News Bulletin - Australian Animal Studies Group

Coming
soon!
―Making the Insect World: The Science and Fiction of Entomology‖
It is now widely appreciated as a truism that the ways in which we represent animals shape the
ways in which we perceive animals, while also signifying a diverse nexus of historical, cultural,
moral, religious, political, economic, and philosophical circumstances. In short, representations of
animals say as much about the human beings responsible for the portrayals, and their cultural
environment, as they do about the animals being portrayed.
In this presentation, I critically engage with the term ‗insect world‘, a
rhetorical device historically employed in the description of insects and
their habitats. I claim that the insect world is a fabrication, a sciencefictional
construct of entomological discourse. Some of the key questions I
address are: From where does this term originate? How has it been used
to frame insect life? To what extent does it inform the visual portrayal of
insects? And what happens to the ecological rapport between humans and
insects when we think of them as the inhabitants of their own ‗world‘.
Incorporating numerous examples from a range of entomological texts,
from the seventeenth century to the present day, I outline the
establishment, development and continuity of key representational
conventions that allocate insects to their own, other world. It is within the wider discourse of
‗worldmaking‘, I claim, that the science and fiction of entomology are most visibly entangled.
Adam Dodd is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ‗Animals as Objects and Animals as Signs‘
program in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo,
http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/people/aca/adamdo/index.html
For enquiries contact Siobhan O‘Sullivan at siobhano@unimelb.edu.au.
Students Researching Animal Issues
The Group is conducting an audit of students undertaking research into animal issues. If you are
an Honours, Masters or PhD student at the University of Melbourne, they would love to know what
you are studying. They need 1. Your name; 2. Your School or Discipline; 3. Whether you are
undertaking honours, Masters or a PhD; 4. Who is supervising your research; 5. The title (including
working title) of your research; and 6. When you commenced and when you expect to complete.
Please send answers to siobhano@unimelb.edu.au. The information will be used to build a picture
of the amount of (non-invasive) animal research currently being conducted at the University of
Melbourne.
Animal Welfare Science Centre
On October 22 the Animal Welfare Science Centre presented a seminar that focused on the way in
which agriculture (particularly the livestock industries) needs to understand how its customers
make purchasing decisions so that communication on farming practices serves to build the level of
trust that consumers have in the food that they purchase.
Speakers were: Siobhan O‘Sullivan, Research Fellow in the School of Social and Political
Sciences at the University of Melbourne: ―Economically Productive Animals and the Community‘s
right to Know‖ (see Film and Audio section for where you can listen to this talk) and Charlie Arnot,
CEO of the Center for Food Integrity, President of CMA: ―Lost in translation – Learning to speak
‗consumer‘ in a way that builds trust in agriculture‖.
For more about the Centre see: http://www.animalwelfare.net.au/
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