HETEROTOPIA, RADICAL IMAGINATION, AND SHATTERING ORDERS: MANIFESTING A FUTURE OF LIBERATED ANIMALS

This volume seeks to advance the process of de-ordering, subverting, and dismantling our destructive orientations towards other animals by encouraging creative engagement with the notion of heterotopias described as spaces “whose functions are different or even the opposite of others” (Foucault 2002: 361). These ‘counter-sites’ represent, contest, and invert the society they’re part of, much as the Situationists (an anti-capitalist art movement) were also doing at the time of Foucault’s writing (see McDonough 2004, Eagles 2012, and Socha, 2012). En masse, they delineate a counter-map or heterotopology that is a “simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (Foucault 1967: 4).

Heterotopia can be thought of alongside utopian thinking, situated speculation, radical imagination, counter-conduct, critical subversion, radical resignification, and prefigurative politics, as kinds of unsettling (intentional or otherwise) that enact speculative ripples through time and space. While we cannot ultimately know which patterns of diffraction will make a/the difference, it is nevertheless important to foreground the intention to actualize concrete spaces of freedom and transformation (Foucault 1988), and to ensure, as far as possible, that the contexts in which these ripples occur preference certain outcomes over others, paying attention to “where we are going to land” (Halewood 2017).

The aim of this volume is therefore threefold:

1. To foreground existing sites, spaces, and practices where normalised meanings of animals exploited for food, entertainment, research, fashion, sport, and/or companionship are negated or undone. Michelle Westerlaken describes these as “the multiplicity of alternative—non-dominant—practices that are already enacted in society” (2017: 57)

2. To imagine radically alternate futures for these commodified animals whether free-living, domesticated, and/or commensal. Here, the literary notion of storyworlds is extended to encourage imaginative leaps to various post-oppression, liberated animal futures where oppressive categories and uses have been overturned.

3.  To explore practical pathways towards these futures, or the diffusion of existing futures, recognising that we need to identify how to get from that-which-is to that-which-could-be (Foucault 1988). This will require disturbing and ultimately rejecting anthropocentrism, in all its expressions, conceptually, emotionally, and practically. This thoroughgoing ontological disturbance is a vital part of the transformative process, recognizing the importance of context for steering and correcting the trajectories of associated ruptures or ‘lines of fragility’ (Foucault 1988).

CAS scholars are constantly grappling with the ontological, speculative, and practical dimensions of ending animal oppression (Bekoff 2013; Doyle 2017; Belicia and Islam 2018). Explorations of alternate futures include proposals for non-speciesist laws (Dunayer 2013) and animals as citizens, sovereigns (Donaldson and Kymlicka 2013) or legal beings (Deckha 2021); calls for speculative multispecies worlding (Westerlaken 2020) and the application of a posthumanism that is cosmopolitan (Narayanan and Bindumadhav 2019) or emancipatory (Cudworth and Hobden 2015, 2018); and prescriptions for a shift in moral and affective orientations towards entangled empathy (Gruen 2015) or an earthling identity (Freeman 2020). Manifestos are also advanced, for total liberation (Best 2014) and futures that are abundant (Collard et al. 2014) or ahuman (MacCormack 2020).

While speculation is common in both fiction and non-fiction to explore alternative social, political, economic, and environmental futures, the majority of these visions retain the subjugation of animals as a constant (Westerlaken 2017). The animal movement needs to create similar worlds of possibility or vegan heterotopia (Arcari 2019) that show what would happen to all the animals, and define the features of a map that would help bring these worlds into being thereby making them “more real and more credible as objects of policy and activism” (Gibson-Graham 2008: 613).

Contributions may focus on one or more of the above aims, on one individual or a group of animals, and take inspiration from any number of approaches to, and expressions of, alternate animals worlds, encompassing art, activism, literature, visual media, scholarship, law, policy, a single event or encounter, everyday practice, or other modality.

In so doing, the challenges to be overcome, explanations for the apparent intractability of animals’ oppression, and reasons why animals deserve liberation (however that is understood) may necessarily be part of the narrative. However, re-examination of these questions is not the primary focus of this volume, which rather aims to more purposefully describe present futures and set a course for future presents (Fisher and Mehnert 2021).

No matter which animals and uses are foregrounded, and whatever perspectives are drawn from, authors are encouraged to critically engage to some degree with the concept of liberation. For instance: What does ‘liberation’ mean for the animal(s) in question? Does this liberation have genetic, biological, physical, social, spatial, temporal, or other kinds of limits? To what extent are the agential capacities and intentions of the animals facilitated? How might liberatory aspirations be compromised or even negated if/when other priorities take precedence, for example in relation to rewilding or conservation goals? What do any of these mean for understandings of liberation and the anthropocentrism they seek to undo?

Authors are also encouraged to consider the broader implications of their respective disturbance – what it might mean for the people, materials, infrastructures, spaces, environments, networks, relations, policies, laws, and/or practices associated with existing animal uses – how would they need to respond or transform?

This call is open to researchers at every level of study, activists, practitioners, and combinations thereof. Experimentation and a radical imagination are welcomed. Submissions are also welcome that address aspects of heterotopia not accounted for in this CfP.

Please send an abstract of your proposed chapter (250-500 words) to Paula Arcari by 25th February 2022. Please also include a short bio (200 words max).

