Jan262021

Lectures & Panels Off-Animals, Creatures of an Exhausted Industrial Capitalism

12-1:30PM

Online Zoom Webinar

Laura Anderson

Arching through and beyond Blanchette’s recent book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (2020), this talk outlines an ethnography of these animals to offer new lines of sight onto the waning state of industrial labor and value in Canada and the United States today. 

Event Overview

Alex Blanchette (Tufts University)
Discussant: Amy Fitzgerald (University of Windsor)

“Off-animals,” as they are called by some managers of North American pork production, are the biological refuse of agribusiness’s efforts to realize standardized hog life and death. Ranging from aged boars to misshapen pigs, recent attempts to industrially slaughter these creatures for meat has led to a shadow infrastructure of killing that underpins the world’s largest factory farms.

Animals, Capital, and the Law

This webinar is part of a series to highlight new and creative research in the growing field of animal studies. This series, which is co-sponsored by Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program, Research for Ethical Speculative Design and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, will emphasize how Canadian scholars, jurists, and writers have played a disproportionately influential role in the development of this interdisciplinary subject. Ranging from Sue Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis and Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital through to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Canadians have broadened how we should think about our fraught relationship to other species. Moreover, the Canadian legal system has had to rule on contentious cases related to animal ethics, such as R. v. Krajnc (2017), and will soon have to evaluate Ontario’s new ‘ag-gag’ laws. This series, sponsored by the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program, will host a monthly online lecture during the spring term. Each 40-minute talk will be followed by a ten minute critique by an invited discussant, to be followed by a Q+A with the audience.

All Webinars will be held during the last Tuesday of each month and run from 12-1:30 p.m. Registration is required for each event.