with extinction and that this declining biodiversity is already taking its toll on human life. While a particular urgency motivates current discussions of animate life and its habitat, examining this relationship has yielded significant philosophical development throughout the 20th century. Consider, for instance, how Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of the umwelt influenced Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze; or, consider Hans Jonas’s assertion that standard ethical paradigms falter insofar as they fail to recognize our responsibility to the environment; or, consider the posthumanist tradition that aims to unsettle rigid distinctions between “the” human, “the” animal, and their proper domains. This conference seeks to develop and examine these traditions, further interrogating the relation of these two shifting concepts: the animal and its environs.

We invite participants to question if and how philosophy’s treatment of animals and their environs can help us make sense of our current situation. How have considerations of habitat, dominion, and domesticity determined the (ethical, ontological, rhetorical) status of animals? Conversely, how have presuppositions about “the animal” informed what environs are proper to “man”? What would it mean for an animal to be “at home” in the current world? Can philosophical approaches to animals be more than an instrumentalizing procedure? How will climate change alter not only the vitality of a species but the very grounds from which it lays claim to a home? 

This conference welcomes papers that address these themes in the history of philosophy as well as interdisciplinary approaches. 

Topics may include but are not limited to: 

•  Philosophical distinctions of human and animal
•  Climate change and animal habitats
• Animality and domesticity             
• Animals in public/private spheres
•  Gender and animality
• Philosophical homelessness         
• Metaphysics of home
• Animal and human umwelts
• Animals and the law
• Race and animality 
• Indigenous animal practices
• Philosophy of biology                  
• Animal ethics and its history 
• Land and property/animals and property
• Political/ecological diasporas
• Technological accelerants of climate change      
• Animals in literature 
• Meat consumption and land use

All submissions are due on or before Feb 15, 2020.

For any other questions or inquiries, please email [email protected]