Description:

Why Do Animal Studies?: The Turn to the Quasi-, Post-, Anti-, Non-, Para- (QPANP) is a collaboration between the Animal/Nonhuman Workshop at the University of Chicago and the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop at Northwestern University. It is a reprise of a symposium that the Animal/Nonhuman Workshop (then the Animal Studies Workshop) hosted in 2014 with a similar title. At the time, everyone was doing Animal Studies: the eponymous question would have been inflected very differently. The reprise, as we have currently conceived of it, responds to a change in the objects of inquiry of the people and publications at the forefront of our subfield, from singular animals to communities, hybrids, machines, apocalypse, inorganic/nonliving things, virtual animals and others, large scale, deep time, energies, plants, and speculative and non-Earth worlds. The conference seeks, among other things, to assemble these objects into five semi-liquid categories: the quasi-, post-, anti-, non-, and para- animal. In so doing, it makes (one) sense of the new direction of our subfield. It is our grand aspiration that people will leave the conference with a sense of the questions to be asking at this moment in Animal/Nonhuman Studies and the types of objects (literary, artistic, scientific, and so on) that people are using to address them.

The conference includes plenary performances by the contemporary art and bioengineer Adam Zaretsky and the Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid.

Why Do Animal Studies? is made possible with the generous support of The Kaplan Insitute for the Humanities, the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, the Buffett Institute for Global Studies, the Department of English, the Department of African American Studies, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University, and the Division of the Humanities, the Council on Advanced Studies, Global Studies at the College, and the Department of English at the University of Chicago.