Critical Animal Studies Center of Academic Excellence, established in the summer of 2010, is the research division of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies (ICAS). If your department or program at your university is wanting to conduct research with faculty, staff, undergraduates and graduate students, and wanting to collaborate with ICAS please contact the Director of the Center, Dr. Brian Lowe.
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Overview of Critical Animal Studies Center for Academic Excellence
The purpose of this Center is to encourage compelling and rigorous scholarship across a variety of disciplines emphasizing the significance and needs of nonhuman animals. This Center seeks to continue the tradition of critical theory, as articulated by the Frankfurt School, that scholarship must necessarily reveal the dynamics of power and influence which underlie and inform social, economic, and cultural arrangements. The Center strongly encourages interdisciplinary projects and cooperation, seeking to promote whenever possible the reality that human and nonhuman animal relationships impact nearly all of human social orders. While carrying forward the mission of critical theory, the Center will not sacrifice scholarship for either expediency or for in pursuit of political ends.
In keeping with these goals, the Center currently has three domains of research:
1) Animal Testing and their Alternatives: This core research area is devoted to examining and promoting effective alternatives to animal testing – including medical and scientific research and cosmetics – and to revealing the social and political forces (such as law and policies of granting agencies) that encourage animal testing despite effective alternatives. The significance and implications of ethology are also considered.
2) Media representations of Animals and Entertainment: his research area is built on the assumptions that most members of contemporary societies are informed about nonhuman animals through mediated representations and that these representations inform how humans understand nonhuman animals. Therefore how animals are represented within mass media and popular culture is significant both for informing the public about nonhuman animals and for what practices may be condoned regarding nonhuman animals. This domain also considers how nonhuman animals are used in entertainment and revealing to the wider public the suffering and exploitation of these animals.
3) Veganism, Ecology, and Agriculture: This core area seeks to emphasize the intersection between human dietary practices, the treatment of nonhuman animals in contemporary industrial agriculture, and the environmental consequences of these practices. While research in this area considers the reality of the lives of ‘farmed” animals, it also considers the social and environmental costs that these practices incur on the wider population and ecosystem. Research in this area also considers the conditions under which vegetarianism and veganism emerge, and how these dietary practices reduce the damages caused to nonhuman animals and the environment.
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Brief Dates
(1) April
(2) August
(3) December
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