- The Board of Directors is made up of every board officer, ICAS director, book series senior editors, and senior editor of JCAS.
- The Board meets 4 to 6 times a years, typically through technological means such as the phone or internet, via Skype and on Saturdays.
- The minutes are written by the Secretary and posted publicly on the website.
- The Board of Directors are appointed by the Executive Officers and have no set term limit.
- The Board and ICAS carriers our mission in respect of the ICAS Bylaws
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ICAS BOARD OFFICERS
Dr. Susan Thomas
President
Carolyn Drew
Vice-President
Sarat Colling
Secretary
Amber Gilewski
Treasurer
Dr. Anthony J. Nocella II
Co-founder and Executive Director
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ICAS BOARD MEMBERS
TBA
Director, Critical Animal Studies Academic Center of Academic Excellence
Stephanie Jenkins
LibNow! Blog, Director
Dr. Helena Pedersen
Rodopi Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Dr. Les Mitchell
ICAS Africa Director
Dr. Colin Salter
Arissa Media Group Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Dr. Vasile Stănescu
Rodopi Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Stanford University
Dr. Nicola Taylor
ICAS Oceania Director
Dr. Richard Twine
ICAS Europe Director
Dr. Richard White
Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Editor-in-Chief
Felipe Andrusco
ICAS South America Director
TBA
ICAS Asia Director
Dr. Kimberly Socha
ICAS North American Director
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS BIOGRAPHIES
Felipe Andrusco (Chile)
Director of ICAS South America
Felipe is a clinical psychologist and philosophy student from Santiago, Chile. His main interests are philosophy, psychoanalysis and animal communication. His actual field of study is the placement of animals as subjects in philosophy, and how critical animal studies give feedback to rethink philosophy beyond the barriers of humanism. In particular, he is interested in the place that animals have been assigned by philosophy and human culture over the years, to study the possibilities of an improvement in the ecology of human and non-human animals relationship. These possibilities are also another field of research, since they present the challenge of thinking a new human and nonhuman animal relationship in the frames of a political, ideological and economical working system. He is also interested in biopolitics and the actual debate on animals as commodities or objects of consumption, and the surrounding discourses (i.e. masculinity and meat consumption). Felipe graduated from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and is currently working on an internship on psychotherapy with adolescents.
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Sarat Colling
Secretary
Sarat Colling grew up on Hornby Island, a small island off the west coast of BC, where the protected natural surroundings inspired her passion to advocate for animal rights and eco-sustainability. She is currently completing a bachelor’s degree in English and Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at Brock University in Ontario, where she volunteers with the Brock Animal Rights Club and serves on the Board of Directors for OPIRG-Brock. She is the newsletter editor for the Vancouver Island Vegetarian Association and the founder of Political Media Review, a reviewing clearinghouse for social justice media. Along with critical animal studies, her concerns include disability rights, transnational feminism, and independent media.
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Carolyn Drew
Vice-President of International Affairs
Carolyn Drew is an academic and animal rights advocate. She currently teaches out of University of Canberra College and University of Canberra . Her main focus is developing critical thinking and writing skills with a twofold purpose. The first is to support access and equity for entry to university for disadvantaged groups. The second, inspired by a Neil Postman and Paulo Freiren approach to education, is to create a learning environment where the student is empowered through nurturing these important skills. Concurrent with this area of interest is her passion for animal rights and activism. Her early experiences showed her the sentience that all life shares, and that the divisions and hierarchies by which we view and organise the world are human constructs. Thus her main focus is the human rupture from the natural world and its basis for the exploitation and abuse of other animals throughout human history. In 2009 she co-authored ‘The Harvest’ with Ray Drew, published in the ‘Southerly’, Australia’s preeminent Australian English Association Journal. ‘The Harvest’ is a faction story based on the 2008 slaughter of 512 kangaroos trapped in a disused Naval Transmission Station in Canberra, Australia. Carolyn has a BA in Communication Honours (Canb) and a Masters in Education in Adult education (UTS).
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Stephanie Jenkins
LibNow! Blog, Director
Stephanie Jenkins is a dual-PhD candidate in Philosophy and Women’s Studies. Her research and teaching interests include 20th century French philosophy, feminist philosophy, disability studies, critical animal studies, and bioethics. She received her Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University in 2007. Her Master’s thesis, “The Bodying of the Body: Levinas’ Theory of Embodiment” outlines and analyzes the role of embodiment in Levinas’ early work through Totality and Infinity. She is a recipient of the Weiss Fellowship, a Penn State scholarship awarded to students who excel in interdisciplinary work in the humanities and sciences. Currently completing her dissertation, “Enabling Biopower: A Genealogy of Able-Bodiedness,” she expects to complete her doctorate in May of 2011. As a feminist vegan living with a disability and as an advocate for an ethics of nonviolence, she combines her life experience and theoretical interests by striving to create strategic alliances between people with disabilities and nonhuman animals.
