Animal Edutainment In A Neoliberal Era

Animal Edutainment in a Neoliberal Era is a rich and beautifully written multispecies ethnographic monograph that explores pedagogy and practice at a Southern California aquarium housing and displaying over 10,000 animals. Drawing on extensive interviews with aquarium staff and visitors, as well as fieldwork interacting with and observing human-animal interactions, the book demonstrates the complex ways in which aquarium animals are politically deployed in teaching and learning processes. Weaving together insights from anthropology, critical geography, environmental education, and political ecology, Teresa Lloro crafts a three-pronged "political ecology of education lens," illuminating how neoliberal ideologies interact at various scales (local, regional, national, and global) to deeply shape aquarium decision-making and practice. Acknowledging that neoliberalism enrolls humans and other animals in teaching and learning in new and often poorly understood ways, this study challenges the anthropocentrism of contemporary informal educational approaches, suggesting that imaginative ways forward will require a paradigm shift in regarding the role of animals in education.

This book presents interdisciplinary research to examine the ongoing debates around nonhuman animals in urban spaces. It explores how we can better appreciate and accommodate animals in the city, while also exploring the ecological, health, ethical, and cultural implications of the same. The book addresses seven interrelated themes such as blurred boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the right of nonhuman species to the city, interactions between the human and nonhuman animals, the fabric of urban space, human and nonhuman complex systems, and collective welfare that forms the basis of a transspecies urban theory. It explains how a holistic understanding of the city requires that these blurred boundaries are acknowledged and critically examined. Chapters analytically consider the need to bring interspecies relationships to the fore to tackle questions of legitimacy and who has the "right" to the city. These also consider important intersections between the economic, political, social, and cultural aspects of the urban experience. The research contained in this book focuses on the development of an urban theory that would eradicate the divide between humans and other species in cities, and it depicts nonhuman animals as social actors that have voices within urban spaces. With global insights on human–animal relationships in a contemporary context, this book will be useful reading for scholars and students of urban studies, animal sciences, animal law, animals and public policy, anthropology, and environmental studies who are interested in the study of animals in cities.

Leading philosophers Alice Crary and Lori Gruen offer a searing and desperately needed response to systems of thought and action that are failing animals and, ultimately, humans too. In the wake of global pandemics, mass extinctions, habitat destruction, and catastrophic climate change, they issue a clarion call to address the intertwined problems we face, arguing that we must radically reimagine our relationships with other animals. In stark contrast to traditional theories in animal ethics, which abstract from social mechanisms harmful to human beings, Animal Crisis makes the case that there can be no animal liberation without human emancipation. Borrowing from critical theories such as ecofeminism, Crary and Gruen present a critical animal theory for understanding and combating the structural forces that enable the diminishment of so many to the advantage of a few. With seven case studies of complex human-animal relations, they make an urgent plea to dismantle the “human supremacism” that is devastating animal lives and hurtling us toward ecocide.

Neoliberalism and Academic Repression provides a theoretical examination of how the current higher education system is being shaped into a corporate-factory-industrial-complex. This timely collection challenges the neoliberal emphasis on valuation based on job readiness and outcome achievement.

This book examines and engages with the ambivalence of digitization, illuminating the diverse ways in which researchers approach, negotiate, understand and interpret objects and practices of digital research.

This book explores interdisciplinary approaches to animal-focused curriculum and pedagogy in environmental education, with an emphasis on integrating methods from the arts, humanities, and natural and social sciences. Each chapter, whether addressing curriculum, pedagogy, or both, engages with the extant literature in environmental education and other relevant fields to consider how interdisciplinary curricular and pedagogical practices shed new light on our understandings of and ethical/moral obligations to animals. Embracing theories like intersectionality, posthumanism, Indigenous cosmologies, and significant life experiences, and considering topics such as equine training, meat consumption and production, urban human-animal relationships, and zoos and aquariums, the chapters collectively contribute to the field by foregrounding the lives of animals. The volume purposefully steps forward from the historical marginalization of animals in educational research and practice.

This book has two primary goals: a critique of educational reforms that result from the rise of neoliberalism and to provide alternatives to neoliberal conceptions of education problems and solutions. A key issue addressed by contributors is how forms of critical consciousness can be engendered thought society via schools, that is, paying attention to the practical aspects of pedagogy for social transformation and organizing to achieve a most just society.

A new approach to writing culture has arrived: multispecies ethnography. Plants, animals, fungi, and microbes appear alongside humans in this singular book about natural and cultural history. Anthropologists have collaborated with artists and biological scientists to illuminate how diverse organisms are entangled in political, economic, and cultural systems. Contributions from influential writers and scholars, such as Dorion Sagan, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, are featured along with essays by emergent artists and cultural anthropologists. Delectable mushrooms flourishing in the aftermath of ecological disaster, microbial cultures enlivening the politics and value of food, and nascent life forms running wild in the age of biotechnology all figure in this curated collection of essays and artifacts. Recipes provide instructions on how to cook acorn mush, make cheese out of human milk, and enliven forests after they have been clear-cut. The Multispecies Salon investigates messianic dreams, environmental nightmares, and modest sites of biocultural hope. For additional materials see the companion website: www.multispecies-salon.org/ Contributors. Karen Barad, Caitlin Berrigan, Karin Bolender, Maria Brodine, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, David S. Edmunds, Christine Hamilton, Donna J. Haraway, Stefan Helmreich, Angela James, Lindsay Kelley, Eben Kirksey, Linda Noel, Heather Paxson, Nathan Rich, Anna Rodriguez, Dorion Sagan, Craig Schuetze, Nicholas Shapiro, Miriam Simun, Kim TallBear, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing