Depression: A Public Feeling (Review)

Review of Ann Cvetkovich's Depression: A Public Feelin

Graphs of Grief and Other Green Feelings: the uses of affect in the study of environmental communication

How can theories of affect and felt emotions be useful in studying the communication of environmental crises? Beginning from tears spilt over a graph of transgressed planetary boundaries published in an academic paper, this article explores the presentation in graphic visual forms of affective imagery and a growing sophistication amongst scientists, policymakers and activist communicators in the visualization of information, data and stories employed to carry the often difficult and complex messages of current earth systems crises. Critically, this article attends to the “emotion work” of such images. Taking a lead from cultural sociology and attempting to elucidate the relationship between societies under pressure and its choice of texts, this article considers the environmental documentary Cowspiracy [Anderson, K., & Kuhn, K. (2014). Cowspiracy. San Francisco, CA: AUM Films & First Spark Media.] to ask questions of affect’s relation to expressions of the earth systems crisis, which is also a crisis of culture

Bodily Encounter, Bearing Witness and the Engaged Activism of the Global Save Movement

The global Save Movement, alongside other animal rights organisations and practices, has since 2010 sought to bring the experiences of nonhuman farmed animals into the public domain from privatized, usually hidden spaces of industrial procedure and slaughter. One key mechanism used is to conduct vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passers-by. Central to the practice are the roles played by emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a self- styled ‘love-based’ compassion for other living beings. In 2014, I joined the Save Movement in Toronto for a number of vigils, engaging in an autoethnographic study of the means by which activists employ emotional labour, bearing witness and bodily encounter in foregrounding the realities of life for industrially farmed nonhuman animals. This article argues that the Save Movement represents a new moment (although not wholly without precedent) in the practices of animal rights activism. Working from the intellectual standpoint of Critical Animal Studies, the structure of the paper employs this autoethnographic and emotionally-affected personal account of taking part as a researcher-activist in the vigils, to offer access to experiences of how emotion, activism and empathy overlap in ‘coming to care’ for nonhuman others in public settings. The article seeks to elucidate the Save Movement’s emphasis on bodily encounter and the making visible of already existing embodied entanglements with farmed nonhuman animals, and suggests this form of engaged witnessing offers opportunity for radically reimagining our species’ existing relationships with those species we currently identity as food

Cruel Optimism (Review)

Review of Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimis

What would inclusive journalism have felt like for the pig?

The idea of the inclusive society as a policy instrument is based upon equality of opportunities and the equal capacity of members regardless of differences such as gender and faith. Operating within society, the idea of inclusive journalism follows this model, including the anthropocentric practices that exclude the living conditions and concerns of most nonhuman animals. This article argues that for journalism to be truly inclusive the anthropocentric nature of both society and the media must be exposed, and our social practices extended beyond the species divide. The article begins by illustrating the common journalistic practices of reporting on farmed animals, before exploring the new practices of Animal Journalism and, within scholarship, the field of Critical Media and Animal Studies. The article then turns to political theory before suggesting Donaldson and Kymlicka’s concept of positive relational rights can be placed at the centre of a non-anthropocentric and inclusive journalism practice

Cultivating Community: Investigating Performances of Community in Ecovillage Settlements

This dissertation considers the subject of ecovillages, intentional ecologically-oriented sustainable communities developed in the U.S., and the different understandings of community involvement, structure, and challenges that members of these communities confront in their efforts at managing these time and labor-intensive settlements. Informed by the work of performance ethnographers and critical phenomenologists, I consider twelve interviews I conducted on-site and electronically with people living in ecovillage settlements. Taking these interviews and my own observations from on-site visits to two ecovillages as entry points, I conducted a phenomenological analysis informed by a critical phenomenological ethos of these accounts, highlighting five motifs that recurred across their recollections of their lived experiences: (1) intentional design; (2) happenings; (3) community; (4) motivations; and (5) political and environmental ethos. I then considered how these motifs suggested several contingent foundations that underwrite the experience of ecovillage community formation more generally. I identified three such contingent foundations: (1) intention; (2) boundaries; and (3) becoming. From these foundations, I propose a phenomenological rendering of community in ecovillages as a purposive act of ongoing relating between the human and more-than-human world that is cultivated through an attention to articulated principles, enacted through actions and behaviors that follow from these principles, and reaffirmed through mutual witnessing and commitment to the aforesaid principles. Such an understanding of community poses interesting implications for communication studies and related sub-disciplines. I consider some of these implications in the conclusion to my dissertation, before outlining some of the future work I hope to pursue relating to ecovillages and intentional communities more generally

[Review] Jason Hannan, editor. Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020. 334 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(2): [Review] Jason Hannan, editor. Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2020. 334 pp

Contest and Concordance: HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US and Challenges to Resistant Discourses in Performance Art

In my response to this year’s special call (of overcoming divisive discourses), I examine the case of LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner’s HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US art installation, and the discourses that have emerged in response to this piece in the months since its opening. After identifying five discourses that seem to compete over the meanings and intent of the installation, I examine the ways in which these discourses might become more openly engaged in dialogic and transgressive encounters through an application of applied Bataillean abjection

The Save Movement, Empathy and Activism

The global Save Movement, alongside other animal rights organisations and practices, has since 2010 sought to bring the experiences of nonhuman farmed animals into the public domain from privatized, usually hidden spaces of industrial procedure and slaughter. One key mechanism used is public vigils held outside slaughterhouses, where activists gather to bear witness to the passing of nonhuman animals in trucks, and to raise awareness of the suffering of animals to passersby and members of the public. Central to the practice are the roles played by emotional engagement and bodily encounter with the nonhuman animals; the movement is founded on a self-styled “love-based” compassion for other living beings, influenced by the non-violence teachings of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. In 2014 I joined the Save Movement in Toronto for a number of their vigils, engaging in an autoethnographic study of the means by which activists employ emotional labour, bearing witness and bodily encounter in foregrounding the realities of life for industrially farmed nonhuman animals. This article argues that the rise of the Save Movement represents a new moment (although not wholly without precedent) in the practices of animal rights activism. Working from the intellectual standpoint of Critical Animal Studies and engaged theory, the structure of the paper employs ethnographic and emotionally-affected personal accounts of taking part as a researcher-activist in the vigils, which offer access to experiences of the ways in which emotion, activism and empathy overlap in ‘coming to care’ for nonhuman others in pressured public settings. The article seeks, in the end, to elucidate the Save Movement’s emphasis placed on bodily encounter and the making visible of already existing embodied entanglements with farmed nonhuman animals, and suggests this form of engaged witnessing offers opportunity for radically reimagining our species’ existing relationships with those species we currently identity as food