Call for papers: Imagining the future of animal farming: Natureculture and technosciences.

(AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco, March 29 – April 2, 2016)

Transgenic animals (Clark 2014, 2015; Rucinska 2011), in vitro meat (Stephens 2010), insects farms, pig towers (Driessen and Khortals 2012) and robotic milking machines (Holloway, Bear, and Wilkinson 2014) are just a few examples of where science & technology is currently being deployed to meet the growing global demand for meat and animal products. These innovations, along with the new types of meats they promise to produce, generate public controversies (Callon et al., 2009), since they are profoundly political, in the sense that they concern the production and distribution of societal benefits and risks, cultural in that, by intervening in nature, innovations such as transgenic animals and ‘in vitro meat’ powerfully impact upon on social meanings and identities and ethical, in that they raise significant questions about our relationship with processes of life.
Animal geographers are beginning to engage with these debates (for example: Emel and Neo, 2015) and with this session we invite presentations that engage with and expand the following topics:

●       What are the potential distributional consequences and ethical implications of these new technologies and innovations?
●       Who will play or should  play a role in designing  the future of animal farming?
●       Is the questioning of meat consumption  a way of forging new human-animal relations or rendering livestock animals obsolete?
●       What are the implications of these new technologies and innovations for human/animal relations?
●       What might it be like to be a transgenic animal or an animal in a high tech space?
●       Where is the animal or what becomes of the animal in a post-domestic era?

We invite empirical and theoretical papers around these themes but are not limited to them. Please send an abstract (max 250 words) with short bio to Karolina Rucinska (rucinskaka@cardiff.ac.uk) and Mara Miele (mielem@cardiff.ac.uk) by the 24th of October 2015.
References:

Clark, J. L. (2015). Killing the Enviropigs. Journal of Animal Ethics, 5(1), 20-30.

Cross, J. A. (2014). Continuity and Change: Amish Dairy Farming in Wisconsin Over The Past Decade. Geographical Review, 104(1), 52-70

Driessen, C., & Korthals, M. (2012). Pig towers and in vitro meat: disclosing moral worlds by design. Social Studies of Science, 42(6), 797-820.

Emel, J. and Neo, H. (eds) (2015)  The Political Ecologies of Meat Production, London: Earthscan

Holloway, L., Bear, C., & Wilkinson, K. (2014). Robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on UK dairy farms. Agriculture and human values, 31(2), 185-199.

Rucinska, K. (2011) Public perception of biotechnological innovation in agriculture- the Enviropig™. MSc Thesis, Cardiff University

Stephens, N. (2010). In vitro meat: Zombies on the menu. SCRIPTed, 7(2), 394-401.