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Dr. Anthony J. Nocella II
Co-Founder, Treasurer, and Executive Director
Anthony J. Nocella, II is a professor in the School of Education at Hamline University, where he teaches social justice and critical urban education. He received his Ph.D. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He has provided conflict transformation workshops and classes to NGOs, ROTC, U.S. military, law enforcement and public safety officials and in prisons, juvenile halls, and middle schools and high schools. He has been involved in numerous political campaigns, organizations, and international demonstrations fostering direct democracy and is a co-founder of more than fifteen active political organizations and four scholarly journals. He has published more than twenty-five scholarly articles and is working on his tenth book, co-edited with Dr. Richard Kahn, Greening the Academy: Environmental Studies in the Liberal Arts (Syracuse University Press, forthcoming). His other books include A Peacemaker’s Guide for Building Peace with a Revolutionary Group (PARC, 2004), co-editor with Dr. Steve Best, Terrorists or Freedom Fighters? Reflections on the Liberation of Animals (Lantern Books, 2004); and, with Steve Best, Igniting a Revolution Voices in Defense of the Earth (AK Press, 2006). His site is www.anthonynocella.org.
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Dr. Les Mitchell
ICAS Africa Director
Dr. Mitchell, is the Director of the Hunterstoun Centre of the University of Fort Hare, South Africa and an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. He gained a doctorate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, for his dissertation titled ‘Discourses and the Oppression of Non-human Animals: A Critical Realist Account’. He has worked in Pathology, Community Health and Education in Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and South Africa where he taught sciences in a township school in Grahamstown. His Masters dissertation at the University of Malawi is titled ‘The Relevance of the Malawian MSCE Science Syllabus to the Lives of Young Malawians’. He is on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Animal Ethics and the Palgrave Macmillan Series on Animal Ethics. He published ‘Animals and the Discourse of Farming in Southern Africa’ in Society and Animals, Vol. 14, No.1, 2006, 39-59 and the review, Crying Fowl in the Journal of Animal Ethics (forthcoming). His research interests are critical realism, non-human animals, discourses, power in society, genocide, moral disengagement, and alternatives to violence.
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Dr. Helena Pedersen
Rodopi Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Helena Pedersen holds a Ph.D. in education and is a researcher in the School of Education at Malmö University. Her primary research interests include Critical Animal Studies, Critical Theory, Critical Pedagogy and Posthumanism. She is author of Animals in Schools: Processes and Strategies in Human-Animal Education (Purdue University Press, 2010, http://www.thepress.purdue.edu/animalsinschools.html). Animals in Schools recieved the Critical Animal Studies Book of the Year Award in 2010. Other recent works appear in the volumes Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter After Noah (Lexington Books, 2010); Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education: Transformative Standards (Routledge, 2009); Global Harms: Ecological Crime and Speciesism (Nova Science Publishers, 2008); and Values and Democracy in Education for Sustainable Development (Liber, 2008). Helena Pedersen received the American Sociological Association’s Award for Distinguished Graduate Student Scholarship (the Animals and Society Section) in 2006. Information on past and present research projects is available on her website: http://www.gender.uu.se/node286
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Dr. Colin Salter
Arissa Media Group Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Salter is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University (Ontario). He holds a BE (hons), a BA (hons) and a PhD from the University of Wollongong in Australia. As an environmental engineer, he worked on the design and monitoring of socially, culturally, and environmentally appropriate technology projects in Australia and the Pacific. On returning to the university sector, Dr Salter has expanded on more than a decade-long research interest, exploring the efficacy of grassroots campaigns and movements seeking to foster peace and justice. Alongside research and publications related to his previous engagement as an environmental engineer, he has presented papers and published research in areas as broad as movements supporting respect and recognition of First Peoples, the strategies and tactics of contemporary animal-environmental-social justice movements and the intersections between masculinity, exceptionalism, violence and nonviolence. Findings from five years of comparative research exploring community campaigns promoting respect and recognition in Austral and Canada will be published in 2011.
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Dr. Kim Socha
ICAS North American Director
Kim Socha is an activist from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. She sits on the board of the Animal Rights Coalition in Minneapolis and has certification assisting survivors and perpetrators of domestic violence and sexual abuse in their recoveries. Holding a Ph.D. in Literature, she is an English instructor with scholarship on topics such as surrealism, Latino/a literature and pedagogy. In early 2012, her book Women, Destruction, and the Avant-Garde: A Paradigm for Animal Liberation—a study of intersectionality amongst radical feminist, animal liberation and arts movements—will be published through the Institute for Critical Animal Studies’ Rodopi book series. She is also co-editing and contributing to Animal Liberation Essays from the Grassroots (tentative title), scheduled for Spring 2012 release through McFarland Publishing, a collection of articles by activists local to the Twin Cities.
