Writing animals
Scholars within the natural sciences are not the only scholars who study, analyze and write about nature. So do also scholars within the social sciences and the humanities. But how is this done? And what is this thing called "nature"?
Donna Haraway has alerted us to the fact that what we have tended to call nature in fact quite often is someone else; other humans as well as non-humans.
Today there is a rich and growing literature that seeks to "make space for" animals, thus bringing non-humans to the center of attention in the humanities and social sciences. One of the prominent and influential scholars within this field of research is professor and cultural historian Harriet Ritvo (MIT).
We are very happy to have her as the key-note speaker of this spring seminar on writing nature - writing animals. In this seminar we have also invited scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss ways of working and methodological concerns involved in writing animals.
Please notify beatet@ilos.uio.no about your participation within Monday April 23.
Programme
10.00-11.30: Part 1
10.00-10.15: Coffee and welcome
10.15-11.30: Harriet Ritvo: Making Space for Animals - followed by discussion
11.30-12.15: Lunch
12.15-13.00 Part 2a
Guro Skarstad: Approaching Fish and Values with Boltanski and Thévenot
Guro Flinterud: Stealing from Bakhtin: Writing the Voices of the "Voiceless"
Tone Druglitrø: Studying Laboratory Animals in Norway
13.00-13.15: Short break
13.15-14.00: Part 2b
Adam Dodd: Making the Insect World: The Science and Fiction of Entomology
Karen Syse: Stumbling over Animals in the Landscape: Categorising Accidents and Anecdotes
Kristian Bjørkdahl: Trailing the Human Serpent in Animal Studies
Harriet Ritvo: Making Space for Animals
The title of this talk refers to an issue that exists on both the figurative and the literal levels. The last several decades have seen the gradual recognition of the significance of animals as subjects of cultural history. These historiographical challenges echo historical ones. The erasure of other animals has been a recurrent theme of human history. The fates of animals targeted by 19th-century acclimatizers provide suggestive examples.
About Harriet Ritvo
Harriet Ritvo is the Arthur J. Connor Professor of History Massachusett’s Institute of Technology where she teaches courses in British history, environmental history, and the history of natural history. She was among the first to write animals into cultural history by her highly rewarded study The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. (Harvard UP, 1987). She is also the author of The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Harvard UP, 1997).
She is the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). She is the editor of John Hopkins University Press’ series Animals, History, Culture.
Her articles and reviews on British cultural history, environmental history, and the history of human-animal relations have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The London Review of Books, Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields.
Organisers: Liv Emma Thorsen, Hilde Reinertsen and Kristin Asdal.
List of "Writing nature" seminars:
1) Når antropologer skriver natur, 15. februar 2012
2) Writing nature in science and technology studies (STS), 14. mars 2012
3) Writing animals, 25. april 2012
4) Writing nature in climate studies, 2. mai 2012.
5) Writing nature in geography, 26. september 2012.
The list will be updated with more seminars as soon as the invited scholars confirm their participation.