Conference Programme UPF- Centre for Animal Ethics (CAE) / [email protected] Faculty of Communication, Universitat Pompeu Fabra – Roc Boronat 138 (Barcelona) https://eventum.upf.edu/24859/detail/6th-conference-of-the-european-association-for-critical-animal-studies-eacas.html 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Welcome to Barcelona! 5 1 Conference Theme 6 2 3 Practical Information 7 4 Keynote Speakers 10 5 Conference Schedule 13 6 Special Panels & Workshops 25 7 Vegan Barcelona 33 Sponsors & Supporters 35 8 9 Abstracts 37 3 4 Welcome to Barcelona! 1 It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to Barcelona for the 6th Conference of the European Association for Critical Animal Studies (EACAS) to be held May 22nd-24th 2019 at the Communication Campus of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, located in the vibrant @22 district of the city. We have endeavoured to ensure that this event will live up to the best in the Critical Animal and Studies (CAS) tradition. It will assemble an impressive list of interdisciplinary contributions showing the unstoppable progress of this field in academia, and it will provide us with the opportunity to integrate academic research with political engagement and activism. Our shared aim: dismantling the oppression of nonhuman animals. We are honoured by the response to this conference call. More than 200 people have confirmed their attendance, including 111 paper presentations, 4 keynote speakers, 4 practical workshops, 2 animal advocacy panels and the participation of a number of critical animal studies publishers and animal advocacy organisations. We extend our heartfelt thanks to everybody whose combination of generosity and effort has made this event possible: the administrative staff at the UPF Department and Campus of Communication, the EACAS and CAE communities, students, volunteers, animal advocates and artists and, of course, our sponsors. Thank you all! The organising committee of the 6th EACAS Conference Núria Almiron Catia Faria Laura Fernández Daniela R. Waldhorn Eze Paez Sandra Amigó Maria R. Carreras 5 Conference Theme 2 Rethinking revolution: Nonhuman animals, antispeciesism, and power Although human exploitation of nonhuman animals is by no means a modern development, it has grown exponentially in the last century. It is under capitalism that human abuse of their power over nonhuman animals has reached a massive scale, with a corresponding massive worsening of its consequences. This includes the suffering of trillions of sentient beings exploited in miserable conditions and killed for anthropocentric purposes, but also the massive contribution to global warming of industries like agribusiness, as well as the negative impact these practices have on social justice, intra-human violence and human health. The animal liberation movement therefore not only calls for justice and compassion for nonhuman animals, but must also confront the results of industrial capitalism and modernity with a radical consciousness-raising claim. This claim is radical because it provides the most accurate condemnation of privilege and the status quo by revealing how inequality does not exist only at the intra-species level, but also at the inter-species level, and that both levels are closely interlinked and thus ought to be addressed jointly. In the spirit of the field of Critical Animal Studies, the aim of this conference is to encourage scholars, students and activists to rethink the revolution that animal liberation theory represents since its inception in the 1970s, a social movement bringing the fight against oppression to its logical conclusion. For this reason, the conference includes proposals from a variety of scholars and disciplines – including critical academics, independent researchers, students and activists – reflecting on the intersecting themes of the conference: power, total liberation and antispeciesism. The conference encourages the approach of critical animal studies and non-speciesist perspectives on all sorts of discrimination, oppression and abuse towards farmed animals, animals in labs and animals in entertainment, among others, including animals living in the wild. 6 Practical information 3 Location The Department of Communication, and the Communication Campus, of Universitat Pompeu Fabra is located in the @22 district in Barcelona. Address: Universitat Pompeu Fabra Campus Poblenou Roc Boronat, 138 08018 Barcelona Metro: Line 1 Glòries Tram: T4 Glòries (Ca l'Aranyó) - T5 & T6 Glòries (La Farinera) Bus: H14, 7, 92 Conference facilities All the conference panels will take place in the basement of building 52, where rooms 52.S27, 52.S29 and 52.S31 and the Auditorium are located. These are all just below Plaça Guttemberg on campus. Some workshops will take place in building 55. The registration desk, exhibitors and coffee-breaks will be in the Auditorium hall. Lunch will be served in the tunnel to building 55, just besides rooms S27, S29 and S31. 