Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS)

 

Kim Socha
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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Sarat Colling
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
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
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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Anthony J. Nocella II
Anthony J. Nocella, II teaches classes in Sociology and Criminology at Le Moyne College and SUNY Cortland. 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
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
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
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. Nicola Taylor
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
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
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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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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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.

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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.

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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

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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”.

Dr. Julie Andrzejewski
Dr. Andrzejewski is a professor, activist scholar, and Co-Director of the Master’s degree program in Social Responsibility at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. She is the initiator and first editor of Social Justice, Peace, and Environmental Education (Routledge, 2009) a book that demonstrates how all these issues are interconnected including animal rights.  Her co-authored chapter on Interspecies Education for Humans Animals, and the Earth (with Helena Pedersen and Freeman Wicklund) in this volume situates animal oppression and speciesism as foundational to a fully comprehensive understanding of global social responsibility and education. Among numerous articles and book chapters, other books she has authored are: Oppression and Social Justice: Critical Frameworks, and co-authored Why Can’t Sharon Kowalski Come Home? (with Karen Thompson) which was nominated for the Minnesota Book Award and received the national Lambda Literary Award.  Andrzejewski has a long history of social action including founding a women’s center, organizing nationally on GLBT, feminist, and disability issues, supporting legal actions against discriminatory institutions, serving as union president, initiating program development and curriculum transformation for global social responsibility; and directing grants to foster global peace and justice. In the 1980’s she read Animal Liberation and began changing her own life. She became a vegetarian in 1987 and began moving toward veganism and integrating Animal Rights and AR activism into all her classes in the early 1990’s. She says “moving toward” veganism because she came to understand that being a vegan is far more than what you do or do not eat, it is a comprehensive lifestyle committed to compassion in every area of life (Stepaniak, 2000). She taught the first course on animal rights at St. Cloud State University in 2000.  Based on her work teaching these courses, she wrote: Teaching animal rights at the university: Philosophy and practice. Journal of animal liberation philosophy and policy, 1(1). Retrieved March 8, 2008, from http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/JCAS/Journal_Articles_download/Issue_1/-andrzejewski.PDF .  She is currently writing about Animal Rights and War. She can be reached at jrandrzejewski@stcloudstate.edu.

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Dr. Piers Beirne
Beirne received his PH.D, in sociology from Durham University, England. He is Professor of Criminology and Legal Studies at the University of Southern Maine. Prior to working in Maine he taught sociology and criminology in England, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at the University of Connecticut-Storrs. He teaches courses on Criminology (CRM215), Crime in Maine (CRM317); Criminological Theory (CRM301); Animal Abuse (CRM 350); and Comparative Criminology (CRM401). His books include an edited 6-volume reprint series The Chicago School of Criminology 1914-1945 (2006, Routledge); Criminology (2006, with Jim Messerschmidt); Issues in Comparative Criminology. (1997, with David Nelken); The Origins and Growth of Criminology: Essays on Intellectual History, 1760-1945 (1994); Inventing Criminology: Essays on the Rise of `Homo Criminalis’ (1993); Comparative Criminology: an Annotated Bibliography (1991, with Joan Hill); Revolution in Law: Contributions to the Development of Soviet Legal Theory, 1917-1938 (1990); Stuchka: Selected Writings on Soviet Law and Marxism (1988, with Robert Sharlet and Peter B.Maggs); Marxism and Law (1982, with Richard Quinney); Pashukanis: Selected Writings on Marxism and Law. (1980, with Robert Sharlet); and Fair Rent and Legal Fiction (1977). With Colin Sumner, he is the founding co-editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology. He likes to sail, kayak and windsurf, and dreams of redoing his 11,000 mile trip on a Triumph motorcycle.

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Dr. Carl Boggs
Carl Boggs is the author of numerous books in the fields of contemporary social and political theory, European politics, American politics, U.S. foreign and military policy, and film studies, including The Impasse of European Communism (1982), The Two Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (1984), Social Movements and Political Power (1986), Intellectuals and the Crisis of Modernity (1993), The Socialist Tradition (1996), and The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (Guilford, 2000). With Tom Pollard, he authored a book titled A World in Chaos: Social Crisis and the Rise of Postmodern Cinema, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2003. He edited an anthology, Masters of War: Militarism and Blowback in an Era of American Empire (Routledge, 2003). He is the author of Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). A new book, The Hollywood War Machine: Militarism and American Popular Culture (co-authored with Tom Pollard), was released by Paradigm Publishers in 2006. He is currently finishing a book titled Crimes of Empire: How U.S. Outlawry is Destroying the World. He is on the editorial board of several journals, including Theory and Society (where he is book-review editor) and New Political Science. For two years (1999-2000) he was Chair of the Caucus for a New Political Science, a section within the American Political Science Association. In 2007 he was recipient of the Charles McCoy Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association. He has written more than two hundred articles along with scores of book and film reviews, and has had three radio programs at KPFK in Los Angeles and was a political columnist for the L.A. Village View during the 1990s. After receiving his Ph.D. in political science at U.C., Berkeley, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis, UCLA, USC, UC, Irvine, and Carleton University in Ottawa. For the past 20 years he has been professor of social sciences at National University in Los Angeles, and more recently has been an adjunct professor at Antioch University in Los Angeles.

