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"Thinking animals in and through scales." The Animal Scales seminar series is co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Critical Global Change, Goldsmiths.
From Aristotle's听scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves 'scale-makers' and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.
Full series dates:
SCALE: METABOLIC
Maan Barua; Department of Geography, Cambridge
5.00-7.00 pm, 20 February
SCALE: GLOBAL
Dr. iur. Charlotte Blattner, LL.M. (Harvard); Institute of Public Law, University of Berne
5.00-7.00 pm, 21 March
SCALE: INDIVIDUAL
Screening of the documentary film听Cow听(2021, UK, MUBI & US IFC films), and discussion with Director, Andrea Arnold. Respondent and chair: Anat Pick, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, London.
3.30-7.00 pm, 23 April
SCALE: TEMPORAL
脡ric Baratay; Department of History, Universit茅 Jean-Moulin, Lyon.
5.00-7.00pm, 24 May
For more information, please contact Mariam Motamedi Fraser ()
Image: "Stray Cat 03" by Sami Ucan (@sami_ucan)