Animal Studies in Multispecies Worlds

4 credits · Graduate

In recent decades social movements, artists, scholars, and biologists have focused more frequently, and perhaps more urgently, on what Derrida called “the question of the animal" and what zoologist von Uexkull called Umwelt, the inner subjective world of organisms. 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 offers important lenses through which to understand power relations and domination, this course will follow the various scientific, political, relational, and ethical implications of multispecies thinking.