Animal Scales series: Scale Global, with Charlotte Blattner

Animals travel the world at a global scale. Day in, day out, countless individuals cross borders. They are either moved as objects of trade, or move on their own accord and on a voluntary basis. Humans either encourage or hinder these movements depending on whether we see certain animals as worthy of protection (e.g., iconic animals, like white rhinos, or those we have a close relationship with, like cats and dogs), or whether we see them as a resource (e.g., farmed animals) or nuisance (e.g., ‘invasive’ animals) – with noticeable, often disastrous consequences for affected animals. The law plays a key role in creating and legitimating such spaces of protection or use, empowerment or disenfranchisement, regulation or deregulation. In this session, we look at these dynamics from a global perspective. How are animals conceptualized and categorized, in law, on a global level? What sort of justifications are used to legitimate this scaling? How – if at all – are animals’ interests taken into account in decision-making? Do they contest anthropocentric ways of ordering life on a global scale?

BIO

Charlotte E. Blattner is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute of Public Law, University of Bern, Switzerland. She specializes in animal law and climate law. She earned her PhD in Law from the University of Basel, Switzerland, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Queen’s University, Canada, and Harvard Law School, Cambridge MA. Her books include Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders (OUP 2019) and Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? (OUP 2020, coedited with Will Kymlicka and Kendra Coulter).

This seminar is part of the Animal Scales series, co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Critical Global Change, Goldsmiths.

Seminar series: Animal Scales

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.

Full series dates:

SCALE: METABOLIC

Maan Barua; Department of Geography, Cambridge
5.00-7.00 pm, 20 February
Location: UCL, IAS Forum, South Wing, Wilkins Building.
Register here

SCALE: GLOBAL

Dr. iur. Charlotte Blattner, LL.M. (Harvard); Institute of Public Law, University of Berne
5.00-7.00 pm, 21 March
Location: UCL, Room BO5, Darwin Building.
Register here

SCALE: INDIVIDUAL

Screening of the documentary film Cow (2021, UK, MUBI & US IFC films), and discussion with Director, Andrea Arnold. Respondent and chair: Anat Pick, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, London.
3.30-7.00 pm, 23 April
Location: Goldsmiths, Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building
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SCALE: TEMPORAL

Éric Baratay; Department of History, Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon.
5.00-7.00pm, 24 May
Location TBA
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SCALE: POLITICAL

Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson; Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Canada
5.00-7.00pm, 19 June
On-line (Zoom)
Register here

SCALE: MULTIPLE

Dinesh Wadiwel; School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
10.00-12.00a.m., 8 July
On-line (Zoom)
Register here

For more information, please contact Mariam Motamedi Fraser (m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk)

Image: “Stray Cat 03” by Sami Ucan (@sami_ucan)