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 with an extraordinary wealth of funding and job opportunities, new publications, and conferences and courses.

In the ASI News section below, we are pleased to highlight some results of ASI’s efforts to support broadening the HAS field internationally.

Under HAS news, check out the latest in the ongoing American Sociological Association-ASI Animals & Society Colloquium Series next week in which my co-editor, Jeannette Vaught, and I discuss how our new book problematizes and tackles the HAS tenet of including animal others’ lived experiences and perspectives in our research, writing, and lives.

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: gala.argent@animalsandsociety.org, and if possible include a URL link to your project or announcement.

ASI is excited to announce the latest release in the Brill Human-Animal Studies Book Series, Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks. In this new addition to the HAS Series, author Sarah Czerny takes readers through an ethnographic comparison of milk consumption and production in Croatia in a range of different social settings: on farms, in mother-infant breastfeeding relations, in food hygiene documentation and in the local landscape, and argues that humans actually invest considerable work into abstracting and negotiating milks into their human and animal forms.

ASI-UIUC Summer Institute’s 2020 fellow, Adewale Owoseni, has since completed a Ph.D. at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and has co-authored a book chapter, “A Yòrùbá Worldview on the Compatibility of Human and Nonhuman Animal Relations (HAR) with Environmental Sustainability” in the text Knowledge Production and the Search for Epistemic Liberation in Africa. (See below in articles.) Congratulations Dr. Owoseni, on both!

Verónica Policarpo, previous recipient of ASI’s International HAS Development Grant, continues her good work with a new video, Children & Animal Companions: Care, love, and grief in multispecies families. It 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 non-humans in contemporary societies. The research looks at the affective practices existing between children and animal companions, how empathy and relationships develop, how they are defined, how families and households change, and how care plays a vital role. 

Join ASI’s Human-Animal Studies Program Director, Gala Argent, and Jeannette Vaught on October 21, 2022 at 1 PM ET for a discussion of their new co-edited book, The Relational Horse: How Frameworks of Communication, Care, Politics and Power Reveal and Conceal Equine Selves. They will discuss how they apply the Human-Animal Studies tenet of including animal others’—specifically, horses—perspectives and lived experiences in both their academic studies and their own relationships with horses. They point out possible ways forward for future studies in which horses’ voices are present, attuned to, and included in both human-equine scholarship and human-horse relationships. Co-sponsored by ASI and the Animals and Society Section of the American Sociological Association, this colloquium is free to attend, open to the public, and includes ample Q&A time. Register here. 

ASI is pleased to make open access the article from its managed journal, Society & Animals, “Learning With Donkeys – A ‘More-Than-Human’ Approach to Animal-Assisted Activities” by Cara Clancy, Fiona Cooke and Richard Gorman. The article draws from empirical work with practitioners involved in donkey-facilitated learning (DFL) to examine the knowledge base of equine facilitators, including their beliefs, opinions, and assumptions about donkeys, their understanding of animal welfare, and their role in DFL. The authors discuss how knowledge of donkeys is mobilized to ensure more-than-human welfare during DFL; how animals’ “choice” to participate is encouraged and centered; how ideas of nonhuman labor create opportunities for considering more-than-human welfare; and how practitioners advocate for animals and embed practices of care for humans and nonhumans.

Our October LINK-Letter focuses on growing international awareness of how animal abuse is often a marker for current and future violence against vulnerable people. This month’s issue includes provocative research about hunting, animal hoarding, bullying, and circuses – plus lots of other news – from Canada, Brazil, Greece, the U.K., Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Mexico, Italy, France, and the Czech Republic, as well as the U.S.

Faunalytics presents a new short film by Ryuji Chua that charts the history, rise, and decline of greyhound racing, an industry whose days are numbered. Run To Death: The Rise & Fall of Greyhound Racing builds on the work of the greyhound advocacy groups around the world that have already pushed this issue to where it is today.

Canisius College is currently looking to hire an Assistant Professor of Anthrozoology. This person will teach in the existing graduate program in Anthrozoology as well as a new undergraduate Anthrozoology major. Some courses may also be offered in the existing undergraduate major in Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation. Applications will be accepted through October 21, 2022.

Eckerd College seeks an Assistant Professor of Animal Studies with a specialty in qualitative investigations of global human animal encounters, looking at spheres of study that intersect with animals and practices or categories of human-animal relations that can include all time periods and all locations of human animal encounters. Applications have been extended to October 21, 2022. 

The Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities (SGSAH), in partnership with the British Council, has just launched its EARTH Scholarships. On offer are up to 10 scholarships for current or recently graduated PhD students from any non-UK institution to study in Scotland for up to 3 months, undertaking personal research or participating in an existing research project in a HEI in Scotland in spring 2023. The deadline for the full application is 12pm GMT on Monday November 7, 2022.

