Organizing Principles
We have three main goals for the conference:
The first goal is to give participants an opportunity to build a community of peers from around the world who are working on similar issues in animal studies and the overlap with technological issues. To that end, we want participants to receive feedback on their work from peers and faculty in this field. We plan for this to happen at the morning workshops on Thursday and Friday. Prior to the conference, we will assign each person a small number of projects (some will be papers and some will be creative pieces) to review. Feedback will be in small breakout discussions each morning (groups of three to five people).
The second goal is to engage participants in dialogue about human-non-human animal relationships in the biotechnological era. In trying to offer a frame for these conversations, it seems to us that the bodily senses of humans and other animals might offer a useful way to think through the complicated relationships between STS and animal studies. Thus, we have divided participants – scholars, artists, and community members – into roundtables organized loosely around different ways of knowing animals (touch, taste, sight, etc.).
For these roundtables, we will offer a few discussion questions prior to the conference for your consideration. During each roundtable, each panelist will have a chance to offer a perspective on these questions. Panelists will then engage in dialogue before we expand the discussion to all conference participants. We want these to be looser, more informal and free form than a traditional conference panel – you’ll be welcome to discuss other issues as you see fit and/or to address how your personal project relates to that sense or senses generally.
The final goal of the conference is to ensure that a conference about human-non-human animal relationships actually engages non-human animals more than just as pictures in PowerPoint presentations! Hence, each afternoon we have planned field trips to actual sites of human and non-human animal enmeshment where we hope to continue the conversations about sensory perception, the overlap of animal studies and STS, and observe the ways in which technology mediates human and non-human animal relationships.
We have organized this conference with these three goals in mind and hope it will prove to be a worthwhile experience for all involved – graduate students, faculty, artists, and community participants alike!