5 Sep
2024
5 Sep
'24
11:58 a.m.
Dear all,
You are cordially invited to the conference
"At the Limits of Imagination: Otherness in Humans & Nonhuman Animals"
26-28 September 2024
Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, Lecture Hall 3D (3rd floor)
Keynote speaker: Alice Crary (The New School for Social Research)
This three-day conference will focus on the possibilities and limits of
imagination and empathy with regards to humans and non-human animals,
and on the tensions inherent in comparing or comparatively analyzing
both groups.
Imagined similarities and dissimilarities play a pivotal role in ethical
theories with regards to treatment of both human and non-human groups.It
has been argued, for example, that racialized and disabled people, and
nonhuman animals, have been discriminated against according to the same
logic that grounds inclusion and exclusion upon the possession of
certain distinctively human ‘abilities’: rationality, language,
autonomy, agency, etc. (e.g., Crary 2016; Taylor 2018; Crary and Gruen
2022).The presumed absence of these ‘abilities’ is equated with a
negative and inferior form of embodiment, against which the human norm
has in turn been defined. However, conflating their respective ethical
status also risks reinforcing the dehumanization of those human groups
by instrumentalizing their oppression in the service of animals
(Boisseron2019; Crary 2016; Kittay 2019).
This conference, organized by Martin Huth, Carlo Salzani, and Ruadhán J.
Flynn, will take place at the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Vienna as part of the project “The Limits of Imagination: Animals,
Empathy, Anthropomorphism” (P 35137-G; funded by the FWF, Austria).
Attendance is free, in person and online. Live closed captioning will be
available. For the conference program, full accessibility information,
and further details, see https://ruadhanjflynn.com/?p=628
To register for online attendance, email
ruadhan(dot)flynn(at)vetmeduni.ac.at