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Dr. Jodey Castricano
Dr. Jodey Castricano teaches in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. Her areas of interest include: critical and cultural theory, including psychoanalysis, feminist, queer, and gender studies in the analysis of literature and film. In the field of Cultural Studies her interests lie in posthumanist questions of representation, race/gender/identity and animal studies. And while one of Castricano’s areas of specialization is Gothic Studies, her research focuses on the history of ideas in the 19th century, particularly in the development of psychoanalysis and its uneasy relationship to psychical research. Before coming to UBC O, she taught courses in literary, film, and cultural studies at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario and in the joint PhD programme between WLU and the University of Guelph. At UBCO she is currently the Coordinator of Graduate Studies for the Faculty of Creative & Critical Studies; serve on the UBCO Senate and sit on the DVC Committee for Human Rights and Equity as well as on the Senate Research and Learning Committee. Castricano has recently been appointed a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics at Oxford University, United Kingdom. http://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/index.php.

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Dr. Karen Davis
Karen Davis, Ph.D. is the founder and president of United Poultry Concerns, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the compassionate and respectful treatment of domestic fowl. Founded in 1990, United Poultry Concerns addresses the treatment of domestic fowl in food production, science, education, entertainment, and human companionship situations. Karen has a PhD in English from the University of Maryland-College Park where she taught for twelve years in the English Department. Karen’s articles have appeared in The Faculty Voice (University of Maryland), Journal of English and Germanic Philology, English Language Notes, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Between the Species: A Journal of Ethics. Her work, letters-to-the editor and op-eds have been featured in the New York Times, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Washington Times, Washingtonian, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Columbus Dispatch, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Potomac Gazette, Harper’s Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Minnesota Monthly, Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Nation, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, “Dear Abby,” Egg Industry, Feedstuffs, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Canadian Veterinary Journal, and many other publications. Karen has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows including The Howard Stern Show, The Daily Show, Fact Finders on WB Channel 11 News @ Ten in New York City, and This American Life on National Public Radio. Karen is the author of several books including A Home for Henny (a children’s book published by UPC); Instead of Chicken, Instead of Turkey: A Poultryless ‘Poultry’ Potpourri (a cookbook published by the Book Publishing Co.); Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (Book Publishing Co.); More Than a Meal: The Turkey in History, Myth, Ritual, and Reality (Lantern Books); and The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities (Lantern Books). The New Revised Edition of Karen’s landmark book Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs is being published in 2009.

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Dr. Leesa Fawcett
Dr. Leesa Fawcett has taught Environmental Education, Critical Education for Social Change, Bioregionalism and Culture and Environment in the graduate program. She has also taught the undergraduate courses Foundations of Nature, Technology and Society, and Environmental Education. Leesa has advised students working on topics such as wolf management, science and environmental thought, environmental education through narrative, cross-cultural learning, women in Thailand, traditional ecological knowledge, and deep ecology and ecofeminism. Leesa is a member of the Conservation Biology Society, the Canadian Network for Environmental Education and Communication, the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, and the Toronto editorial group of the international journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Principal research interests relating to sustainability are: environmental education, sustainable agriculture and food education, human/animal relationships and feminist environmental and cultural studies.

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Dr. Carol Gigliotti
Gigliotti is a writer, educator, and artist, currently teaches Interactive Design and Media at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver, BC. Canada. She has been involved in new media since 1989 and has been writing about ethics and technologies for the last thirteen years. She has returned to teach at ECI from a year off working on a number of writing projects. One project, “Genetic Technologies and Animals” was published this January 2006 as a special issue of the Springer_Verlag journal AI and Society. Gigliotti guest edited this issue which includes her essay, ‘‘Leonardo’s choice: the ethics of artists working with genetic technologies’, and essays by philosopher Steven Best, literary theorist Susan McHugh, feminist biologist Lynda Birke and a dialogue between Gigliotti and cultural theorist, Steve Baker. During the year she was on leave, she began research for a book on “Wildness and Technology” on which she is continuing to work. An essay called “Artificial life and the lives of the non-human,” was published in the June06 issue of Parachute. This essay “engages contested ideas about how and why we need to look closely at assumptions about animal consciousness and animal cognition in artistic practices of the artificial”, and includes discussion of the work of artists, Ken Rinaldo and France Cadet. Her essay, “Sustaining Creativity and the Loss of the Wild” is included in the upcoming Intellect Press collection edited by Mel Alexenberg, Educating Artists in a Digital Age: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture. “Shifting Vision: the importance of metaphor in the recent work of M. Simon Levin” an essay commissioned by Surrey Art Gallery for the upcoming digital catalogue on the recent environmental work of M. Simon Levin, will be published early next year. In the past few years she gave the keynote at Interactive Futures 05 at the Victoria International Independent Film Festival on the ethics of artists working with biotechnologies and the opening keynote at the NEW FORMS 05 Festival at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC. on “The Power of the Non-Human.” Gigliotti is Co-Chair of Research Cluster B at the innovative Centre for Interactive Research in Sustainability (CIRS), and developed and teaches the Michael Davies Seminar on Environmental Ethics in the Humanities area at ECI.

