133. The animal farm: how to study care in multi-species encounters.
Eline van Oosten, KNAW, Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam; Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, Humanities Cluster, Dutch Academy of Science (KNAW); Leonie Cornips, KNAW, Humanities Cluster, Amsterdam
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
Animal farming practices posit urgent questions concerning the animal as a subject, animal welfare, zoonoses, toxicity, and precarious human and animal working conditions. This panel invites colleagues to engage with multi-species relationality in animal farming practices through the lens of care. Industrial farming, shifting patterns of consumption, legislation and growing up as an animal in such a context are fundamentally reshaping multispecies relations in animal farm practices, providing a (new) urgency to engage with the complex milieu of animal farming.
Focusing on the farm as a multi-species encounter, brings out methodological questions and challenges. Living organisms appearing in the past in the margins of ethnographies are now taken to the center of anthropological enquiries (Kirskey & Helmreich, 2010). Such a program works as an antidote for an all too humanist tendency in Anthropology. Moreover, taking the concept of care into farm animal practices reconfigures care as a concept. How to account for animals that care for one another (not just human-animal care)? How do automatization and technological innovations (like precision farming) reconfigures care practices as a multi-species encounter?
The aim of this panel is to investigate the different ways in which to study entangled animal farm care practices with the various actors within and surrounding them, to articulate the complexity of care (and careless practices) unfolding. This is particularly important considering the actual intensification of farming production practices, human and animal labor mobilities, the automatization of farms, where animals, sentient and social co-beings, turn into ‘production’ animals.
