News Bulletin - Australian Animal Studies Group

Love just is. It needs no defence. How it arises is one of the great and beautiful mysteries. I always
hope that my words can help other people to find their own experiences of love, loss, mystery, and
fidelity.
Matt: Do you see animal studies yet gaining much of a foothold in the academy – in its own shape,
or in its influence on other disciplines, such as anthropology or philosophy? What has been your
experience of developing interdisciplinary discussions on these issues? What have you achieved
so far with Macquarie‘s working group on Animals and Society, and what are your hopes for the
future of this initiative?
Deborah: Animal studies seems to be popping up all over the place – in universities, in journals, in
conferences, in conversations. I think it is wonderful. This is a moment of a thousand flowers – the
field is not controlled, nobody owns it, the boundaries haven’t been set, it is un-disciplined, and
consequently immensely fertile. Like the term ‘environmental’, the term ‘animal’ is often linked with
disciplines. Environmental philosophy and environmental anthropology, for example, have their
emerging parallels in the anthropology of animals and the philosophy of animals.
I think it is great that animals are being given recognition in disciplines, but interdisciplinary
approaches are also seriously necessary. I am particularly involved with approaches that rest
under labels like multispecies ethnography and ethno-ethology. Basically, for me, the ecological
humanities approach is the most satisfying. The ‘take’ on the ecological humanities that we have
developed (see www.ecologicalhumanities.org) works with two tasks identified by Val Plumwood.
She asserted that the tasks before us today, as people who hope to change the world, are to
resituate the human within nature, and to resituate nature within ethics. This is a huge project, of
course, not a one-person show. It requires numerous disciplines: the study of humans, the study of
ethics, the study of animals and other living beings and ecosystems, the study of the stories we tell
about inclusion and exclusion. This time of loss is also a time for opening our lives to the relational,
ethical, inclusive, and responsive vulnerability of life on earth.
Last year I started the Animals and Society Working Group at Macquarie. This initiative brings
people together across faculties, and is producing some truly interdisciplinary insights and
understandings. Our research questions range widely across issues of extinction, conservation and
rescue; zoos, biopolitics and resurrections; cities, wildlife and urban planning; ethics and the use of
animals in laboratories; co-existence, and friendship; animal behaviour and cognition. Our
disciplinary perspectives include history, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, human geography,
law, anthropology, religious studies, musicology, and biology. We have had a brilliant year and a
half: our group was launched by Marc Bekoff in December last year, and we’ve held four
international symposia in our short history, two of them organised by you (thanks Matt!). Two of our
members, Dr Jane Johnson and Dr Hollis Taylor, were awarded Macquarie post-doctoral
fellowships. At this time discussions have just started with a view to developing a formal research
centre for animal studies building on the excellent start made by the existing group.
My work has been facilitated by the ARC Discovery Grant that Thom van Dooren and I were
awarded: ‘Encounters with Extinction: A multi-sited, multi-species approach to life at the edge of
catastrophe in the Asia-Pacific region’ (see www.extinctionstudies.org). I’ll conclude this rave by
acknowledging the support we’ve been given to take on this large and exciting research project,
and to thank you, Matt, for being part of it.
Matthew Chrulew is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion
at Macquarie University.
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