animals

Exploring Human-Animal Relationships in Organizational Settings: A New Research Line at the HAS-Hub

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By: Leticia Fantinel and Verónica Policarpo

In February, the first post of a series of three was published, detailing the first steps of the Human-Animal Studies Hub (HAS-Hub). The post presents the first seeds of the Hub and the ingredients that helped it grow and gain some breath. With the mission of establishing and supporting a network of scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and institutions interested in Human-Animal Studies who speak (not only but also) Portuguese, the HAS-Hub has been an important reference for researchers in the field. The Hub has been playing a crucial role in helping us to build a community, fostering collaboration and enabling us to work together to achieve common goals.

The series of posts reveal that the Hub is expanding, with the seeds already planted and the growth environment under close attention. Now, it is time to focus on nurturing the growth process so that the branches can become strong and fruitful. This post is dedicated to one of these branches – the research line “Animals and Organizations”. This is one of the two new research lines stemming from the synergies created in the course of post-doctoral projects developed at the Hub, the other one focusing on “Animals and Education”. Both will add to the already existing research strands that animate the HAS-Hub since 2018 – “Companion Animals” (Animals and Children, Animals and Personal Life), “Animals in Disasters”, and “Animals and Sustainability” (farmed animals, food animals, transition to plant-based diets).

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A CLAN for Human-Animal Studies? Opportunities and challenges of establishing the field – Part 3 

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By: Verónica Policarpo

**A versão portuguesa dos 3 posts pode ser consultada aqui.

This is the last post of a series of three in which I proposed myself to reflect upon the main opportunities and challenges implied in the establishment of the field of Human-Animal Studies (HAS) in Portugal, and the role of the HAS-Hub in that process. In the first part, I recollected the strengths of international networks and funding. In the second part, I dived into the powers of connecting in our own mother tongue. Finally, in this third and last post, I will shortly discuss the major threats that, from my point of view, the HAS-Hub may face in the near future, as well as the emerging opportunities.

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A CLAN for Human-Animal Studies? Opportunities and challenges of establishing the field in Portugal – Part 2

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Por: Verónica Policarpo

**A versão portuguesa dos 3 posts pode ser consultada aqui.

For the last four years, the Human-Animal Studies Hub (hereafter, HAS-Hub) has brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and institutions, under a common interest: the critical appraisal of the multiple and systemic ways through which humans have exploited nonhuman animals, and an ethical commitment to contribute to diminish their suffering. In this post, I resume the reflection initiated here about this process. In the first part, I leaned over the rising strengths of international networks and collaborations, as well as the angular role of funding to foster research, training and dissemination. In this second part, I wish to highlight – and honour – the power of connecting and working in our mother tongue. Building a HAS network that speaks, not only but also, in Portuguese is a major mission of the HAS-Hub. I will try to show the role of post-graduate education in this process, in particular the post-graduate course Animais e Sociedade. This reflection will not end today, though. In a future third and last part, I will highlight what are, from my point of view, the major threats that the HAS-Hub faces in the near future, as well as emerging opportunities.

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A CLAN for Human-Animal Studies? Opportunities and challenges of establishing the field in Portugal – Part 1

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By: Verónica Policarpo

**A versão portuguesa dos 3 posts pode ser consultada aqui.

Three sociologists meet at a conference in Athens

In September 2017, the congress of the European Sociological Association was held in legendary Athens. It was a very hot day, and as it happens to me often, my presentation was on the very last day of the conference, on the very last time slot, late in the day. Feeling all the tiredness that comes after a long week of one of these big conferences, I headed to the venue early in the morning, after a sleepless night. I had browsed the conference program several times, looking for presentations that had the word “animal”, or any other related, in the title or abstract. I had found only three. One of them was exactly on the very same panel, and the very same day, in which I was going to present my own work. Moreover, it was about a topic very dear to me: death and mourning for a companion animal.

