Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Welcome to the Animals & Society Institute's Human-Animal Studies Report. Again this month, the Human-Animal Studies (HAS) field is active and busy, this time with an extraordinary wealth of podcasts and recorded seminars, publications, and conferences and courses.

ASI has been very active too. In the ASI News section below, we are pleased to highlight some results of ASI’s efforts to support the HAS field and broaden it worldwide.

Under HAS news, the recording is now available for the American Sociological Association-ASI Animals & Society Colloquium Series last month in which my co-editor, Jeannette Vaught, and I discussed our new book, The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves. Also, among other great conference calls, check out the Call for Proposals for the March 2023 Living with Animals and Living with Horses conferences at Eastern Kentucky University.

Thank you for your ongoing support of our Human-Animal Studies efforts. Stay healthy and safe, and do what you can to protect those you can.

Best,

Gala

Editor’s note: The HAS e-newsletter is organized as follows: Jobs, grants, and calls are ordered chronologically by deadline dates, with the earliest first, and will continue to be posted until the deadlines expire. Books and articles include, where possible, links to access them directly from this email. Because publication reference styles vary by source, they might not always be consistent or pretty, but they will get you there. To read more about the topics discussed, click the bold hyperlinks for source material and additional information. 

Please send your comments, suggestions, and submissions to: [email protected], and if possible include a URL link to your project or announcement.



ASI Board President Ken Shapiro recently served as a discussant at a session on “Animal Boredom: Concepts and Ethics.” The talk was a part of a series of ongoing seminars under the project, Biosociality and More-than-Human Relations in the Anthropocene. See future seminars under this project here.

Kim Spanjol, ASI Board Member, presented in August at the Animal and Public Policy: Embodying, Implementing and Institutionalizing Animal Ethics conference arranged by the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Her presentation, “Cultivating Compassion in Higher Education: Humane Pedagogy and Implications for Educating Public Policy Stakeholders,” advocated for widespread applications of Humane Pedagogy that addresses non-human animal protection issues and our deep interconnection with them in expanded settings and offered guidelines for best practices to optimize and support critical thinking, attitudinal shifts, and behavioral change when educating learners, including public policy stakeholders, about non-human animal issues.

In 2019, the University of Lisbon was awarded ASI’s Human-Animal Studies International Development Program grant which provided the resources required to develop and implement the university’s first HAS-Hub. The grant has now closed, but there has been incredible work coming out of the Hub whose new postgraduate course, Animals & Society, is currently in its second year. Along with the postgraduate course, the Hub recently completed a four-year research project that studied the relationships between animals and children. The Hub has also completed two years of an international summer school, and has an ongoing HAS reading group, Animal Wonder. 

The November Human-Animal Studies Colloquium, co-sponsored by ASI and the Animals and Society Section of the American Sociological Association will address “Nonacademic Social Science Career Paths in Human-Animal Studies.” The colloquium will feature social scientists Dr. Teresa Tyler, Dr. Miranda Workman, and Molly Tamulevich who will discuss how they have forged successful careers outside of academia, describe their personal career paths, give some points of advice, and answer audience questions. The colloquium will take place Friday, November 18 at 9am PT/12pm ET. It is free to attend, open to the public, and includes ample Q&A time. Register here.

The recording is now available of the October Human-Animal Studies Colloquium, co-sponsored by ASI and the Animals and Society Section of the American Sociological Association. In it, editors Gala Argent and Jeannette Vaught discuss how their new book, The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves, applies the Human-Animal Studies tenet of including animal others’—specifically, horses—perspectives and lived experiences, and how their scholarship and own relationships with horses mutually impact each other.  

The November LINK-Letter about animal cruelty’s intersections with child, elder and domestic abuse focuses on how social workers can play key roles in cross-reporting animal abuse and human violence, that perpetrators of elder abuse may use their victims’ pets to manipulate and control vulnerable elders, and that veterinarians need more training in diagnosing animal sexual abuse, among other issues.

The Exeter Intersectionality Ethics Research Network calls anyone part of an organization working with individuals or groups (human or animal) who experience oppression, marginalization, inequalities, and injustice, to spare 5-10 minutes to complete a survey and help the Exeter Intersectionality Ethics Research Network understand how to best work with and assist organizations and policy makers around the world.

As the holiday gift-giving season approaches for some of us, if you have little people on your gift list check out The Gryphon Press with its picture books celebrating the human-animal bond. For K-12 teachers, Gryphon has free downloadable classroom guides for most titles, and offers 50% off bulk purchases.

The International Museum of the Horse is seeking qualified applicants for the position of Parks Museum Curator. The Curator of Exhibits will be expected to help plan, design, and construct exhibits relevant to the Museum’s mission as well as work on refreshing existing exhibits in coordination with the Museum’s Interpretive Plan. The deadline for applications is November 15, 2022 (so be fast).