7 WI-FI access Event access: An Event server for free internet access will be available for the conference. The password will be provided at the conference facilities. Conference events The conference includes 4 sessions with keynote speakers, 36 academic panels, 4 practical workshops, 2 sessions with animal advocates and 1 special session with experts. The registration to the conference gives free access to all. Food Conference food: Registration at the conference provides access to all coffee-breaks and lunches. All food provided will be vegan and served by Estació Vegana and La Raposa. Self-paid dinner: A self-paid dinner will take place Thursday evening at 7.30pm at La Raposa, a vegan, feminist cooperative located in the picturesque Poblesec district. A special buffet will be served for 30€ / person. La Raposa is located at Carrer de Tapioles, 47, which is 5 minutes on foot from Paral·lel (L2, L3) metro station. Because of La Raposa’s space limit, only 50 people will be able to attend. You will be invited to pay for the dinner at the registration desk. Please note that having selected the self-paid dinner option on the online registration form does not mean you have a booking. This was only meant for the organisers to make an estimation of attendance. Booking must be confirmed through payment at your arrival at the registration desk. Booking will be available up to capacity. Volunteers and organisers will gladly guide you to the restaurant on Thursday. If you have booked the dinner, please join us at 6.30pm at the Auditorium hall to go to the restaurant. Vegan Barcelona For anyone looking for opportunities to try other vegan options in Barcelona, recommendations for vegan restaurants in the city can be found at the Vegan Barcelona section of this programme. Please note that the cafeteria at the UPF Communication campus regularly offers vegan options as well. 8 Conference language The language of the conference is English but there will be two panels and two workshops in Spanish including Spanish and Catalan animal advocates and experts. Volunteers The antispeciesist student association ESLA (Estudiantes por la Lucha Animalista) will provide assistance and support to participants. For your convenience, they will be wearing a t-shirt with the conference slogan: This is a serigraphy of the chicken in the picture of the conference poster. This chicken is a refugee at a sanctuary, photographed by animal activist and photojournalist Aitor Garmendia, who kindly donated the image for the event. Aitor is the celebrated author of Tras los Muros [Behind the Walls] project (http://traslosmuros.com/). 9 Keynote Speakers 4 OPENING KEYNOTE Wednesday 22 May, 10.00 – Auditorium Emotions as Political and Moral Concepts: The Need for (Radically) New “Animal Emotions” Elisa Aaltola For long, Western thought has presumed emotions to be fixed, innate and universal. However, this essentialist stance on emotions has recently been contested by a constructivist approach, according to which emotions are conceptualisations, which we actively make on the grounds of past experience and social learning. Thereby, emotions do not “just happen”, but we construct them, and they are influenced by our cultural and social surroundings. The important implication is that emotions are also influenced by political ideologies and moral beliefs – indeed, the constructivist take on emotions supports what the feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed has called “the politics of emotion”, whereby emotions are both partially constituted by and impact different power-related worldviews. Another significant implication, argued for in this talk, is that by reshaping our existing emotion concepts, and by learning entirely new emotions, we can radically alter our political and normative landscapes. All these considerations are highly pertinent to the human-nonhuman relationship. The role played by emotions in how other animals are defined, treated and valued, still remains understudied. Arguably, what has been termed “the meat paradox” or “omnivore’s akrasia” – a state, within which the same individual proclaims to love animals and yet eats them – is largely motivated by emotions or affective states such as species-pride, hedonistic habits, or the fear and shame of standing out. In turn, those emotions are culturally learned and politically/normatively coloured, whereby anthropocentric cultures teach, via the media, marketing, law, education and various cultural narratives, which emotions are appropriate in regard to pigs, cows or hens. In order to radically alter the moral standing of other animals, novel emotions need to be introduced