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The Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is the first interdisciplinary scholarly center in higher education dedicated to establishing and expanding the field of critical animal studies.
MISSION STATEMENT
ICAS was established to promote critical animal studies initiatives and to eliminate animal oppression in higher education.
STRATEGIES
ICAS identifies animal oppression as torturing, marginalizing, or killing animals. ICAS has identified four major initiatives that create academic and social change to end animal oppression in higher education they include:
1. Forums, such as conferences, debates, and lecture and film series
2. Research, such as analysis that result into books, articles, journals, and policy papers
3. Networking, such as associations and groups for faculty, staff, and students to communicate
4. Campus activism, such as working with students, faculty, and staff on veganizing their campus, banning animals in entertainment and animal mascots, and eliminating vivisection and dissection.
To learn more about ICAS or CAS visit the ICAS website.
The Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) is a 501c3 non-profit organization. Contributions to ICAS in the United States are tax-exempt to the extent provided by law.
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.
IMPORTANT!! TELL EVERYONE!!! sign petition- NO to Mike Vick as a PITBULL spokesperson ANYWHERE! CLICK HERE TO SIGN PETITION
Vick as a PITBULL Spokesperson!? Target: HSUS,PETA ,Commissioner, NFL, Roger S. Goodell Sponsored by: ADVOCATE FOR SAVING DOGS PETA even considered helping Vick get back into the game by making him an animal-rights spokesperson! Mr. Vick will try to rehabilitate his image. People with knowledge of his comeback plan said it will also include mea culpa TV interviews, PSAs and charitable donations to other animal-rights organizations (or perhaps the formation of his own foundation), along with the possibility of working with HSUS. But this might be the mother of all PR jobs. Mr. Vick's obstacles are many: a hard-line NFL commissioner who wants to see "genuine remorse" before reinstating Mr. Vick to the league; individual franchises that might be wary of the backlash and potential damage to their brands from signing Mr. Vick; and an incredulous public that remains shocked by the story. " I don't think Vick needs to be forever condemned, but to make him a spokesmen for animal rights is insane. He just wants a public relations stunt to make him look good. Do you really think he cares about the treatment of animals? The answer is NO! " We know how society trains every one to revolve around the media and sports.... DO WE REALLY WANT THE PUBLIC TO LOOK UP TO MICHEAL VICK? ----That it's ok to HURT living breathing vessels as long as we are "sorry" after wards?
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