Institute for Critical Animal Studies 's Interests
General
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International
Advisory Board
Dr. Carol Gigliotti, Associate Editor
Emily Carr Institute
Chairperson, Advisory Board
Dr. John A. Alessio,
St. Cloud State University, USA
Dr. Julie Andrzejewski,
St. Cloud State University, USA
Dr. Philip Armstrong, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Dr. Piers Beirne,
University of Southern Maine
Dr. Carl Boggs, National University, Los Angeles, CA
Dr. Stephen R.L.Clark,
University of Liverpool, England
Amie Breeze Haper, University of California, Davis
Dr. Charlotte Laws,
Councilperson for Valley Glen, California
Dr. Annie Potts, Researh & Syllabi Director
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
Dr. Maxwell Schnurer, Humboldt State University
Dr. Nicola Taylor, Central Queensland University, Australia
Former Executive Director, ICAS
Dr. Richard Twine,
Lancaster University, England
Dr. Cary Wolfe, Rice University
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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.
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.
Institute for Critical Animal Studies
PO Box 35905
Syracuse, NY 13235
406-657-2936 - Dr. Lisa Kemmerer
icas@criticalanimalstudies.org - Dr. Nicola Taylor
Journal for Critical Animal Studies
jcas@criticalanimalstudies.org
Conference for Critical Animal Studies
ccas@criticalanimalstudies.org
Association for Critical Animal Studies
acas@criticalanimalstudies.org
Book Reviews for the Journal can be sent to:
richard@criticalanimalstudies.org
ICAS Blog
http://criticalanimalstudies.blogspot.com/
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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Hello ~ thank you for being a friend of Moon Warriors. I am currently drumming up signatures for 17 petitions to stop the gassing of healthy, loving animals in the USA, so please visit my blog and sign them!
This video shows what can be done ~ it is not necessary to kill so many animals, nor kill them in an inhumane manner
Cat House on the Kings Cat Sanctuary ~ amazing video
Click the cat's eyes to sign petitions:
Please visit the new blog and sign petitions to end the animal gas chambers. There are 17, if you could sign at least some of them that would be great ~ Have a good week ~ Thank you for helping animals ~♥~
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