S6E10: Grad Review with Virginia Thomas and Darren Chang

The Animal Turn

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In this ‘Grad Review’ Claudia talks to Virginia Thomas and Darren Chang, two early career researchers interested in animals and politics. Together they unpack synergies, tensions, and omissions that emerged in the 6th Season of The Animal Turn podcast. They discuss the multiple scales at which politics is practiced and can be considered, the crisis of imagination that potentially exists among the animal advocacy movement as well as some of the conceptual development being done by scholars that can create space for more just, multispecies futures.
Date Recorded: 15 December 2023.
Darren Chang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, at the University of Sydney. His research interests broadly include interspecies relations under colonialism and global capitalism, practices of solidarity, kinship, and mutual aid across species in challenging oppressive powers, social movement theories, and multispecies justice.Through political (and politicised) ethnography at animal sanctuaries, Darren's PhD research project explores potential alignments and tensions between animal and other social and environmental justice movements. The multispecies dimension of this project also considers the place, positions, and subjectivities of nonhuman animals in relation to anthropogenic social movements.
Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano).
Featured:

• The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston
• Animals and Capital by Dinesh Wadiwel

The Animal Turn is part of the iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, and Instagram
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Students Interested in the study of human encounters with other animals are invited to participate in the 4th Anthrozoology as International Practice Conference. Find out more: https://anthrozoologyconference.com/

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.

Chapters

1. Introduction (00:00:00)

2. A bit about Darren and Virginia (00:06:03)

3. Political Scales (00:13:23)

4. Epistemic Violence and Crisis of Imagination (00:19:30)

5. Re-Animalization, Reparation, and Risk (00:23:00)

6. Tensions in 'The Movement' (00:34:30)

7. Domesticated Animals, Structures, and Change (00:41:36)

8. Story Telling and Conceptual Space (00:55:59)

9. Quote - Virginia (Henry Beston) (01:00:43)

10. Quote - Darren (Dinesh Wadiwel) (01:05:43)

11. Working on now? (01:11:43)

12. Animal Highlight (Heck Cattle) (01:14:43)

13. Credits (01:28:06)