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Institute for Critical Animal Studies

Institute for Critical Animal Studies

About Me


Our interests include:
animal liberation, animal rights, environmentalism, feminism, globalization, social justice, respect for all, Earth liberation, prisoner support, free education, green theory and praxis, music, movies, critical theory, sociology, anthropology, criminology, criminal justice, political prisoner support, reading, writing, freedom, disability rights, youth rights, food not bombs, books not bombs, punk, hardcore, hip-hop, rap, country, 80s, raggae, funk, metal, rock, dance, latin, alliance politics, total liberation, peacemaking, peace studies, philosophy, social philosophy, action and theory, critical pedagogy, disability pedagogy, human rights, fair wages, working with all, collaboration, end of the individual, and intersectionality
The Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is the first interdisciplinary scholarly center dedicated to promoting critical scholarly dialogue and research on the principles and practices of animal advocacy, animal protection, and animal-related policies in the fields of social sciences and humanities.
Check out the ICAS web-site here: www.criticalanimalstudies.org
Institute for Critical Animal Studies
PO Box 35905
Syracuse, NY 13235
406-657-2936 - Dr. Lisa Kemmerer
[email protected] - Dr. Nicola Taylor
Journal for Critical Animal Studies
[email protected]
Conference for Critical Animal Studies
[email protected]
Association for Critical Animal Studies
[email protected]
Book Reviews for the Journal can be sent to: [email protected]
ICAS Blog
http://criticalanimalstudies.blogspot.com/
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What Is Critical Animal Studies?
The aim of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is to provide a space for the development of a “critical” approach to animal studies, one which perceives that relations between human and nonhuman animals are now at a point of crisis which implicates the planet as a whole. This dire situation is evident most dramatically in the intensified slaughter and exploitation of animals (who die by the tens of billions each year in the United States alone); the unfolding of the sixth great extinction crisis in the history of the planet (the last one being 65 million years ago); and the monumental environmental ecological threats of global warming, rainforest destruction, desertification, air and water pollution, and resource scarcity, to which animal agriculture is a prime contributor.
Since the last decade, animal studies has emerged as a new and rapidly growing interdisciplinary paradigm, leading to a prolific development of centers, university position, conferences, journals, books, e-lists, radio shows, and podcasts dedicated to studying how humans have conceived of and related to nonhuman animals. Although scholars working in animal studies have made significant contributions to our understanding of the historical, sociological, and philosophical aspects of human/nonhuman animal relations, the discipline is strangely detached from the dire plight of nonhuman animals, human beings, and the Earth.
Animal studies has already entrenched itself as an abstract, esoteric, jargon-laden, insular, non-normative, and apolitical discipline, one where scholars can achieve recognition while nevertheless remaining wedded to speciesist values, carnivorist lifestyles, and at least tacit – sometime overt -- support of numerous forms of animal exploitation such as vivisection. In recent years Critical Animal Studies has emerged as a necessary and vital alternative to the insularity, detachment, hypocrisy, and profound limitations of mainstream animal studies that vaporizes their flesh and blood realities to reduce them to reified signs, symbols, images, words on a page, or protagonists in a historical drama, and thereby utterly fail to confront them not as “texts” but rather as sentient beings who live and die in the most sadistic, barbaric, and wretched cages of technohell that humanity has been able to devise, the better to exploit them for all they are worth.
In contrast to the dominant orientations of animal studies, as well as to tendencies prominent throughout the animal welfare and animal rights movements, we seek to develop a Critical Animal Studies that:
1. Pursues interdisciplinary collaborative writing and research in a rich and comprehensive manner that includes perspectives typically ignored by animal studies such as political economy.
2. Rejects pseudo-objective academic analysis by explicitly clarifying its normative values and political commitments, such that there are no positivist illusions whatsoever that theory is disinterested or writing and research is nonpolitical.
3. Eschews narrow academic viewpoints and the debilitating theory-for-theory’s sake position in order to link theory to practice, analysis to politics, and the academy to the community.
4. Advances a holistic understanding of the commonality of oppressions, such that speciesism, sexism, racism, ablism, statism, classism, militarism and other hierarchical ideologies and institutions are viewed as parts of a larger, interlocking, global system of domination.
5. Rejects apolitical, conservative, and liberal positions in order to advance an anti-capitalist, and, more generally, a radical anti-hierarchical politics, This orientation seeks to dismantle all structures of exploitation, domination, oppression, torture, killing, and power in favor of decentralizing and democratizing society at all levels and on a global basis.
6. Rejects reformist, single-issue, nation-based, legislative, strictly animal interest politics in favor of alliance politics and solidarity with other struggles against oppression and hierarchy.
7. Champions a politics of total liberation which grasps the need for, and the inseparability of, human, nonhuman animal, and Earth liberation in one comprehensive, though diverse, struggle; to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr.: a threat to liberation anywhere is a threat to liberation everywhere.
8. Deconstructs and reconstructs the socially constructed binary oppositions between human and nonhuman animals, a move basic to mainstream animal studies, but also looks to illuminate related dichotomies between culture and nature, civilization and wilderness and other dominator hierarchies to emphasize the historical limits placed upon humanity, nonhuman animals, cultural/political norms, and the liberation of nature as part of a transformative project that seeks to transcend these limits towards greater freedom and ecological harmony.
9. Openly engages controversial radical politics and militant strategies used in all kinds of social movements, such as those that involve economic sabotage and high-pressure direct action tactics.
10. Seeks to create openings for critical dialogue on issues relevant to Critical Animal Studies across a wide-range of academic groups; citizens and grassroots activists; the staffs of policy and social service organizations; and people in private, public, and non-profit sectors. Through – and only through -- new paradigms of ecopedagogy, bridge-building with other social movements, and a solidarity-based alliance politics, is it possible to build the new forms of consciousness, knowledge, social institutions that are necessary to dissolve the hierarchical society that has enslaved this planet for the last ten thousand years.
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NEW JOURNAL FOR CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES POSTED!
Vol. 5, Issue, 2 - 2007
Table of Contents
Introduction
Steven Best, PhD and Carol Gigliotti, PhD
Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own Path
Andrea Rossing McDowell, PhD
Jewish Ethics and Nonhuman Animals
Lisa Kemmerer, PhD
Deliberative Democracy, Direct Action, and Animal Advocacy
Stephen D'Arcy, PhD
Should Anti-Vivisectionists Boycott Animal-Tested Medicines?
Katherine Perlo, PhD
A Note on Pedagogy: Humane Education Making a Difference
Piers Beirne and Meena Alagappan
Book Reviews:
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser
Reviewed by Lisa Kemmerer, PhD
Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust by Charles Patterson
Reviewed by Steven Best, PhD
The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA by Norm Phelps
Reviewed by Steven Best, PhD