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Dr. Nicola Taylor
ICAS Oceania Co-Director
Nicola Taylor is the former Executive Director of ICAS. Taylor teaches sociology at Central Queensland University, Australia. Her interests include all aspects of human-animal relationships on a broad level. More specifically her current research links between human directed and animal directed violence; philosophies of animal welfare and animal rights, and, social theories as they pertain to our beliefs about other animals. Having always been interested in animals she was lucky enough to be able to incorporate this into her academic life by completing a PhD on the sociology of animal studies in 2000. Since then she has worked in both the UK and Australia on a number of animal related projects, both academically and community-based. Taylor regularly presents lectures and workshops on human-animal abuse links to various service providers and has been lucky enough to consult with a number of organizations regarding the instigation of numerous projects designed to protect the companion animals of those entering refuges fleeing violence. She believes firmly that in order to secure a better future for all animals (humans included) we need to address broad societal attitudes towards disenfranchised others. This has led to the development of a CD resource called ‘Happy Animals’ aimed at teaching children respect and empathy for animals. This is now regularly used throughout Australia with school children.
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Susan Thomas
President
Susan Thomas is an Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, and Political Science, at Hollins University in Virginia (Ph.D., University of California, 1990). In 1999, she produced and taught the first Animal Rights Movement course in the University’s history, which she continues to teach once a year. In 2008, she added another new course, Gender and Animal Rights, to the curriculum. She an also active in the local animal rights movement community and is a direct action vegan. Professor Thomas’ academic interests include critical theories of race and subjectivity; the intersectionality of women’s rights and non-human animal rights; and the state’s active complicity in the abuses of marginalized women living in poverty. Her work concerns the hidden power behind ‘neutral’ rules, the role of male heterosexual privilege in the construction of hierarchal rules and law-making processes, and the invisibility of those subordinated by the public/private divide. While her research focuses on contemporary U.S. culture and politics and their relation to political and economic forces, she addresses, more broadly, questions of gender, race, species and sexual identity in discourses and material practices of anthropocentrism, heteroarchy, and patriarchal capitalism. She is currently researching the politics and policy of civil union and same sex marriage laws passed or under consideration in the United States. Professor Thomas lives with her partner, Lori, and their daughter Cais Fu Feng, as well as her 10 feline and canine family members: DaXia, Little Bear, Hera, Pellet, Shai Ming, Ling Ling, Romeo, Kirby, Tasche, and Lucky Wind.
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Dr. Richard Twine
ICAS Europe Director
Dr. Richard Twine is presently in a mostly research position with a focus on animal genomics and biotechnology. He is specifically interested in the different frames, such as sustainability, used to argue for such technologies. His intellectual homes are animal studies, gender studies, environmental ethics and sociological theory. He is also increasingly interested in the global political economy of food; theories and practices of critical posthumanism, as well as rejoining earlier interests in intersectionality theory, including but not limited to theories of ecofeminism. Moreover he has written on the idea of critical bioethics. His academic interests are informed by a commitment to critical thinking, a reflexivity toward the relationships between academia and activism, and a commitment to a posthumanist politics of intersectionality. He also teaches a small amount on subjects as diverse as genomics and society, critical animal studies, and masculinities.
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Dr. Vasile Stanescu
Rodopi Book Series, Co-Senior Editor
Vasile is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University in the Program of Modern Thought and Literature. He serves as co-Senior editor for the Critical Animal Studies books series published by Rodopi Press. He also serves on the review board, and as book review editor, for the Journal for Critical Animal Studies. In 2009 his paper, ‘”Green” Eggs and Ham? The Myth of Sustainable Meat and the Danger of the Local’ won the award for best paper (by a graduate student) at the international Minding Animals conference in Australia. This article was then published in the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, republished in the edited volume Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, and is forthcoming, in now its third publication, in Conversations: Readings for Writing, a current and well-known college textbook. Vasile has presented at, or organized, twenty-five academic conferences or symposia and has nine publications (current or forthcoming). He has received eighteen awards, grants, or fellowships (including a Mellon, an Armstrong, a Sanger, and an award from the National Endowments for the Humanities) and a fellowship from the Institutul Cultural Român. He is also a founding member, and current co-organizer, of the Stanford Environmental Humanities Project ( http://ehp.stanford.edu ). In 2010, Vasile was chosen as the Tyke “Scholar of the Year” by the Institute for Critical Animal Studies.
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Dr. Richard White
Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Richard J White is Lecturer of Economic Geography at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. To date, Richard’s main area of research has focused on exploring the geographies of the informal economy in the Minority World/ advanced economies generally, and in particular through understanding community self-help, mutual aid and reciprocity. His research, focused on both affluent and deprived communities, has critically challenged many dominant myths that surround our understanding of contemporary work and exchange in “capitalist” society. In addition to disseminating his research through peer-reviewed journals, Richard has formally participated in conferences and seminars to International and European audiences (ranging from local policy making communities and think-tanks, to high-profile academics, and senior government officials). Richard’s broad teaching and lecturing profile includes: re-thinking the economic in economic geography; philosophical approaches to space and place; alter-globalization groups; the use of direct action within human and animal liberation movements; dissident and moral geographies; and critical pedagogy. Finally, Richard is also currently serving on the Editorial Boards of “The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy” and “Theory in Action, The Journal of the Transformative Studies Institute”.
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