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Amie Breeze Harper
Amie Breeze Harper was born and raised in Lebanon, CT. She attended Dartmouth College as an undergraduate and Harvard University for her Masters program in Educational Technologies. In Fall 2005, she embarked on the first ever book project that brings together the voices of Black female vegans living in North America. The book, entitled, Sistah Vegan! Food, Health, Identity and Society: Black Female Vegans Speak will be released Fall 2007. Currently, she is a PhD student in Nutritional Geography at UC Davis where she is focusing on the intersections anti-racist praxis, critical race theory, and whiteness studies as it applies to the health and food ways of Black identified people living in the USA.

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Dr. Elliot M. Katz
Katz is the president of In Defense of Animals (IDA), which he founded in 1983. He is a graduate of Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and practiced veterinary medicine in Brooklyn, New York before moving to California. IDA is an international animal protection organization dedicated to ending the abuse and exploitation of animals by protecting their rights, welfare and habitats, and by raising their status beyond that of mere commodities, property, objects or things. Through investigative and advocacy work and through their chimpanzee sanctuary in Cameroon, Africa, veterinary clinics in Mumbai, India, and their 64-acre sanctuary for abused and abandoned animals in rural Mississippi, IDA has been a powerful voice and force for change. Dr. Katz is the father of daughters Danielle and Raquel, and lives in Corte Madera, California with his beloved rescue dog Charlie.

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Dr. Lisa Kemmerer
Dr. Lisa Kemmerer earned a Masters Degree in Theology from Harvard Divinity School and her PhD in Philosophy from University of Glasgow, Scotland. She has also traveled widely, spending several years in Asia, with a special interest in exploring Asian religions. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Montana State University, Billings, teaching courses in philosophy and religious studies, including feminism and animal liberation. Lisa has written, directed, and produced two documentaries on Buddhism, and also numerous articles in the area of philosophy and religions.  She has most recently published Ethics and Animals: In Search of Consistency (Brill, 2006), and has two books forthcoming: The Buddha, the Bible, and the Beasts, and Real Christians Don’t Eat Meat.

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Marti Kheel is a writer and activist in ecofeminism, animal advocacy, vegan studies, and environmental ethics. She is the author of numerous articles that have been published, translated, and reprinted in journals and anthologies in the United States and abroad. Her 2008 book, Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, has been hailed as “a groundbreaking contribution to the literature and a must read for anyone concerned with the links between environmental ethics, animal liberation, and feminist critique of male cultural bias”(Rosemary Radford Ruether). Kheel developed the first feminist critique of the philosophical dualisms between environmental and animal liberation philosophies in a 1984 landmark essay, “The Liberation of Nature: A Circular Affair.” Originally published in Environmental Ethics, the article has since been frequently cited and reprinted. Over the years, Kheel’s main project has been to work toward an ecofeminist philosophy that is capable of bridging the seemingly disparate movements and philosophies of feminism, animal liberation, and environmental ethics. Applying her vision of interconnection, Kheel co-founded Feminists for Animal Rights in 1982. She holds a doctorate from the Graduate Theological Union and is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), University of California, Berkeley.  She has been a vegetarian for 37 years, a vegan for 32, and a raw foodist for the last 14 years.

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Dr. Charlotte Laws
In Spring 2004, Charlotte Laws was elected to her first political office as a councilperson for Valley Glen, California. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from the University of Southern California (USC) and has completed doctoral level coursework at UCLA. She also earned two B.A. Degrees, in Philosophy and Theatre Arts, from California State University (Northridge) and two Masters Degrees, in Social Ethics and Professional Writing, from USC. She has lectured and written articles in the following areas: the philosophies of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Russell and Mill, postmodernism, ethics, animal liberation/rights, environmentalism, philosophy of science, social philosophy, political theory, and First Amendment law. Some of her more mainstream articles have appeared in Newsweek, Publisher’s Weekly, and the L.A. Times. For three years, she was also a regular contributor to California magazine, focusing on philosophy, politics, law, and social issues. Her first book was published in 1988, and her second book entitled Armed for Ideological Warfare, exploring Spinoza and the animal rights movement, will be released in Spring 2005. She has been interviewed on number of television shows, including Larry King Live, Fox News, The Late Show, and Oprah Winfrey. Charlotte has been a vegetarian since 1981 and is the Founder and President of the League for Earth and Animal Protection (LEAP), which advocates and educates on behalf of nonhumans and the environment. The website is www.LEAPnonprofit.org

