Alienation in the 21st Century: Revisiting, Reevaluating, Recentering. Part II

Eco-Feminist and Environmentalist Contributions to Contemporary Alienation Theory

Although sometimes insufficiently appreciated by those who have yet to understand that social relations possess deeply rooted interspecies dimensions, the field of Human- Animal Studies has, over the course of the last three decades, produced rich and innovative work showing that an epistemology of interspecies connection and connectedness is both fruitful and necessary. We align ourselves with recent literature that situates human-animal studies within the context of broad and incisive theoretical paradigm changes in the social sciences, promoting work that reveals the interspecies dimensions of our current societal crises, in both individual and collective manifestations. This session is an invitation to researchers and scholars who see human-animal relations as a terrain of alienation – or of overcoming alienation - to share theoretically and/or empirically-oriented work. Among the themes that come to mind here are: interspecies relations and current environmental and social crises, human-animal relations within contemporary efforts to recreate subjects and subjectivities, human-animal relations in social movement practices and discourse, human-animal relations in art, literature, and social theory.