My Interests



International Executive Board of Directors

Dr. Nicola Taylor, Central Queensland University, Australia
Executive Director

Dr. Steven Best, University of Texas, El Paso
Director

Dr. Lisa Kemmerer, Montana State University, Billings
Director

Dr. Carol Gigliotti, Associate Editor Emily Carr Institute
Chairperson, Advisory Board

Richard Kahn, Book Review Editor of JCAS University of North Dakota
Secretary

Anthony J. Nocella, II Syracuse University
Treasurer

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International Advisory Board

Dr. John A. Alessio,
St. Cloud State University, USA

Dr. Julie Andrzejewski,
St. Cloud State University, USA

Dr. Piers Beirne,
University of Southern Maine

Dr. Stephen R.L.Clark,
University of Liverpool, England

Dr. Charlotte Laws,
Councilperson for Valley Glen, California

Dr. Annie Potts, Researh & Syllabi Director
University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Dr. Maxwell Schnurer, Newsletter & Reports Editor
Humboldt State University, USA

Dr. Richard Twine,
Lancaster University, England

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Books by ICAS Members

In search of Consistency: Ethics and Animals
by Lisa Kemmerer

This volume introduces the most important ideas in animal ethics and builds on a critical dialogue emerging at the intersection of animal rights, environmental ethics, and religious studies. In search of Consistency examines the work of influential scholars Tom Regan (animal rights), Peter Singer (utilitarian ethics), Andrew Linzey (theologian), and Paul Taylor (environmental ethics), and explores ethics and animals across six world religions (Indigenous faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). In Search of Consistency sheds light on 'the sanctity of life' by means of an intriguing moral theory, 'The Minimize Harm Maxim', rooted in the time-honoured moral ideals of impartiality and consistency. This volume questions what it means to be human and challenges our assumed place in the universe.

