Animals at Large: CAS Perspectives on Wild, Feral, and Free-Living Animals is co-organized by the Canadian Society for Critical Animal Studies, the Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en éthique (CRÉ) and the Social Justice Centre at Concordia University, the Groupe de recherche en éthique animale et environnementale (GREEA) and the Observatoire québécois en droit animalier (OQDA) based at the Université de Sherbrooke.

This event is co-sponsored by the Groupe de recherche en éthique animale et environnementale (GREEA), the Observatoire québécois en droit animalier (OQDA) based at the Université de Sherbrooke, the Killam Research Fund, the Kule Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Alberta, and Toronto Metropolitan University’s Faculty of Arts and Department of Criminology.

The conference will be hybrid, register here (free and open to all).

Schedule:

Wednesday, August 5th

2:30 p.m. – 3:45 p.m. – Welcome and Opening Keynote: Stephanie Rutherford (Trent University), “Canids and Canada: Wolves, Coyotes and Regimes of Violence and Belonging”

4:00 p.m. – 5:15 p.m. –Artist-Activist Plenary: Shannon Johnstone (Meredith College), “Photography, Animals, and Activism: Centering Animals Through an Ethics of Sight”; moderator Deborah Hardt (University of Wollongong in Dubai)

5:15 p.m. – 6:30 p.m. – Shannon Johnstone Photography Exhibit and Reception

Thursday, August 6th

9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. – Wild Animal Attacks

• Emelia Quinn (University of Ottawa), “When Animals Attack: The Comedy and Camp of Wild Animal Revenge”
• Susmita Roy (University of Alberta) “Who Produces the ‘Tiger Widow’? Ecology, Patriarchy, and Systemic Marginalization”
• Ian Hanesworth (University of Utah), “Wolf Mothers & Man Things: Agency, Emotionality, and Personhood in Ursula LeGuin’s ‘The Wife’s Story’”

10:30 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. – Break

10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Feral Intimacies: Care and Control in Interspecies Relations

• Misha Solomon (Concordia University), “Goon at Love Park”
• Ishaan Selby (Concordia University), “‘Big, Furry, Asymmetrical Balls’: Wildness, Feral Sex, and Ownership in Marian Engel’s Bear”
• Jesse Arsenault (Concordia University), “The Wildness of Interspecies Desire in South African Literature and Law”

12:15 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. – Lunch

1:15 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. – Wild Politics 

• Pablo Castello (University of Denver), “The Territorial Rights of Wild Animals: Justification”
• Esther Palm (Université de Montréal), “Travail Animal et critique du sauvage en théorie politique”
• Christiane Bailey (Concordia University), “Renouncing violence and doing politics with wild and liminal animals in Donaldson and Kymlicka’s Animals and the Right to Politics”
• Agata Kowaleska (Jagiellonian University), “Feralizing: Reimagining Future Liberations in Europe”

3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. – Break

3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. – Vermin, Pests and Invasive Species

• Emily Major, “The Boogeymen of Our Forests: Anti-Possum Rhetoric and the Construction of Fear in Dominant Conservation Messaging in New Zealand”
• Zoei Sutton (Flinders University) and Kate Hall, “Feral Catastrophe: Analyzing the Narrative Construction of Australian Cats”
• Lauren Corman (Brock University), “Criminal/Animal: Trump’s Criminalization of Immigrants and Vilification of Nonhuman Animals”

Friday, August 7th

9:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. – Keynote: Catia Faria (Complutense University of Madrid), “Compassion by Design: Aligning AI with the Welfare of Wild Animals”

10:15 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. – Break

10:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. – Media Analyses

• Mathieu Chaput (Université TÉLUQ) and Jacinthe Dupuis (Université de Montréal), “The Communicative Constitution of Liminal Animals in the ‘Deer Saga’”
• Briana Magnuson (Western University) and Tony Weis (Western University), “HPAI in the Wild: A Critical Analysis of Media Coverage of the Panzootic Crisis”
• Branislava Vičar (University of Maribor), “The Conservation Discourse of Native Animal Species as Nationalist Narrative: The Case of the Marble Trout”

12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. – Lunch

1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. – Wild Horses

• Sabine Sassner (University of Texas at Dallas), “Movement vs. Behaviour: Visibility and Agency of Equines”
• Lucy Horswill (Falmouth University), “From ‘Semi-Wild’ to Surplus: Language and Disposal at British Drift Sales”
• Kelly Struthers Montford (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta), “Wild Mustang Prison Programs in the American Southwest”

2:30 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. – Break

2:45 p.m. – 4:15 p.m. – Intersection of Behavioural Ecology and Critical Animal Studies: The Ethical Costs and Benefits of Primate Research in Wild, Free-Ranging, and Rehabilitative Contexts 

Facilitator: Mikaela Gerwing (Concordia University)

Presenters: Nève Djevalikian-Couture, Italo Ferreira Perreira, Maya Moghrabi, Viviane Aurora Oliviera, & Brogan M. Stewart (all presenters from Concordia University)

4:15 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Break

4:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. – Sanctuary and Salvation 

• Sal Renshaw (Nipissing University) “Saving By Any Other Name: Sanctuaries, Arks, and the Governance of Animal Lives in the Anthropocene”
• Stephanie Eccles (Toronto Metropolitan University), “Farmed Animals in Extreme Weather Events: Disaster Response Pathways and Foreclosures of Wildness”
• Darren Chang (University of Sydney), “Contesting Wildness: The Farmed Animal Sanctuary as Liminal Contact Zone”