Email: arcarip@edgehill.ac.uk

Please include HETEROTOPIA in the email subject line.

Timeline:

25th February 2022: Submission of abstracts

31st March 2022: Editor’s response to submissions

30th September 2022: Draft chapters due

​

Some references

Arcari, P. 2019, Making Sense of ‘Food’ Animals: A Critical Exploration of the Persistence of ‘Meat’, Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

Bekoff, M. 2013, Who lives, who dies, and why? How speciesism undermines compassionate conservation and social justice. In: Corbey, R. and Lanjouw, A. (eds) The Politics of Species: Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15-26.

Belicia, T. and Islam, M. 2018, Towards a Decommodified Wildlife Tourism: Why Market Environmentalism Is Not Enough for Conservation. Societies 8: 59.

Blattner, C., Coulter, K. and Kymlicka, W. (eds) 2020, Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Chang, D. 2022, Infiltrate the Cityscapes: Resisting Speciesist Segregation with Farmed Animals. In: Hodge, P., McGregor, A., Springer, S., Veron, P. and White, R. (Eds) Vegan Geographies: Spaces Beyond Violence, Ethics Beyond Speciesism. Lantern Publishing & Media. pp. 217-238

Collard R-C, Dempsey J. and Sundberg J. 2014, A Manifesto for Abundant Futures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105: 322-330.

Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2015, Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism, Globalizations, 12(1): 134-148.

Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2018, The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism, Routledge.

Cudworth, E. and Hobden, S. 2018, ‘Anarchism’s Posthuman Future', Anarchist Studies, 26(1): 79-104.

Donaldson, S. and Kymlicka, W. 2013, Zoopolis, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Douglas M. 1966, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London and New York: Routledge.

Doyle C. 2017, Captive Wildlife Sanctuaries: Definition, Ethical Considerations and Public Perception. Animal Studies Journal 6: 55-85.

Dunayer, J. 2013, The rights of sentient beings: Moving beyond old and new speciesism. In: Corbey, R and Lanjouw, A (eds) The Politics of Species: Reshaping our Relationships with Other Animals. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 27-39.

Eagles, J. 2012, 'The Spectacle and Détournement: The Situationists' Critique of Modern Capitalist Society', Critique, 40(2): 179-98.

Fischer, N. and Mehnert, W. 2021, 'Building Possible Worlds: A Speculation Based Framework to Reflect on Images of the Future', Journal of Futures Studies, 25(3): 25-38.

Foucault, M. 1967, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias. Architecture/Mouvement/Continuite October: 1-9.

Foucault, M. 1989, Order of Things: An Archaeology of the human sciences, London and New York: Routledge.

Foucault, M. 1988, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, Routledge, New York and London.

Foucault, M. 2002, Space, Knowledge, and Power. In: Faubion JD (ed) Power: the essential works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984 V.3. Penguin Books, pp. 349-364.

Gibson-Graham, JK. 2008, Diverse economies: performative practices for `other worlds'. Progress in Human Geography, 32: 613-632.

Halewood, M. 2017, 'Situated speculation as a constraint on thought', in A Wilkie, M Savransky and M Rosengarten (eds), Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures, Routledge, Oxon and New York.

MacCormack, P. 2020, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene, Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York.

McDonough, T. 2004, Guy Debord and the Situationist International, MIT Press.

Narayanan, Y. and Bindumadhav, S. 2019, '’Posthuman cosmopolitanism’ for the Anthropocene in India: Urbanism and human-snake relations in the Kali Yuga', Geoforum, 106: 402-10.

Nocella, AJ II, RJ White and E Cudworth (eds) 2015, Anarchism and Animal Liberation: Essays on Complementary Elements of Total Liberation, McFarland and Company Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, NC.

Puwar, N. 2004, Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, Oxford: Berg.

Socha, K. 2012, Women, destruction, and the avant-garde: A paradigm for animal liberation, Rodopi, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Sorenson, J. 2014, Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable, Canadian Scholar’s Press, Toronto, ON.

Taylor, N. 2020, Radically Imagining Human-Animal Relations after the Covid19 Pandemic Animals in Society. https://animalsinsocietygroup.wordpress.com/2020/04/06/radically-imagining-human-animal-relations-after-the-covid19-pandemic/

Tomasello, S, Piazza, A & Poirier, N. 2021, 'Reproduction or the Lack Thereof: A Mode of Oppression, a Means to Liberation?', in AE George (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Critical Animal Studies, Lexington Books, pp. 145-62.

Twine, R. 2012, 'Revealing the ‘Animal-Industrial Complex’ - A Concept & Method for Critical Animal Studies', Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 10(1): 12-39.

Véron, O. 2016, '(Extra)ordinary activism: veganism and the shaping of hemeratopias', International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36(11/12): 756-73.

Westerlaken, M. 2017, 'Uncivilising the Future: Imagining Non-Speciesism', Antae, 4(1): 53-67.

Westerlaken, M. 2021, 'It matters what designs design designs: speculations on multispecies worlding', Global Discourse, 11(1-2): 137-55.

Yates, L. 2014, 'Rethinking Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals in Social Movements', Social Movement Studies, 14(1): 1-21.

Yates, L. 2021, 'Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements', Political Studies, 69(4): 1033-52.