The Inhumanities

The Inhumanities presents a rigorous intervention into the contemporary social sciences and the humanities drawing upon the growing scholarly apparatus surrounding “the question of the animal.” Two hopes guide our intervention. First, to bring in the perspectives of others who do not currently see the focus of their work on the question of the animal. As we see it, all aspects of life are affected by how we conceive of animals. Furthermore, all types of labor, all projects intellectual and concrete, have the capacity to alter our relations to animals.  Second, to produce concepts capable of responding to the present situation of human and nonhuman animals.  We see the casualization of violence against all types of life as proceeding from connected social forces, and believe that one cannot effectively address the plight of humans without analyzing this in concert with our violence against animals.  At present our conceptual apparatus is incommensurate to the task; a new form of life requires new concepts.  We further believe that the only way to carry out the second hope is with an unwavering commitment to ending the systematic violence carried out against both human animals and other animals.

Craig McFarlane is a doctoral candidate in sociology at York University, Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa. His dissertation, tentatively titled “The Human and The Animal in Early Modern Social Theory,” explores how the conceptual opposition between human and animal informed the development of theoretical concepts, such as order, community, property and interest. He also blogs at Theoria.

Petbull, aka Greg Pollock, is a graduate student in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz.  His work concerns the tension between the concepts of literary writing as both characteristically human and as an opening beyond the human, and the way in which this problem informs relations historical and futural with nonhuman animals. He maintains the blog Animal Obscura.

James K. Stanescu (aka Scu) is a graduate student in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton University (SUNY). He maintains the blog Critical Animal. He is currently at work on a dissertation tentively entitled The Abbatoir of Humanity: The Birth of the Factory Farm; which explores the ethical, political, and ontological implications of the disavowal of the animal in sacrificial, colonial, and biopolitical economies of violence.

We can be contacted at inhumanitiesblog[at]gmail[dot]com.