Canadian Society for Critical Animal Studies
1st Biennial Meeting program
Animals at Large:
Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Wild, Feral, and Free-Living Animals
Co-sponsored by The Social Justice Centre at Concordia University, the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ), and the Observatoire québécois en droit animalier, with the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Killam Research Fund, the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS) at the University of Alberta, and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts and Department of Criminology.
The conference will take place at the Cinéma De Sève located at 1400 De Maisonneuve Ouest H-558 on the Concordia University (downtown/Sir George Williams) campus in Montreal and online. You can register for the online meeting here.
August 5
2:30 - 3:45 p.m. - Welcome and Opening Keynote: Stephanie Rutherford (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Christiane Bailey
Stephanie Rutherford, “Canids and Canada: Wolves, Coyotes and Regimes of Violence and Belonging”
4:00 – 5:15 p.m. - Artist-Activist Talk: Shannon Johnstone (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Deborah Hardt
Shannon Johnstone, “Photography, Animals, and Activism: Centering Animals Through an Ethics of Sight”
5:15 – 6:30 p.m. – Shannon Johnstone Photography Exhibit and Reception (Shift)
August 6
8:30 - 9:00 - Continental breakfast (Shift)
9:00 – 10:30 a.m. – Wild Animal Attacks (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford
Emelia Quinn, “The Comedy and Camp of Wild Animal Revenge”
Susmita Roy, “Who Produces the ‘Tiger Widow’? Ecology, Patriarchy, and Systemic Marginalization”
Ian Hanesworth, “Wolf Mothers & Man Things: Agency, Emotionality, and Personhood in Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Story’”
10:30 – 10:45 a.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)
10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Feral Intimacies: Care and Control in Interspecies Relations (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Emelia Quinn
Misha Solomon, “Goon at Love Park”
Ishaan Selby, “‘Big, Furry, Asymmetrical Balls’: Wildness, Feral Sex, and Ownership in Marian Engel’s Bear”
Jesse Arsenault, “The Wildness of Interspecies Desire in South African Literature and Law”
12:15 – 1:15 p.m. – Lunch (Shift)
1:15 – 2:45 p.m. – Wild Politics (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Chloë Taylor
Pablo Castello, “The Territorial Rights of Wild Animals: Justification”
Esther Palm, “Travail Animal et critique du sauvage en théorie politique”
Christiane Bailey, “Renouncing violence and doing politics with wild and liminal animals in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Animals and the Right to Politics”
2:45 – 3:00 p.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. – Vermin, Pests and Invasive Species (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford
Emily Major, “The Boogeymen of Our Forests: Anti-Possum Rhetoric and the Construction of Fear in Dominant Conservation Messaging in New Zealand”
Zoei Sutton & Kate Hall, “Feral Catastrophe: Analyzing the Narrative Construction of Australian Cats”
Lauren Corman, “Criminal/Animal: Trump’s Criminalization of Immigrants and Vilification of Nonhuman Animals”
August 7
8:30 - 9:00 Continental breakfast (Shift)
9:00 – 10:15 a.m. – Keynote: Catia Faria (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Chloë Taylor
Catia Faria, “Compassion by Design: Aligning AI with the Welfare of Wild Animals”
10:15 – 10:30 a.m. – Coffee/tea Break (Shift)
10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Media Analyses (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Parth Pant
Mathieu Chaput & Jacinthe Dupuis, “The Communicative Constitution of Liminal Animals in the ‘Deer Saga’”
Briana Magnuson & Tony Weis, “HPAI in the Wild: A Critical Analysis of Media Coverage of the Panzootic Crisis”
Branislava Vičar, “The Conservation Discourse of Native Animal Species as Nationalist Narrative: The Case of the Marble Trout”
12:00 – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch (Shift)
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. – Wild Horses (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Tayler Zavitz
Sabine Sassner, “Movement vs. Behaviour: Visibility and Agency of Equines”
Lucy Horswill, “From ‘Semi-Wild’ to Surplus: Language and Disposal at British Drift Sales”
Kelly Struthers Montford & Chloë Taylor, “Wild Horse Prison Programs in the American Southwest”
2:30 – 3:00 p.m. – (extended) Coffee/tea Break (Shift)
3:00 – 4:30 p.m. – The Future of Wildness (Cinéma de Sève)
Moderator: Kelly Struthers Montford
Stephanie Eccles, “Farmed Animals in Extreme Weather Events: Disaster Response Pathways and Foreclosures of Wildness”
Sal Renshaw, “Saving By Any Other Name: Sanctuaries, Arks, and the Governance of Animal Lives in the Anthropocene”
Agata Kowaleska, “Feralizing: Reimagining Future Liberations in Europe”
