Scales: Political

Speakers will be Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka (Queens, Canada), with Eva Meijer (Amsterdam) and Alasdair Cochrane (Sheffield) responding. 

Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka abstract for the seminar:
The animal ethics literature tends to focus on animals either as individuals (with rights, or moral standing) or as part of biological populations or species (vulnerable to extinction/extirpation, loss of genetic diversity, resilience, abundance, etc.) But politics takes place at the level of social and cultural groups, not individuals or biological populations, and it concerns how members of groups navigate and shape the terms of collective life together. In this paper, we explore the importance of seeing animals as members of groups or associations (e.g. herds, pods, neighbours, clans, commoners), and how such groups fit into larger visions of interspecies politics and justice. Traditional political theory has long faced the challenge of how to relate different scales of political community (local, national, transnational), each with its own rules of membership, authority and legitimacy. Adding animal groups to the mix ramps up this complexity considerably, but we argue that this complexity is generative. It helps clarify the need to think about political communities as interdependent (not isolated or self-sufficient), grounded (in physical space and/or social connection), and overlapping (with different communities having divided authority/jurisdiction in shared places, not exclusive or unitary power). We explore how political community of this scale and scope could enable justice in more-than-human politics.

About the seminar series:
From Aristotle’s scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves ‘scale-makers’ and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.

You can access further information about Animal Scales and watch recordings of past events here.