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Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defenes of the Earth
Steve Best and Anthony J. Nocella, II, ed.

Global warming, acid rain, deforestation, air and water pollution are but a few of the overwhelming indicators that the earth's health is worsening. For decades, environmental groups have been resisting the destructive trends set by industry and government, but as the social and political climate has changed, popular protest movements have become less and less effective. As the earth's situation worsens, those opposing its destruction have out of necessity become increasingly militant. Corporate and federal properties have been vandalized, set ablaze-even bombed-and the government is meeting this new brand of environmental militance with an increasingly heavy hand.

Whether you're drawn by frustration with environmental strategies that, to date, have been ineffective against this growing ecological crisis, or simply by curiosity (Who are these people? Why are they doing this? What do they hope to gain?), Igniting a Revolution offers a fascinating and compelling look at the emerging movement of revolutionary environmentalism.

Includes essays by Marilyn Buck, Robert Jensen, John Zerzan, Ashanti Alston, Jeffrey "Free" Luers, Derrick Jensen, Ann Hansen, and a preface by Bron Taylor.

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Aftershock Confronting Trauma in a Violent World A Guide for Activists and Their Allies
by pattrice jones

Aftershock explores the culture of trauma that people have created through our violent exploitation of the Earth, other animals, and one another. As long as we continue to perpetrate such violations, we will never fully heal our own traumatic injuries. This book, therefore, is for survivors of all kinds of trauma, for therapists who treat trauma, and for anyone who hopes to reduce the amount of terror in the world.

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Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals
Steven Best & Anthony J. Nocella, II, ed.

The first anthology of writings on the history, ethics, politics and tactics of the Animal Liberation Front, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? features both academic and activist perspectives and offers powerful insights into this international organization and its position within the animal rights movement. Calling on sources as venerable as Thomas Aquinas and as current as the Patriot Act—and, in some cases, personal experience—the contributors explore the history of civil disobedience and sabotage, and examine the philosophical and cultural meanings of words like “terrorism,” “democracy” and “freedom,” in a book that ultimately challenges the values and assumptions that pervade our culture. Contributors include Robin Webb, Rod Coronado, Ingrid Newkirk, Paul Watson, Karen Davis, Bruce Friedrich and others.

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My Blog

CNY Peace Studies Conference Nov. 1st!!

20th AnnualCNY Peace Studies Conferencewww.peaceconsortium.org and Concerned Philosophers for Peace21st Annual ConferenceState University of New York College at CortlandOctober 30-November 2 2008 All...
Posted by Institute for Critical Animal Studies on Sat, 18 Oct 2008 12:06:00 PST

Central New York Peace Studies Conference Nov 1st

20th Annual CNY Peace Studies Conference        &n bsp;         &n bsp;       ...
Posted by Institute for Critical Animal Studies on Sat, 18 Oct 2008 09:41:00 PST

ICAS Interview with Anthony J. Nocella, II on Academic Repression

Interview with Anthony J. Nocella, II on Academic Repression: Reflections from the Academic Industrial Complex (co-edited with Steven Best and Peter McLaren, AK Press, Fall 2008)Institute for Critica...
Posted by Institute for Critical Animal Studies on Sun, 17 Aug 2008 10:31:00 PST

Looking for Guest Editors

Post far and wide:     The Journal for Critical Animal Studies (JCAS)  is looking for Guest Editors on a diversity of topics - feminism, critical race theory, ecopedagogy, disability s...
Posted by Institute for Critical Animal Studies on Mon, 16 Jun 2008 04:44:00 PST

Critical Animal Studies Annual Conference 2008

..> 6th Annual Conference for Critical Animal Studies & 2nd Annual Green Theory and Praxis Conference "Animal and Earth Advocacy: Links of Life" ...
Posted by Institute for Critical Animal Studies on Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:43:00 PST