News Bulletin - Australian Animal Studies Group

POPULAR MEDIA AND ANIMALS by Claire Molloy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
How do mainstream films, television, advertising, videogames and
newspapers engage with key animal issues such as vivisection,
hunting, animal performance, farming, meat eating and animal
control?
Claire Molloy argues that animal narratives and imagery are
economically significant for popular media industries which, in turn,
play an important role in shaping the limits and norms of public
discourses on animals and animal issues. Through analysis of
various popular examples this book grapples with some of the
industrial, social, cultural and ethical aspects of media discourses
on animals. By examining how popular media forms constitute key
sources of information, definitions and images, the author explores
some of the myriad ways in which media discourses sustain a range
of constructions of animals that are connected, appropriated or coopted
by other systems of production and so play a role in the
normalisation of particular practices.
Claire Molloy is Senior Lecturer in Media in the School of Arts and Media at University of Brighton,
UK. She is the author of Memento, has published on various topics related to media and animals
and is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
THE AFTERLIVES OF ANIMALS: A Museum Menagerie edited by Samuel J. M. M.
Alberti. University of Virginia Press, 2011
In the quiet halls of the natural history museum, there are some
creatures still alive with stories, whose personalities refuse to be
relegated to the dusty corners of an exhibit. The fame of these
beasts during their lifetimes has given them an iconic status in
death. More than just museum specimens, these animals have
attained a second life as historical and cultural records.
This collection of essays--from a broad array of contributors,
including anthropologists, curators, fine artists, geographers,
historians, and journalists--comprises short "biographies" of a
number of famous taxidermized animals. Each essay traces the
life, death, and museum ‗afterlife‘ of a specific creature,
illuminating the overlooked role of the dead beast in the modern
human-animal encounter through practices as disparate as hunting
and zookeeping. The contributors offer fresh examinations of the
many levels at which humans engage with other animals,
especially those that function as both natural and cultural
phenomena, including Queen Charlotte‘s pet zebra, Maharajah the
elephant, and Balto the sled dog, among others.
Contributors: Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Sophie Everest, Kate Foster, Hayden Lorimer, Garry Marvin,
Henry Nicholls, Hannah Paddon, Merle Patchett, Christopher Plumb, Rachel Poliquin, Jeanne
Robinson, Mike Rutherford, Richard C. Sabin, Richard Sutcliffe, Geoffrey N. Swinney.
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons, is
also author of Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
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