LECTURERS

Opening Lecture by Margo DeMello

Carrol College, USA

Bio

Margo DeMello received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from U.C. Davis in 1995 and is an Assistant Professor in the Anthrozoology program at Carroll College. Her books include Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community(2000), Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature (2003), Why Animals Matter: The Case for Animal Protection (2007), The Encyclopedia of Body Adornment, Feet and Footwear (2009), Faces Around the World (2012), Teaching the Animal: Human Animal Studies Across the Disciplines (2010), Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing (2012),Inked: Tattoos and Body Art Around the World (2014), On the Job: An Encyclopedia of Unique Occupations around the World (2021), and the textbooks Body Studies: An Introduction(2014) and Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies(2012, 2021).

Thom van Dooren

University of Sidney, Australia

Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2017-2021) in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and a Professor II at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, University of Oslo. His research is based in the broad interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities, with particular grounding in environmental philosophy, cultural studies, and science and technology studies. His research and writing focuses on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (2014),The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds(2019) and co-editor of Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations (2017), all published by Columbia University Press. With Deborah Bird Rose, and the Elizabeth DeLoughrey, he was the founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke University Press).

He completed his BA (honours) at the Australian National University (2003), and his PhD in the Fenner School of Environment and Society, also at the ANU (2007).He then held a Research Councils of the UK Academic Fellowship at the University of Hull (UK) and a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Technology Sydney. From 2011-2017 he helped to establish and then worked with the Environmental Humanities group at the University of New South Wales. He took up his current position at the University of Sydney in 2018.

He has held visiting positions at the University of California at Santa Cruz (2005, 2010), the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden (2014), MIT (2018), the University of Hawai`i (2018) and been a Humboldt Research Fellow (Experienced Researchers) at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (2014, 2015, 2016).

Personal website: https://www.thomvandooren.org/

Lindsay Hamilton

University of York, UK

Lindsay is an organisational ethnographer with a particular interest in human-animal interactions at work. Her interdisciplinary research has focused upon a number of organisational settings in which the species come into contact; slaughterhouses and meat packing plants, farms, veterinary surgeries, shelters and zoos.

Lindsay has published widely on her empirical findings in journals such as Organization, Gender Work and Organization, New Technology, Work and Employment and Sociology. She is co-author of two books and joint editor of the textbook,Contemporary Issues in Management, now in its second edition.

Lindsay is keen to supervise doctoral students with an interest in human-animal studies, sociology of science and technology as well as ethnographic studies of management and organization.

Piers Locke

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Piers is an environmental anthropologist who has taught, researched, and supervised in human-animal studies for many years. He has conducted extensive field research on captive elephant management and biodiversity conservation in Nepal. He has also developed a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach for studying the historical, sociological, and ecological intersections between humans, elephants, and environments.
He has published on multispecies ethnography, on human-elephant relations, and the Tharu of Nepal. He is the editor of Conflict, Negotiation, and Coexistence: Rethinking Human-Elephant Relations in South Asia (2016). Published by Oxford University Press, this volume brings together contributions from anthropologists, biologists, ecologists, geographers, political scientists, and Sanskritists.

He is currently an adjunct member of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies (NZCHAS) at the University of Canterbury.

David Redmalm

University of Mälardalen, Sweden

David Redmalm is a researcher in the Division of Sociology, School of Health, Care and Social Welfare, at Mälardalen University, Sweden. His research is focused on the relation between humans and other animals with a focus on the categorization of life: the constructions that make life valuable and grievable, and how life itself is used as a resource—or biopoliticized—in contemporary societies. He has published articles and book chapters on, among other things, the grief for companion animals, presidential pets, Chihuahuas in popular culture, riding schools, and the biopolitics of pet keeping.

Redmalm is part of the HumAnimal Group, based at Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University, with which he has organized several conferences and workshops. He has taught human-animal studies since 2010 – undergraduate classes, graduate classes, and two summer schools (in Lisbon and Kassel, both in 2019). Redmalm also teaches qualitative methods, he is especially interested in alternative forms of ethnographic methods and has worked with organizational videoethnography.

Verónica Policarpo

ICS-ULisboa, Portugal

Verónica is a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisboa (ICS-ULisboa), in the field of Human-Animal Studies. Her current research interests are focused on human-animal relationships and the construction of daily practices and bonds between human and non-human animals. She is interested in a more-than-human approach in which all living beings are considered as active stakeholders and collaborators in the co-construction of shared worlds. Currently, she explores this subject in two different topics: the relationships between children and companion animals; and the situation of non-human animals in disasters. At ICS-ULisboa, she coordinates, within this field of studies: the Human-Animal Studies Hub, with the support of the Animals & Society Institute and its International Development Award ;project “CLAN – Children-Animal’s Friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and non-humans in contemporary societies” (PTDC/SOC 28415/2017); project “Liminal Becomings: reframing human-animal relationships in disasters” (CEECIND/02719/2017); the International Summer School in Human-Animal Studies, a collaboration between ICS-ULisboa and the University of Westeros (Sweden); the post-graduate course “Animais e Sociedade”; the “Animal Wonder – Reading Group on Human-Animal Studies; and the Webinar “The Post-Human Animal”.

