July 17, 2015
‘Lives matter’: Simpson Center project marries animal, postcolonial studies
The study of animals meets up with postcolonial studies in The Postcolonial Animal, a cross-disciplinary research project hosted by the UW’s Simpson Center for the Humanities.
The work, notes from the center state, “considers relations between human and nonhuman lives and with indigenous ways of knowing” and “follows a conviction that violence toward any life is violence toward all, and the flourishing of any life is tied to the flourishing of all.”
The Postcolonial Animal project hosted visiting speakers and faculty/graduate student colloquia during the 2014-15 school year, and continues next year through a collaboration studio grant from the Simpson Center. The project has since been retitled “Putting the Human Back into Animal Studies.”
“What we’re trying to do is open up conversation,” says María Elena García, director of the UW’s Comparative History of Ideas program and associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies in a video you can view below. García leads the project with Louisa McKenzie, associate professor of French & Italian studies.
“Basically, animal studies is really thinking about the role of animals, the place of animals in society,” García said, “and postcolonial studies, very broadly speaking, is concerned with thinking about colonialism and empire and the impact of these forces on human lives.”
She said the concept involves expanding our understanding of “what lives matter, who matters,” and that she wants students to understand they can change the way they see their place in the world.
“Thinking about nonhuman life seriously — or indigenous ways of knowing seriously — changes how we are with one another, how we act in the world, and gets us to think more clearly and carefully about our actions. And hopefully – what I tell (students) is – it can literally change the world.”
- Watch the video, “Postcolonial Animal Studies: Redefining What Lives Matter”:
https://vimeo.com/129810507
