Animal Self

3–5 credits · Undergraduate

Using an interdisciplinary approach that includes humanities scholarship, literary texts, popular media, and contemporary social science, this class will investigate the myriad relations between nonhuman animals (or "animals"), humans, and human social orders. Together we will unpack speciesist assumptions embedded in the Western humanist tradition (and represented across Western media and literature) and explore alternative texts that present nonhumancentric views of and strategies for living and adapting in our rapidly changing world, such as works by Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing, and Kim TallBear. We'll approach nonhuman animals as agential subjects (rather than merely objects for human study), and practice thinking with "assemblages" or networks rather than in subject-object relations.