The University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria, has two fully-funded three-year PhD positions available: (1) Socioecological and developmental effects on social behavior in free-ranging dogs (apply to [email protected]); and (2) Testing aspects of the Domestication Syndrome in free-ranging dogs (apply to [email protected]). Both positions begin in January 2023 at the field site in Morocco. The deadline for applications is November 20, 2022. 

The Tiny Beam Fund—a small charitable foundation based in the U.S.—is offering fellowships and grants to academic researchers interested in drivers and negative impacts of industrial animal agriculture, especially those concerning low- and middle-income countries. The Fellowship Awards (given to individuals) for up to $25,000 are for four months for academic researchers (including independent scholars) who hold PhD or are PhD students in advanced stage of their study. No restrictions as to applicants’ place of residence or citizenship. The Research Planning Grants (given to universities) for up to $10,000 are for six months for applicants (or leaders of teams with 2-4 persons) who must hold PhD and should be employed by universities that can receive these grants. They need not be located in the U.S. Deadline for both: November 22, 2022.

Are you pursuing a Ph.D. related to Animals and Biodiversity? Is your goal to have a positive impact on policies and laws surrounding the treatment and status of animals in society? The Global Research Network’s Animals and Biodiversity Think Tank programme is looking for new Junior Fellows to join the team. 

Dr. Lisa Kemmerer is seeking interns to help with a new Animals and Religion Website. The website will provide animal-friendly religious teachings to people around the world who identify as religious and is also designed to assist students and scholars of animal studies and activists who engage with people of faith. Interns will create and populate the website. For more information and to be part of the change brought by the Animals and Religion Website, please contact [email protected].

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) is advertising for quite a few jobs right now. Check them out here.

The ASPCA’s Department of Strategy and Research announces remote work opportunities for the following positions: 2 x Director of Research. Also, funding applications remain open on a rolling basis for ASPCA’s Open-Access Publishing Fund, which covers the cost of article processing charges to make high-quality research papers on animal welfare topics available to broader audiences. Applications will be considered in the order in which they are received.



This section includes both upcoming live events, and past events that were recorded.

In the video, Children & Animal Companions: Care, love, and grief in multispecies families, the University of Lisbon’s HAS Hub explores the complex relationships existing between children and their “pets” by following the questions and findings of the CLAN research project, which stands for Children-Animals Friendships: challenging boundaries between humans and nonhumans in contemporary societies.

Directed by Professor Maneesha Deckha, A Deeper Kindness: Animal Law and Youth Activism is a scholarly documentary film pilot on Animal Law. This film introduces a planned six-episode series surveying the current field of animal law and policy through the eyes of four youth active in animal advocacy. 

The recordings of The Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies conference, which took place took place on November 3-5, 2022, are now available for viewing. 

Presentations from the third annual meeting of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists, a conference co-host each year by Corey Wren, have been posted to Youtube. Her talk "Selling Veganism in the Age of COVID: British Newspaper Representations in 2020" is included.  

Episode 86 of the podcast, Always for Animal Rights, interviews John Sanbonmatsu about his forthcoming book, the connections between speciesism and other forms of oppression, and the myth of “humane” and “sustainable” animal agriculture. 

Knowing Animals Episode 202 speaks to Dr Frauke Albersmeier, a research fellow in philosophy at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, about her 2022 paper “Popularizing Moral Philosophy by Acting as a Moral Expert,” which was published open access in the philosophy journal Kriterion. 

Knowing Animals Episode 203 speaks to Ali Ryland, an animal studies scholar at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. The working title of her thesis is “Changing Representations of Women and Cow, from Milkmaid to Milking Machine.”

Check out the podcasts on Juliana Roth’s Drawing Animals website, which focuses on our interconnection with animal life. Once a month, interviews are released with ecological writers, vegan chefs, animal-related spaces, artists, and more.

In the latest episode of The Animal Turn podcast, Claudia Hirtenfelder talks to Jeff Sebo about bioethics and how it straddles both health and environmental ethics. Jeff Sebo is Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Affiliated Professor of Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, Director of the Animal Studies M.A. Program, Director of the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and Co-Director of the Wild Animal Welfare Program at New York University. He is author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves (Oxford University Press, 2022), co-author of Chimpanzee Rights (Routledge, 2018)

Following are some recent books published of interest to the field of Human-Animal Studies.

Joyce D'Silva, 2023. Animal Welfare in World Religion: Teaching and Practice. Taylor & Francis Group.

Catia Faria, 2022. Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature. Cambridge University Press.

Stephanie Rousseau & Turid Rugass, 2022. How to Raise a Puppy: A Dog-Centric Approach. CRC Press.

Simons, J. 2023. Goldfish in the Parlour: The Victorian Craze for Marine Life. Sydney University Press.

Tom Tyler, 2022. Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity. Minnesota University Press.

