Thinking With Animals

4 credits · Undergraduate

Animals have long been the subject of human inquiry. As historian Harriet Ritvo writes, “Learned attention to the animal is far from new." However, in recent decades social movements, artists, and scholars have focused more frequently, and perhaps more urgently, on what Derrida called “the question of the animal.” In this course we will look to how centering the animal challenges human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and traditional critical discourse. Tracing the ways work in animal studies denaturalizes hierarchical taxonomies, defines key concepts such as human and animal, and articulates boundaries between species, this course will follow the various political, relational, ethical and imaginative implications of thinking with animals.