Course Presentation

How do non-human animals participate in society —as symbols, products and actors? How does the distinction between humans and animals shape humans’ understanding of themselves as a species, and of other animals? How is humans’ exploitation of other animals established and perpetuated? And how can such exploitation be challenged?

These are some of the questions asked by human-animal studies, an interdisciplinary research field that has expanded quickly during the last two decades and is today an established research field with its own journals, research networks and conferences. This course follows this same line of inquiry. The second edition of an International Summer School set out in 2019, in Lisbon, it is both for students new to the field and for master and PhD students who seek to further explore theoretical problems within the field, and to advance their methodological skills. The course also welcomes researchers, scholars or practitioners working in the field of human-animal relations. This second edition title is inspired by Martin Hägglund’s

This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (2019). Hägglund argues that what unites humans is that they can reflect on what they ought to do with their limited time on Earth. Hägglund argues that humans should live their life according to this existential condition, and commit and pay an increased attention to this life. But other animals share a fundamental condition of finitude with humans, a condition that is accentuated in times of pandemic zoonosis and ecological crisis. How can theoretical and methodological tools within human-animal studies be used to increase our attentiveness to this more-than-human-life? And how can human-animal studies scholars better commit to this life that we share with other animals, through their work?

Applications

Applications are accepted between February 19 and March 15. The course is FREE to all citizens of European Union member states, EES countries and Switzerland. Citizens from other countries pay a fee of 12,313 SEK. The course is open to all applicants with a bachelor degree in any subject.

Applicants sign up for the course through the Swedish national university admission system, https://www.antagning.se/ It can be difficult to navigate the site if you do not read Swedish – use google translator on the site to translate to your prefered language. For any inquiries regarding the website, please contact david.redmalm@mdh.se for support. You apply for this year’s edition of the summer school by applying for the module Animals in Society (“Djur i samhället” in Swedish, course code SOA143).

The course is strictly an online course – there are no physical meetings during the course. The lectures and seminars of the course are concentrated to August 16–20. Participants prepare for this week by reading 10-12 articles / book chapters that will be provided to all course participants a month before the start of the week of lectures.

The course officially runs from July 19 to August 22, which means that all participants will have time go through all of the readings. However, there will be no lectures, meetings or mandatory assignments before August 16.

Participants earn 2,5 ECTS for active participation online August 16–20. Participants can earn an additional 5 ECTS by submitting a course paper based on the course readings and a selection of additional readings. The paper is to be handed in no later than two months after the end of the course (deadline October 22).

Qualifications for applicants

The applicant must hold a Bachelor’s degree in any field of social sciences and humanities (sociology, geography, history, anthropology, ethnology, literature, psychology, philosophy, law, etc.). Degrees in other disciplines with a link to the study of human–animal relations will also be considered (caring sciences, nursing, public health sciences, biology, veterinary science etc.). In all cases, the applicant should have basic knowledge of the theories and methods within social sciences or humanities.

Documents

Enlish language requirements: You must submit documented proficiency in English when applying (En B/En 6 requirements). You can do that by (1) submitting your high school diploma, (2) showing a certificate from an official English test, or (3) showing through your bachelor diploma that you have at least 60 ECTS in courses given in English (any kind of courses)—applicable in EU countries and some other countries, see link below for full list.

For more information concerning the required documents depending on your citizenship:

For more information concerning language requirements:

PROGRAM

Lecture 1

Human-Animal Studies: The Past, Present and Future

Keynote Lecturer: Margo DeMello

Lecture 2

Can there be “ethnography after humanism”? Exploring possibilities and problems in human-animal studies

Lindsay Hamilton

Lecture 3

An Interdisciplinary and Collaborative Approach to Human-Elephant Relations

Piers Locke

Lecture 4

Snail trails: A foray into disappearing worlds, written in slime

Thom van Dooren

Lecture 5

Animals and Fire: Addressing Life and Death in Disaster Landscapes

Verónica Policarpo

Lecture 6

When Is Nonhuman Life Grievable? Loss, Grief and the Biopolitics of Human-Animal Relations

David Redmalm

Workshops to discuss the readings and hands-on exercises will run during the afternoons, hosted by David and Verónica.