Waltham Petcare Science Institute is calling for applications to fund high-quality innovative research into Human-Animal Interaction (HAI). This grant is part of Waltham’s continued support into high quality, evidence-based research critical to better understanding the beneficial relationship between people and companion animals. The deadline for applications is November 15, 2022. Find more information here. 

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.

The ASPCA’s Department of Strategy and Research announces remote work opportunities for the following positions: Director, Research, Senior Manager, Project Management, and Internships in Applied Animal Welfare 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.

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 lkemmerer@msubillings.edu.

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

Charlotte Blattner, Senior Lecturer and Researcher, Faculty of Law, University of Berne in Switzerland, will give the second 2022 Tom Regan Memorial Lecture on "Transitional Justice and Animal Rights” on Monday, October 17, at 3:00 p.m (CET) and 9:00 a.m. (EDT).

The ASPCA and the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement will co-host their annual Research Forum on the afternoon of November 9, 2022. The Research Forum is for anyone interested in advancing animal welfare, including shelter or other animal welfare organization leadership, staff, and volunteers; veterinarians; researchers and students; and the public. This free event will explore the results of new studies in community and shelter animal welfare. A variety of continuing education credits are available. Find out more and register here.

In the podcast episode, “Will a fully vegan world ever be possible?” guest host Rachel New and sociologist, Dr. Corey Wrenn, discussed how a global shift to veganism could benefit humankind, and what a vegan world might actually look like. Also, the scholar-activist collective International Association of Vegan Sociologists has a Youtube channel that includes past conference presentations.

In Episode 201 of Knowing Animals, Professor Chris Hopwood, Professor of Personality Psychology at the University of Zurich, discusses his work on the links between personality and diet, including his co-authored paper 'Development and validation of the Motivations to Eat Meat Inventory', published open access in the journal Appetite. 

In Protecting Animals 51, Knowing Animals talks with Jamie Woodhouse, who runs sentientism.info, the Sentientism podcast, and a range of outreach activities relating to the philosophy of sentientism.

The University of British Columbia’s Animal Welfare Program will be hosting hybrid webinars on a Monday in each month in celebration of the Program’s 25-year anniversary.

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

Sune Borkfelt, 2022. Reading Slaughter: Abattoir Fictions, Space, and Empathy in Late Modernity. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

Sarah Czerny, 2022. Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks. Brill Publishing.

Joshua Duclos, 2022. Wilderness, Morality, and Value. Lexington Books.

Đurašević, Siniša & Todorović, Zoran, 2022. Animal Bioethics: Old Dilemmas and New Challenges. Ethics Press.

Sana Loue & Pamela Linden (eds.), 2022. The Comprehensive Guide to Interdisciplinary Veterinary Social Work. Springer.

Baptiste Morizot, 2022 . Rekindling Life: A Common Front. Polity. 

Matthias Stephan & Sune Borkfelt, (eds.), 2022. Interrogating Boundaries of the Nonhuman: Literature, Climate Change, and Environmental Crises. Rowman & Littlefield.

Belinda Recio, 2021. Your Inner Zoo: A Guide to the Meaning of Animals and the Insights They Offer Us. Skyhorse.

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

Clancy, C., Cooke, F., & Gorman, R. (2022). Learning With Donkeys: A “More-Than-Human” Approach to Animal-Assisted Activities, Society & Animals (pre-published). 

DeVera, M. R.; Cristobal, G. A. J.; DeGuzman, C. P. C.; Mariño, E. M. V.; Palomares, A. M. L.; Sonajo, J. H. C., 2022. Experiences, Reasons, and Challenges of Filipino Cat Lovers who Adopted Multiple Stray Cats. North American Journal of Psychology. 24(3), 505-514. 

Finkelstein, M. (2022). The Art of Therapeutic Horsemanship: Communication, Choreography, and Collaboration in Equine Therapy. Anthropological Quarterly, 95(3), 621-648.

Giraudet, C.S.E.; Liu, K.; McElligott, A.G.; Cobb, M. Are Children and Dogs Best Friends? A Scoping Review to Explore the Positive and Negative Effects of Child-Dog Interactions. Preprints 2022, 2022100052.

Amy Johnson & Emily Eccles. Animal Welfare Considerations in Animal-Assisted Interventions. Human-Animal Interaction Bulletin, 10(1): 99-105; Special Report.

Panos Kompatsiaris (2022). Companion species and comrades: a critique of ‘plural relating’ in Donna Haraway's theory manifestos. Culture, Theory and Critique. 

