Social Science Research Council

2008 DPDF Research Field:
Animal Studies

During the last several decades Animal Studies has emerged as a newly central focus of scholarship in disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences.   The “animal turn” in academic research has expanded the range of possible research topics in disciplines from art history, cultural studies, and philosophy to history, sociology, and anthropology, while suggesting new relationships between scholars and their subjects, and new understandings of the role of animals in the past and at present. At the same time, Animal Studies has remained at the border of established disciplines, a location that is the source of much of its appeal and power. 

Like many interdisciplinary research areas, Animal Studies brings divergent, complementary, and mutually enriching approaches to bear on a common thematic focus.    Throughout the social sciences and the humanities, scholars now consider animals (their functions, and even their experiences) as subjects in a sense previously reserved for humans.  Even in fields where animal topics have been routine, such as agricultural history, the farmyard creatures are now less likely to be abstracted through quantification, and more likely to appear as individual creatures, or at least groups of individual creatures. And as has been the case with some other emergent or recently emerged areas of scholarly investigation, academic interest resonates with issues in the news. As organized labor, civil rights, decolonization, and women’s liberation inspired sympathetic scholars, so have, in their turn, the advocates of hunted whales, poached tigers, abandoned dogs, and overcrowded pigs.   Panda diplomacy, the anti-vivisection movement, pest control: all these invest animals with crucial socio-political meaning. A focus on human relationships with other animals illuminates the study of ancient cultures as well as modern ones, western as well as non-western.  As Animal Studies has expanded the range of topics available to scholars, it has also opened new possibilities of connection between the social sciences and humanities, and the life sciences.  We will engage a wide range of research methods including the analysis of representation and discourse, ethnography and interviews, archival and data analysis.

Students from varied disciplines are encouraged to apply, including history, history of science, visual and media studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology, religion, law, philosophy, and anthropology.  Such interdisciplinary exposure will produce stimulating exchanges, and enable students to explain their proposed work to a general academic audience. Through conferences and group discussions, students will develop in both workshops their individual research projects, and will also participate in “field-building activities,” focusing on such topics as “making” animals (from breeding to biotech), animal-human boundaries, representing and displaying, conservation and extinction, and animals as symbols.