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Animal publics: Political subjectivity after the human subject. Gwendolyn Blue Assistant Professor Dept. of Geography University of Calgary, Canada. What does it mean to consider nonhuman animals as part of a public?
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Animal publics:Political subjectivity after the human subject Gwendolyn Blue Assistant Professor Dept. of Geography University of Calgary, Canada
What does it mean to consider nonhuman animals as part of a public? What would it mean for our understanding of publics if we acknowledged their embeddedness in nature (materiality / animality) as their condition of possibility? Blue, G. and Rock, M. Animal publics: Accounting for heterogeneity in political life. Society and Animals. In press. Blue, G.Multispecies publics in the Anthropocene: From symbolic exchange to material-discursive intra-action. Life in the Anthropocene. Dinesh Wadiwel, Nikki Savvides, Madeleine Boyd, Matthew Chrulew, AgataMrva-Montoya, Christopher Degeling, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (eds) Sydney University Press. In press.
Confront the assumption, deeply rooted in liberal democracy, that the political subject is a self authenticating individual who arrives, fully formed, into a public sphere of discourse. - Grounded in “humanist schema of the knowing subject” (Wolfe, 2009) Recognize the capacity for representation and political agency is not ours alone • Emerges from technological networks as well as the ‘contact zones of multi-species relations’ (Haraway 2008)
Animal public as issue oriented public ‘Issues spark a public into being’ “… all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transaction, to such an extent that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for” (Dewey 1927, p. 16 cited in Marres 2005, p. 213) Marres, N. (2005). Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippman-Dewey debate. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, edited by B. Latour and P. Weibel. Boston: MIT Press.
Example of Animal Public BEAR 71 (2012) National Film Board of Canada Interactive digital documentary Created by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendez Script by J.B. MacKinnon
Themes: SURVEILLANCE – capture the ambivalent ways in which new digital media constitute publics – draws attention to hypermediated environments in which we currently live LOGIC OF REMEDIATION – the twin logic of erasing mediation (immediacy) in the act of multiplying media channels (hypermediation)