It’s been ten years since I became actively involved in the field of academic enquiry known as human-animal studies. Its antianthropo-centric, revisionist, and multidisciplinary approaches have proved largely productive in rethinking human-animal relationships and in challenging the representational tropes that have relentlessly objectified animals in art, as well as other disciplines. Although very active in publishing and well integrated amongst research peers, from an early day, I was a dissident voice. While many focused on farm animals or pets, I began wondering about insects and amphibians. The more others examined charismatic megafauna, the more I became interested in plants. The recent speculative turn in philosophy including the rise of new materialism, object oriented ontology, and critical plant studies have proved my doubts to be well founded: the zoocentrism that characterizes human-animal studies requires serious problematization. This talk looks at the productivities involved in moving beyond human-animal studies in art.  more>>

In a world increasingly produced by Timothy Morton's theory of hyperobjects—a term borrowed from computer science to conceive of objects massively distributed in time and space as non-localized yet cohesive entities — what is the role of the localized organism? Taking up extremophiles, strange organisms that thrive in very specific extreme environ-mental conditions, from the industrial sludge at the bottom of the Calumet River to the arid deserts of the Atacama, this talk will explore the economic, environmental and social positions modeled and enacted by these organisms in a world increasingly characterized by volatile cycles of drought and flood, "extreme" fuel extraction, and fluid hyper-connectivity.  more>>