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Multispecies organizing: “de-anthropocentering” management practices in the city

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By: Leticia Fantinel

Organizations are omnipresent in our lives. We are born in hospitals, we study in schools, we work for companies, and when we die, we go to cemeteries. Organizations represent one of the main instruments for mediating our relationships with other human beings, with our cities, or even with the environment and other animals. Organizations make possible animal exploitation in complex food systems and laboratory experimentation. Organizations coordinate human and non-human work in assisted therapies, as well as in aquariums and zoos. Furthermore, it is through organizations that public management intermediates our relationships with multiple non-human populations in our cities. The latter was the subject of a project we developed in Brazil.

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Sustainable futures for whom? Towards an education for interspecies sustainability

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By: Maria Helena Saari (University of Oulu)

What does cow’s milk have to do with education and sustainable futures? To explore this question we might ask, as environmental education scholar David Orr has done, if education stems from the word “educe”, meaning “to draw forth” or “bring out”, what is being brought out by the connections between the dairy industry and schools?

Image: Annie Spratt on Unsplash
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Uma vida que seja sua: um Hub de estudos com os animais

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Por: HAS-Hub

Em 2017, um colectivo de autoras assinava o texto A life of their own: children, animals, and sustainable development, questionando a invisibilidade dos animais não humanos na agenda do desenvolvimento sustentável das Nações Unidas. O texto chamava a atenção para a sua ausência nos 17 Objetivos (SDGs) da Agenda 2030, onde só surgem mencionados indiretamente como “recursos” (SDGs 14 e 15), meios para um fim: construir uma vida e um futuro melhores para os humanos, no (e não com) o planeta. Sem o saber, este documento lançava as bases programáticas que inspiraram a agenda de investigação daquele que viria a ser o Human-Animal Studies Hub (HAS-Hub) – um espaço interdisciplinar para investigadores nacionais e internacionais unidos por um interesse comum: reconhecer os animais como sujeitos de investigação de pleno direito, com subjetividade e agência, parceiros no estudo das nossas relações com eles.

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The Roar of Catastrophes: animals and humans in the face of (not-so-natural) disasters

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By: Verónica Policarpo

Breathing in, take one. Inspiring Svetlana.  

How can we attune ourselves to the suffering of those caught by catastrophes? How much wonder can we find in their unimaginable capabilities for recovery?

These were the questions that inspired me when I first read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices of Chernobyl, and then all her other books, as it usually happens when I get obsessively caught by an author that speaks to my deepest soul. What is it that triggers a line of restless enquiry that clings to our mind, as much as to our heart, to the point that it seems to have a life of its own? Here, I wish to reflect briefly upon what draws me to the study of catastrophes, and in particular to the experiences and suffering of nonhuman animals caught therein. I depart from Svetlana’s words, which was precisely what triggered my interest in the topic. Her books on human-made catastrophes – nuclear incidents, wars – are mainly about humans. But it strikes me how, in her narratives, she weaves the human accounts of disaster together with the non-human. May it be the forests of Ukraine or Belarus, caught in a radioactive peaceful mortal beauty. Or the innumerable animals caught in between the cruelty of such human excesses. At some point, in the preface of one of her books, she poignantly states (in much more beautiful words than those I can now recollect): one day, someone should make the History of all the animals killed in these disasters.

Like all important ideas, its simplicity hit me as fire. How come we have for so long disregarded what happens to animals in catastrophes? I am not an historian. But I am a social scientist and a human-animal studies scholar. And part of what I do is exactly to explore how to bring the non-human animals into our knowledge of social phenomena, including them as legitimate subjects of research, full co-producers of knowledge, accounting for their perspectives and interests. How could I, then, make a contribution?

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A walk on the wild side: Rewilding Britain’s landscapes with large herbivores

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By: Filipa Soares

Conservation is at a crossroads. Despite increasing efforts worldwide aimed at halting or preventing the extinction of animal and plant species, many reports and scientific studies paint alarming pictures of rocketing extinction rates, dwindling population sizes and habitat loss. The era of the sixth mass extinction is under way, the first for which humankind is deemed responsible. In response to these ‘doom and gloom’ scenarios, a growing number of ecologists and conservationists has emphasised the need for innovative, proactive and experimental approaches to nature conservation. Rewilding, which was the focus of my PhD thesis in environmental geography, is one such approach.

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