Kull, K. & Favareau, D., 2022. Semiotics in general biology. In: Pelkey, Jamin (ed.), Bloomsbury Semiotics, vol. 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences. pp. 35–56. Bloomsbury.

Lawton, G., 2022. Meat-free mutts and moggies. New Scientist, 24 Sep. 44-48. PDF.

Selene Mezzalira, Cristiano Scandurra, Antonio Santaniello, Fabrizio Mezza, Claudia Saturnino, Serena Cristiano, Rosa Pizzo, Nelson Mauro Maldonato, Lucia Francesca Menna, Vincenzo Bochicchio, 2022. Affiliative Bonds and Cruel Behavior in Childhood Interspecific Relationships: A Conceptual Framework on the Psychodynamics of Affect Regulation. Mediterranean Journal of Clinical Psychology. In press.

N.Z. Liz Paola, P.R. Torgerson, S. Hartnack, 2022. Alternative Paradigms in Animal Health Decisions: A Framework for Treating Animals Not Only as Commodities. Animals, 12, 1845.

Owoseni, A.O., Olatoye, I.O., 2022. A Yòrùbá Worldview on the Compatibility of Human and Nonhuman Animal Relations (HAR) with Environmental Sustainability. In: Masaka, D. (ed). Knowledge Production and the Search for Epistemic Liberation in Africa. Springer.

Katy Schroeder & Priscilla Rose Prasath, 2022. Positive Psychology and Therapy Animals: A Conceptual Integration for Counseling Practice. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 4 (4): 312–326. 

Shalini Sengupta, 2022. “Enabling Entanglements”: Rethinking Modernist Difficulty in the Sixth Extinction. Modernism/Modernity, 7(2).

Radosław Siewierski, 2022. The Relationship between Humans and Animals in the Aboriginal Mythology through the Prism of Animal Studies. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 2: 601-612.

J Sorenson, A Matsuoka, 2022. Moral Panic over Fake Service Animals, Social Sciences, 11: 493. Published: 25 September 2022.

Stobiecka, M., 2022. Lively Heritage: On More-Than-Human Encounters at Mediterranean Archaeological Sites. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 9(1), 64–81. 

Sinivaldo Silva Tavares, 2022. The ‘Invention’ of Anthropocentrism: A Decolonial Approach. Perspect. Teol., 54 (2).

Urbanik, J., Johnston, C.L. (2022). Shared Spaces, Shared Suffering: Exploring the Effects of COVID-19 on Urban Animal Advocacy Organizations in Chicago and Kansas City, USA. In: Brunn, S.D., Gilbreath, D. (eds). COVID-19 and a World of Ad Hoc Geographies. Springer. 

Laura M. Wauthier, Steve Farnfield, Scottish SPCA & Joanne M. Williams, 2022. A Preliminary Exploration of the Psychological Risk Factors for Childhood Animal Cruelty: The Roles of Attachment, Self-Regulation, and Empathy, Anthrozoös. Published online: 04 Oct 2022. 

Zidenberg, A.M., Olver, M.E., 2022 Measurement and Correlates of Zoophilic Interest in an Online Community Sample. Arch Sex Behav. 

Alexandra M. Zidenberg, Brandon Sparks & Mark Olver, 2022. A Survey of Veterinary Medical Professionals’ Knowledge, Attitudes, and Experiences with Animal Sexual Abuse, Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science. Published online: 05 Oct 2022.

Neldner, K., & Wilks, M. (2022). How do children value animals? A developmental review. Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations, 1, Article e9907.



MDPI is calling for submissions for the Special Issue of their journal, Animals, titled, Live Animal Transportation: A Risk for Animal and Human Health and Welfare. This Special Issue invites colleagues working in animal welfare science, in particular, in animal transportation, and aims at collecting a series of articles that may help to enhance the regulation of animal transportation worldwide. The deadline for manuscript submissions is October 25, 2022. Find more information here.

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. Find more information here. 



The 30^th Annual Animal Law Conference, co-presented by the Animal Legal Defense Fund and the Center for Animal Law Studies, will take place in-person in Portand, Oregon and live online on November 4-6, 2022. Ticket registration is open and can be purchased here.

The ASPCA and the Association for Animal Welfare Advancement will host their annual Research Forum on November 9, 2022. Registration, which is free to all, is now open, and a variety of continuing education credits are available.

The Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) 2022 International Captive Wildlife Conference will take place on November 11-12, 2022, in Sacramento, California. 

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.

AIP: Anthrozoology as International Practice Student Conference will take place online November 11-12, 2022. The conference is free. For further information and to register, visit the website. 

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!