Keynote Speakers
Mieke Roscher
Current Objectives of Historical Human-Animal Studies: Interspecies Societies and Relations after the Animal Turn
When historian Harriet Ritvo in 2007 observed that an “Animal Turn” had entered the humanities and the social and cultural sciences, the ubiquity of animals was finally received adequately by these disciplines. Maybe, however, she was somewhat overzealous. Of course, animals were popping up here and there, but to speak of a new school of thinking was perhaps a bit premature. However, what happened in the past ten years has proven Ritvo right. We can now speak of an animal sociology, an animal geography, a multispecies ethnography and, of course, an animal history. Having published her first monograph, The Animal Estate in 1987, Ritvo was maybe just ahead of her time.
My talk will focus on the becoming of animals in Ritvo’s field while showing how the interdisciplinary nature of Human-Animal Studies has fueled the discussion about the animals’ capacities and their agency and made it possible to talk about animals as more than historical objects. My talk will further introduce current approaches, such as praxiography or new materialism and show how they resonate in historical writing. Finally, it will present the concept of a new political history of animals as a methodology to write about animals after the Animal Turn.
References
Roscher, Mieke, and André Krebber, eds. (2018). Animal Biographies. Reframing Animal Lives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Roscher, Mieke (2018). “New Political History and the Writing of Animal Lives,” in: Hilda Kean / Philipp Howell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Animal-Human History. London: Routledge.
Roscher, Mieke (2018). “Veterinary Medicine and Animal Welfare Discourses in the Third Reich, in: Food Ethics 1.3. 235–245.
Roscher, Mieke (2017). “Curating the Body Politic: The Spatiality of the Zoo and the Symbolic Construction of German Nationhood (Berlin 1933‒1961),” in: Jacob Bull / Tora Holmberg / Cecilia Åsberg (eds.), Animals and Place: Lively Cartographies of Human-Animal Relations. London: Ashgate.
Mieke Roscher,Professor of Social and Cultural History and the History of Human-Animal Relations at the University of Kassel, Germany,holds the first professorship in Germany dedicated to the historical study of human-animal relations. She earned her doctoral degree with a comparative study of the history and politics of the British animal rights movement at the University of Bremen. Her dissertation resulted in the publication, Ein Königreich für Tiere. Die Geschichte der britischen Tierrechtsbewegung (2009). She is a founding member of the Forum Animals & History, the association of German-speaking historians involved with Human-Animal Studies, and the Forschungsinitiative Tiertheorie (FITT). Further, she is a research associate with the New Zealand Center of Human-Animal Studies (NZHAS). Her research interests focus on colonial history (especially British India), gender history, animal history and historiography, and the history of the Third Reich.
Roman Bartosch
Teaching Animality in the Face of Extinction
What, how, and who are we teaching when we are ‘teaching human-animal studies’? Recent developments in the field have broadened the scope of concern from a focus on animal imagery to fundamental theoretical and methodological questions pertaining to the human-animal divide, the ethics of engaging with the more-than-human world, and post-anthropocentric pedagogical principles. More recently, and in light of movements such as Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future as well as in line with research on the ‘sixth mass extinction’ event, teaching human-animal studies is also pressed to ponder what it means to teach in times of catastrophic biodiversity loss and existential grief.
My keynote will review the development of human-animal studies as both scholarly and educational enterprise and underline links between diverging perspectives from literary and cultural studies as well as pedagogies. It will point to overlaps as well as potential conflicts in both fields and argue for a greater consilience needed to create a ‘pedagogy of the unprecedented’ (Greg Garrard) in perilous times. Specifically, it will ask what literature and art have to teach us about knowing and feeling extinction and make a case for creative writing and literary reading as key opportunities for a humanimal pedagogy. For this case to be made, I will assess recent developments in posthumanism and ecocriticism and their bearing on non-anthropocentric scholarship and education. I will present two examples from my own research and teaching practice: The first is concerned with creative literary responses and what Robert MacFarlane calls ‘Desecration Phrasebooks’ – creative texts by students “for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene” (see Clark 2019, 12). The second example will critically assess the meaning of the second big educational debate in this context – digitisation –and discuss potential ways of fostering critical environmental literacies and affective entanglements through a participatory, creative, and immersive engagement with short videos and digital media in the English classroom.
Methodologically, both examples draw on three related task designs on the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of agency (i.e., individual, communal, and global levels; cf. Bartosch 2020). Creative forms of engagement on these levels are meant to mobilise processes of symbolic and affective engagement with ‘earth others’ and take particular advantage of the potentially immersive nature of digital media and the ambiguities of literary writing. The presentation concludes by outlining some implications of this task design for a revised model of competence acquisition in sustainability contexts and by reconnecting these arguments with larger debates in the environmental humanities.
References
Bartosch, Roman (2020). Literature – Pedagogy – Climate Change. Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bartosch, Roman (2016). ‘Animals Outside in the Teaching Machine’. Anglistik - International Journal of English Studies 27.2. 147-164.
Clark, Timothy (2019). The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garrard, Greg (2017). ‘Towards an Unprecedented Ecocritical Pedagogy’. Teaching Literature. Ed. Ben Knights. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 189-207.
Roman Bartoschis Associate Professor of Teaching Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Cologne, Germany. He is author and editor of 10 books and over 40 scholarly articles and is interested in environmental and human-animal studies, English teaching methodologies and transcultural learning, inclusive education as well as Education for Sustainability. His latest book, Literature – Pedagogy – Climate Change. Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology, is forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. He is currently working on the topic of extinction and the implications of climate change and related extinction events for English competences in the context of Education for Sustainability.