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Dr. Bill Martin
Bill Martin earned his Ph.D. at the University of Kansas, where he worked on continental philosophy, analytic philosophy, and social and political philosophy, and also on literary theory in the Departments of English and French. Bill wrote his dissertation with Gary Shapiro, on Derrida’s philosophy in relation to social theory. This became Bill’s first book, Matrix and line (SUNY, 1992). He has now published nine books, most recently Ethical Marxism: the categorical imperative of liberation (Open Court, 2008). Much of his work is motivated by an ongoing conversation between Kantian and Marxist themes, and he does extensive work in twentieth-century Marxism, including especially Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse, Sartre, Althusser, and Derrida, and, more recently, the work of Alain Badiou. He continues to engage with themes and figures in analytic philosophy, including Wittgenstein, the Vienna Circle, Quine, and especially Donald Davidson. Bill has also written extensively on creative currents in rock music, and to a lesser extent in jazz and Western classical music. He is a musician himself, having played the bass guitar for more than thirty-five years, as well as writing music. Bill’s current projects include a book on the post-Maoist current of Badiou’s philosophy, and a book taking account of Harry Frankfurt’s concept of “bullshit” in a social-political context. At some point he hopes to pull back momentarily from all of the political stuff to turn his attention toward writing a book on Wittgenstein and chess. In addition to his vocations as a writer and musician, Bill is an avid bicyclist and chess player.

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Anthony J. Nocella II
Anthony J. Nocella, II teaches classes in Sociology and Criminology at Le Moyne College and SUNY Cortland. 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. David Nibert
David Nibert is Professor of Sociology at Wittenberg University, where he teaches Animals & Society, Global Change, Social Stratification and Law and Society. He has worked as a tenant organizer, as a community activist and in the prevention of mistreatment and violence against devalued groups. He is the author of Animal Rights/Human Rights: Entanglements of Oppression and Liberation (Rowman/Littlefield) and Hitting the Lottery Jackpot: State Governments and the Taxing of Dreams (Monthly Review Press). He has published articles in such journals as Child Welfare; the Journal of Interpersonal Violence; RESPONSE: To the Victimization of Women and Children; Critical Sociology; Race, Gender, Class; Society and Animals; and the International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. He co-organized the section on Animals and Society of the American Sociological Association. His research interests include the historical and contemporary entanglement of the oppression of humans and other animals.

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Norm Phelps
Phelps an animal rights activist for 25 years and is the former spiritual outreach director of The Fund for Animals, as well as a founding member of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV). Phelps is the author of The Dominion of Love: Animal Rights According to the Bible, The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights, and The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA. A frequent speaker at animal rights conferences, he has contributed two articles to the Journal for Critical Animal Studies, a chapter in the forthcoming Call to Compassion, and an entry in The Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. His primary areas of interest are animal rights and religion, the moral foundations of animal rights, and the strategy of the animal rights movement.

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Dr. Constance Russell
Dr. Constance Russell, MES (York), PhD (Toronto), is Associate Professor and Chair, Graduate Studies and Research in Education in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University. She is the co-editor of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education and co-editor of the (Re)thinking Environmental Education book series with Peter Lang Publishing. She is Chair of the Ecological and Environmental Education SIG of the American Educational Research Association. Her research on environmental and humane education, ecofeminist and queer pedagogy, human/animal relations, nature experience, wildlife tourism, representation of other animals and nature in environmental education research, interdisciplinary and academic/activist collaboration, and generous scholarship has been published in journals like Society and Animals, Environmental Education Research, Journal of Environmental Education, Applied Environmental Education and Communication, and Journal of Experiential Education, as well as in numerous edited books. For more information, please see http://flash.lakeheadu.ca/~crussell/.

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Dr. Anuj Shah, J.D.
Dr. Anuj Shah, J.D., is a producer and host of Vegan World Radio and practices Immigration Law and Animal Law in Houston. Anuj also earned his Ph.D. in Eastern and Western/Comparative Philosophy in Honolulu, HI. He studied Master’s level work in French Literature at the Sorbonne. Anuj was a member of the National Society for the Defense of Animals while in Paris. While in Honolulu, he served for four years on the Boards of both the Vegetarian Society of Hawaii and Animal Rights Hawaii. Anuj is currently a member of both the Texas State Bar and the Houston Bar Association’s Animal Law Sections, as well as the Animal Legal Defense Fund.