Following are some recent research articles and book chapters published in the field of Human-Animal Studies.

A new issue of Humanimalia, 13(1) is out.

Annie L. Booth & Ken Otter, 2022. The Law and the Pussycat: Public Perceptions of the Use of Municipal Bylaws to Control Free-Roaming Domestic Cats in Canada. Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science. 

Buddhamas P., Kriengwatana, Richard Mott, Carel ten Cate, 2022. Music for animal welfare: A critical review & conceptual framework. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 251. 

Allison Caine, 2022. Herding at the Edges: Climate Change and Animal Restlessness in the Peruvian Andes. Ethnos.

Comaskey, E. & Eith, C.m 2022. Creating an Environment for Social Cohesion in Early Childhood through Humane Education. Early Childhood Educ J. 

Müller, N.D., 2022. From here to Utopia: Theories of Change in Nonideal Animal Ethics. J Agric Environ Ethics, 35, 21.

Victoria L. O'Connor, Jennifer Vonk, 2022. “A (tiger) king's ransom”: Dark personality features predict endorsement of exotic animal exploitation. Personality and Individual Differences, 202. 

Perlo, K. 2022. What is the Animal Class?: Idea, Position, Goal. Politics and Animals, 8, 1-13. 



Meryl Shriver-Rice, M. Jesse Schneider & Christine Pardo, 2022. Charismatic megafauna, regional identity, and invasive species: What role does environmental archaeology play in contemporary conservation efforts?. World Archaeology.

Sider, K., 2021. Playing with Horses: Improvisation and Communication. TDR: The Drama Review, 65(3), 91-102. 

Chrstine Yvette Tardif-Williams & Renata P. S. Roma, 2022. Exploring Children’s Insights about Participating in Recreational Activities with Horses and Farm Animals: Social Emotional Experiences and Belief in Animal Mind. People and Animals: The International Journal of Research and Practice, 5(1).

Wren, Corey, 2022. Early Writings of Vegan And Vegetarian Societies. In: Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies. University of Edinburgh.

MDPI is calling for submissions for the Special Issue of their journal, Animals, titled, Advances in Marine Mammal Cognition and Cognitive Welfare. For this Special Issue MDPI welcomes manuscripts that speak to issues regarding the cognitive abilities and/or cognitive well-being of any marine mammal species. The deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2023. 

Editors Eva Spiegelhofer and Elizabeth Tavella call for book chapters for a new volume titled, Animated Wor(l)ds: Language and Relationality for Multispecies Kinship. For this volume, contributions that seek to cultivate multispecies kinship by encouraging alternative ways of relating to, thinking about, and entering into conversation with the animate world are invited. The deadline for abstract submission is November 30, 2022. For more information, click here. 

MDPI is calling for submissions for the Special Issue of their journal, Animals, titled, Animal Welfare from a Cross-Cultural Perspective. For this Special Issue MDPI welcomes manuscripts that address animal welfare from a cross-cultural perspective, including more-than-human cultures. The deadline for manuscript submissions is March 23, 2023.



The Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control (BIWFC) will host a free webinar on November 17, 2022, at 2:00pm (EST) titled "Black-tailed deer in the city: A scientific approach to population control using immunocontraception." This webinar will examine the increase in abundance and density of urban Columbian black-tailed deer that has become a growing concern in Victoria, British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada.

The 6th panel of the Ecocide/Speciesism Symposium will take place on Saturday November 19, 2022 at 10am PST, which brings together exciting research, activism, and artwork. There is no registration needed.

The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History and the Latvian Academy of Sport Education will host the online seminar, Horse care and training in medieval Europe, on November 24, 2022.

The Institute for Humane Education will host the online Graduate Program Info Session for Animal Advocates on Tuesday November 22, 2022 at 7pm EST. There are many ways for animal activists to help animals, and one of the most effective also happens to be one of the most heartening and strategic: working as a trained humane educator who has the knowledge and skills to effectively ignite and inspire positive change for animals through a variety of activities and professions.  

The Institute for Human Education has created humane education graduate programs to support and deepen the work and impact of changemakers. The online programs with Antioch University explore interconnected issues of human rights, animal protection, and environmental ethics. Visit their website for more information or contact Mary Pat Champeau, Director of Graduate Programs: [email protected]. The deadline for applying to Spring 2023 programs is December 15, 2022.

Dr. Leslie Irvine and the University of Colorado at Boulder have three online courses as part of the Animals and Society Specialization: Animals, Self, and Society; Animals and Institutions; and The Changing Status and Perception of Animals.



As you can see, ASI is promoting a tremendous amount of activity in the field of Human-Animal Studies. We always invite your input and participation.

Your donation to the Animals & Society Institute will enable us to continue to expand the field in many more ways and work in conjunction with others around the world who share these goals.

Thank you for supporting ASI's Human-Animal Studies efforts!