Animal Studies

About the seminar:
Mariam Motamedi-Fraser will speak about Animal Studies in conversation with Andrew Barry in this seminar.

About the seminar series:
Over twenty years ago, in the early 2000s, Georgina Born, Andrew Barry and Marilyn Strathern led an ESRC funded project that focused on new institutional collaborations between natural and social scientists and creative practitioners. In these collaborations, the work of social scientists and artists often served to supplement dominant naturals scientific or engineering paradigms, standing in for a wider engagement with society (Barry, Born and Weszkalnys 2008, Born and Barry 2010, Barry and Born 2013). In some collaborations, there was a more radical reconfiguration of the relation between different forms of practice. In this mini-series of events, we revisit the question of the relation between the disciplines at a different moment, and from different angles.

Today, the potential contribution of the social and historical sciences to what were once thought of predominantly scientific or technical domains (including climate change and environmental research, computer science and AI) is more established, although it remains uneven. However, there is also growing recognition that an engagement with the natural and computational sciences have become critical to the reconfiguration of the social sciences themselves, beyond the established field of Science and Technology Studies.

In this mini-series, we reflect on the question of interdisciplinarity and the social and historical sciences through a series of conversations with Ann Stoler (on radical adisciplinarity), Mariam Motamedi-Fraser (on Animal Studies), Nikolas Rose (on the exposome), John Haddon (on history), and Georgina Born (on AI, and interdisciplinarity more broadly).

This seminar will be a hybrid event and take place both in-person and online.