political ecology

The emergent discipline of Animal Studies looks both to complicate the ways in which the demarcation between human and animal worlds has been achieved, maintained, enacted, and performed throughout history and to explore the ways in which animals and the human-animal relationship have been represented in discursive formations from the premodern fable to early cinema, Modernist literature, and most recently, televisual representations of wildlife such as National Geographic’s “Crittercam.” This working group will investigate the recent turn towards de-centering the humanist assumptions upon