British Animal Studies Network

The centrality of animals in human culture is one that frequently goes without scholarly comment. So commonplace are animals in human lives as pets, metaphors, instruments for use, food, and so on that they are often ignored. This is a silence that is currently being addressed in numerous ways and by many different humanities disciplines at international conferences and in specialist journals such as Society and Animals, Worldviews, Anthrozoos.
It is also an issue that is of growing critical and academic concern more generally, as witnessed in the number of articles concerned with animals in 'mainstream' academic journals, and in the growing 'animal lists' being established by publishers in North America and Europe. As such, this proposal is timely and the establishment of a Network for UK based scholars working in the field of Animal Studies would, without doubt, contribute to a further and fuller analysis of human history and culture.
The Network would also provide an opportunity for scholars from across the UK to meet on a regular basis. Work in Animal Studies is currently being undertaken by scholars in literary studies, history, film studies, cultural studies, art history, philosophy, childhood studies, anthropology, human geography, and other disciplines, and, as my experience working with the Animal Studies Group (an informal, unfunded group of eight scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, which was established in 2000, and whose book Killing Animals was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2006) has shown, such cross-disciplinary conversations are exceptionally important in a field such as
Animal Studies.

The Network would be organised around ten meetings held over a two-year period. These meetings would vary in format. Some would include papers given by invited speakers on a particular theme of relevance to a variety of areas in Animal Studies. Such themes would include, for example, anthropomorphism, companion animals, and representations of animals.
Other meetings would take the form of discussions of particular reading materials led by scholars with expertise in the relevant field. Such reading materials might include Jacques Derrida's late work on animals; classic anthropological work such as that by Claude Levi-Strauss or Mary Douglas; key texts in contemporary ethical debates concerning the status of animals. It is proposed that at five of the ten proposed meetings key overseas scholars would be invited to give lectures and lead discussions. In this way the British Animal Studies Network would provide a forum not only for UK-based scholars in the field, it would also embrace work currently being undertaken overseas.
The overall aim of the network would be to disseminate new research from a range of disciplinary perspectives to scholars in different disciplines and to engage in debates between scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and with different expertise.
The benefits of such a Network would be to strengthen the work of individual scholars by providing a format for debate about current research; to allow debates across disciplinary and institutional boundaries; to establish a network of scholars who might collaborate, support and help to develop each other's work. Finally, the long term legacy of such a proposal would be that relationships between scholars working in different fields would be established thus allowing Animal Studies to develop in truly interdisciplinary ways.