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Interested in human-animal relationships/multi-species ethnography


Ilikekitties

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With a focus on moral relativism. I also love reflexivity.

 

So far, this is the list of schools/people that I'm looking at (PhD programs in anthropology). For most of them, I've come across them by random chance. The people that I've been reading are all from Australia or the UK.

 

Columbia -Paige West: long-term study of the meanings and values attributed to plants, animals, landscapes, and seascapes in PNG.

 

UVA - Carrie Douglass: Cultural anthropology; symbolic anthropology; Spain; the Mediterranean; European anthropology; ritual cycles; demography; reproduction; gender; marriage and the family; medical anthropology; transnational kinship; nationalism and ethnicity; art in small-scale cultures; animals (Good to Think).

 

Toronto - Hilary Cunningham: Nature and culture; anthropology of animals; animal geographies; animal histories; urban nature; wilderness; theories of nature.

Naisargi Dave: Activism, affect, sexuality and gender, ethics, social emergences, queer anthropology, intimacy, animal-human relationships, postcolonial cities

 

Washington -  Maria Elena Garcia Adjunct: Animal studies, Latin America

Holly Barker: ethics and applied

 

The New School  - Hugh Raffles: histories of human/nonhuman relations in Amazonia, East Asia, North America, Western Europe.

 

UCSB Jeffrey Hoelle: Sociocultural Anthropology (ecological and economic anthropology, cattle raising and cowboy cultures; Latin America, Brazilian Amazon)

 

McGill - Eduardo KohnAnthropology of life, semiotics, human-animal relations, "nature" and ecological and environmental anthropology, self and personhood, Quichua, Amazonia, Ecuador

 

Apparently US students can't get funding outside of the US? Someone told me that.

 

Any suggestions? Further people/programs? I would check the AAA book that costs a fortune but I'm abroad.

 

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I have met Professor Naisargi Dave at University of Toronto a couple of times. She is friendly and her work is extremely interesting. I study at McGill (poli. sci.) with a couple of American PhD students: they received the standard funding package and were given a waiver on the international student tuition; I'm not so sure if they also received a waiver on the international fees.

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Anna Tsing in USCS and her mushroom group http://www.ic.ucsc.edu/~atsing/matsutake/group.html, which includes Tim Choy in UCDavis, Miyako Inoue in Stanford and so on. Also Eduardo Kohn, who authors  How Forests Think. You can definitely find many related authors in the literature review of this book.

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Will the AAA book of departments have more information so that I can find departments where this is a focus? I'm not on campus this semester, so I don't have access to it now unfortunately.

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So, in terms of finding "fits," the specific topic doesn't matter as much? For example, I'm not interested in mushrooms or plants, but the theories and methods might be similar enough?

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I don't think topic matters as much as theories and methodologies. Someone that can help you with those will be giving you the tools you need to apply to your specific topic. As an example, I did my PhD with someone with a similar theoretical and methodological approach but who had never worked on my specific topic (and hadn't had students do so really either). It worked out pretty well for me!

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So, in terms of finding "fits," the specific topic doesn't matter as much? For example, I'm not interested in mushrooms or plants, but the theories and methods might be similar enough?

My suggestion would be to go to find their articles and weight out who they are in dialogue with. If you think your interests are covered, then try to reach out them. This is pretty new area echoing the alleged ontological turn, thus they will be happy to know people are attracted by multi-species projects.

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I would look in the citations of that article I sent you before written by Laura Ogden. There are a lot of good people in there and she has been doing the "more-than-human" thing for a while now. It's also a review article so it's a good way to cover a lot of ground in terms of what people are doing in terms of multi-species ethnography. There were also a few sessions on more-than-human political ecology at this year's Dimensions of Political Ecology conference. Looking at the conference program to see where people are doing work would be really helpful for you.

 

FWIW, a portion of my own work is "multi-species" and though I know a number of people who have been doing that kind of work (including people on your list), it would take a really broad definition for anyone on my committee to be considered a part of that world. Without knowing your more specific interests it's difficult to say where you should be looking. I will say though that you shouldn't let "multi-species" really be your guiding light. A lot of the people you mention are affiliated with nature-society studies generally and political ecology and/or science studies specifically. Looking more generally at these will open up a lot of doors.

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^ok, currently my more specific interest is people's perceptions of livestock and companion animals and how these categories are constructed. I am interested in how the animals in these categories are valued (for example, why is it *typically* okay to eat a cow but not a dog?) That's just something that I made up for an example.

 

Yes, I will take a look at who's cited on Odgen's article! Thanks!

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