15.05, 12:15-1:45pm GEO1, R.323

Heide Bruckner (Department of Geography and Regional Science, Uni Graz)

Eating animals in the Anthropocene: Engaging feminist and indigenous ontologies for multispecies worlds

Many argue that the detrimental social and ecological impacts of industrial animal agriculture in the Anthropocene are rooted in dualistic Western European philosophical traditions, in which humans and animals are understood as conceptually distinct.  However, (how) do different human-animal relational ethics of eating animals emerge when affective and material interdependency is assumed? When livestock or fish or clamshells become animal subjects? In this talk, I draw from fieldwork experience in two distinct settings (Austria and the Solomon Islands) to discuss natureculture human-animal entanglements in small-scale food networks on land and at sea. I ultimately draw connections between feminist and indigenous food systems scholarship which productively, and at times problematically, re-constitute humans as ‘just’ another part of nature.