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.
_____________________________________________________
Dr. Alessandro (Alex) Arrigoni
Dr. Arrigoni is born in 1971. Three days after his birth he endured a blood transfusion because of a blood incompatibility between his parents. During the transfusion the doctor who was injecting the blood broke his umbilical vein (during the trial, in 1973, she admitted that actually “the vein made a sort of resistance” while she was pumping the last quantity of blood but “she did not stop”; in spite of this, she has been acquitted of personal injuries). Alex spent his first ten years of life in and out Italian and German hospitals and endured 18 surgeries in the first five. Thanks to his family never ending support , in 1997 Alex graduated in Philosophy at Siena University – 4 Years Philosophy and Literature Degree Course – with a paper on animal rights philosophy, published in 1998 (and 2004) as “Animal rights. Toward a civilisation without blood”. In May 2006 he finished his Ph.D. course in Methodologies of Ethno-Anthropological Research at Siena University. He tried to apply cultural anthropology methodologies to a theoretical-practical research in zooanthropology, concerned about humans-dogs partnership, with an ethnography of the “beach for dogs accompanied by people” of Rome (summer 2003). The project of research has been partially supported by Tom and Nancy Regan’s Culture and Animal Foundation (North Carolina). As he wrote in the preface of his degree paper, he felt himself as a slaughtered animal since what happened in 1971. He is still fighting the Italian Republic because it did not acknowledge, and still does not, the violation of his rights, as written in the Italian Constitution.
_____________________________________________________
Dr. Steven Clark
Stephen R.L.Clark has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, UK, since 1983, having previously lectured at Oxford and Glasgow Universities. His writings (for a complete list click here) include The Moral Status of Animals (1977), The Nature of the Beast (1982), How to Think about the Earth (1993), Animals and their Moral Standing (1997) and Biology and Christian Ethics (2000). He has served on the Farm Animal Welfare Council and on the Animal Procedures Committee (which advise the relevant government departments on issues related to the treatment of animals). He is at present at work on the ethics and psychology of the third century Platonist, Plotinus.
_____________________________________________________
Dr. Helena Pedersen
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
_____________________________________________________
Richard White
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”.
