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Animal Studies Journal

Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS: ANIMAL CULTURES

Animal Studies Journal is calling for submissions on the theme 'Animal Cultures' for a special edition which will follow the AASA 2023 Conference: Animal Cultures. This edition of the journal will be guest edited by Laura Jean McKay, Alexandra McEwan, and Clare Archer-Lean and published in May/June 2024.

The Animal Cultures theme encompasses a range of perspectives and considerations of culture in non-human animal communities and extends to culturally informed human views and practices related to non-human animals. Whiten (2021) notes that for a wide array of species, cultural transmission can be understood as traditions that are ‘acquired in a community by social learning from other individuals'. These traditions facilitate the acquisition of social and ecological knowledge and behaviours that influence biological and social wellbeing (Brakes et al. 2019). Hence, it is possible to understand animals as cultural beings within non-human communities. Equally, the lives of non-human animals unfold through their relationship with humans and as bearers of cultural signifiers within human cultures. The 'Animal Cultures' special edition of Animal Studies Journal explores the affordances and complexities of the concept of ‘culture’ in settings and dynamics of interest to animal studies as a multidisciplinary pursuit.

Contributors might explore Animal Cultures from perspectives which include, but are not limited to: • Indigenous knowledges of animal cultures • Literary, musical, and visual representations of non-human animals, including those animals participate in or create • Transmissions of knowledge through space, time, bodies, sound and dance or other modalities • Culture and the threat of species extinction • Multispecies cultures and domesticity • Cultures, politics, and the law • Cultures of animal exploitation • Cross cultural and multicultural approaches to animal life • Non-human animals and environmental protection • Political organisations • Symbiotic animal cultures • The culture of animal studies

The deadline for submissions is 11th December 2023. Articles should be submitted through the Animal Studies Journal submission system at https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/ Authors should consult the journal for submission guidelines, attending to 4000-7000 word limits and MLA formatting.

Papers which are accepted for peer review will be returned to authors by 15th February 2024. Final, revised versions of articles will be due 4th March 2024 for publication in the first 2024 issue of ASJ. If you have any questions, please contact Clare Archer-Lean at carcher@usc.edu.au

CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES IN AN AGE OF EXTINCTION

Guest editors: Chloë Taylor, Eva Kasprzycka, and Kelly Struthers Montford

SUBMISSIONS NOW CLOSED

We live in a time of biodiversity loss that has only five precedents in the history of the earth. Unlike the previous five mass extinction events, this time, an extraordinarily destructive minority of one species, our own, is the cause. Researchers across the natural and social sciences, as well as the arts and humanities, have all acknowledged human interaction with other animals as being a significant driver of greenhouse gas emissions and anthropogenic habitat loss –interactions such as the upsurge of farmed-animal populations and the expansion of industrialized overfishing. Indeed, current rates of human-driven biodiversity loss are a clearer indication than climate change that we have entered a new geological epoch—what is being called the Anthropocene—with climate change but one of many anthropogenic causes of the current extinction event. Although such catastrophic eliminations in the web of life will inevitably have dire repercussions for humans, mass-extinction continues to be a relatively rare subject of media, political, and ethical discussion in comparison to climate change.

How should Critical Animal Studies scholars respond to the fact that animal species are disappearing at nearly unprecedented rates? What can Critical Animal Studies perspectives offer in terms of political and ethical responses to the Sixth Extinction? Does thinking about animal death at the scale of mass biodiversity loss challenge, or lend urgency to, certain approaches to Critical Animal Studies? Are species extinctions any more tragic than the deaths of animals who belong to abundant species, such as the industrially farmed animals and laboratory animals on whom CAS scholars frequently focus?

We welcome Critical Animal Studies reflections on, but not limited to, the following topics: o Capitalism and extinction o Colonialism and extinction o Indigenous perspectives on conservation and extinction o Feminist and queer perspectives on mass extinction o Crip theory and critical disability studies perspectives on mass extinction o Food production, land use, new food technologies, and mass extinction o De-extinction, resurrection biology, or species revivalism o Animals as conservation subjects o Ecological and animal grief o Death justice and responsibility in the Anthropocene o Legal responses to mass extinction o Afrofuturisms, Afropessimisms and extinction o Massification and economies of extinction

The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2023. Articles should be submitted through the Animal Studies Journal submission system and authors should consult the journal for submission guidelines. Decisions will be sent to authors by August 1 and final, revised versions of articles will be due September 1 for publication in the second 2023 issue of ASJ. If you have any questions, please write to Chloë Taylor at chloe3@ualberta.ca.