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Teaching empathy and emotions : J. M. Coetzee's "The lives of animals" and human-animal studies
(2022)
In "Teaching Empathy and Emotions: J. M. Coetzee's 'The Lives of Animals' and Human-Animal Studies," Alexandra Böhm focuses on one of the most influential novels in the field of HAS. In her article, she delineates the two main difficulties in teaching Coetzee's text: firstly, the text's protagonist, fierce and fearless Australian author Elizabeth Costello, is often less-than-lovable and offers few grounds for identification; secondly, the text's multilayered structure further problematizes the authorial voice. However, by focusing on Costello's reassessment of emotion and empathy, Böhm convincingly demonstrates that Coetzee's text offers possibilities for understanding the key concepts of HAS, such as animal agency, alterity, and the necessity of assuming a non-anthropocentric perspective. In the narrative, Costello employs empathy in her approach to animals, but is this also true of the metadiegetic level of Coetzee's text? Does the text itself suggest how to teach empathy? Alexandra Böhm demonstrates that it is possible to elicit affective responses to these questions through emotion journals and role-playing.
In her contribution, "Of Birds and Men: Lessons from Mark Cocker's 'Crow Country,'" Michaela Keck discusses strategies for teaching Mark Cocker's encounters with the often-ignored members of the corvid family in "Crow Country" (2007). Part natural history, part pastoral, and part personal memoir, "Crow Country" raises and explores questions central to HAS regarding both dichotomies such as self / other, human / animal, and subject / object, as well as the potential and limitations of anthropocentrism and the narratives humans construct about other animals. As Cocker's twenty-first-century account of the rooks in East Anglia demonstrates, these corvids are neither domesticated nor companion animals. Since students will be familiar with crows and might even consider them a nuisance at times, Cocker's text offers new perspectives for thinking about so-called "trash animals." However, crows are also famous for their cognitive skills and cooperative capacities, and are therefore particularly suitable agents for challenging human-animal distinctions and simple notions of species boundaries. Keck's paper engages with "Crow Country" as an entry point to teaching core questions of HAS, exploring the ways in which Cocker's narrative draws students' attention to the de-/constructions of the birds' natural and cultural history and, conversely, of human animality and/or difference. Focusing on rooks as social constructs and agents, as well as rooks anthropomorphized and reconfigured, Michaela Keck illuminates the role of human-bird relationships in current Anthropocene contexts.
Liza B. Bauer looks at science fiction or speculative fiction writing - the literary genre par excellence for exploring alternative models of human-nonhuman coexistence. In her article "Reading to Stretch the Imagination: Exploring Representations of 'Livestock' in Literary Thought Experiments," she dissects processes of reciprocal negotiation between human and nonhuman beings in texts such as Sue Burke's "Semiosis" and Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and "The Year of the Flood." Following Brian McHale's and Donna Haraway's credo that highly unlikely worlds encourage readers to critically reflect on current realities, Bauer addresses the following questions: What if chickens, cows, or pigs had the chance to exist for their own ends? What would happen if they could communicate in human language? Or if they were of superior intelligence? Would they subdue humankind, domesticate their co-inhabitants, or coexist harmoniously? By enacting these scenarios in literary storyworlds, SF proves to be particularly fertile ground, yielding insights into the current and future challenges of coexistence. As Bauer convincingly outlines, immersing ourselves in (science) fictional worlds to practice multispecies living does not seem too far removed from reality. The redistribution of animal agency shows that the passivity to which most livestock animals are condemned is not irrevocable. The well-being of both human and nonhuman animals will depend on whether it is possible to theoretically and practically broaden students' understanding of these entanglements. Since alternatives to animal commodification are thinkable in experimental SF storyworlds, they could constitute, Bauer argues, a significant step toward abolishing animal exploitation.
Roman Bartosch assesses the pedagogical potential of literature and the role of literary studies in an age of climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental destruction and degradation, and animal death and suffering. As he points out, these developments and students' responses to these various crises have received little or no attention in most educational contexts. Furthermore, many of today's curricular goals are essentially useless and meaningless for students facing an uncertain future. Bartosch asks us to reconsider what education could and should be in the Anthropocene, to acknowledge students' needs, and to reflect on why and how we teach literature and literary HAS in particular. As he also shows with his reading of Max Porter's novel "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers" (2015), engaging with literary and cultural animals can be a means to "[cultivate] an interest in acts of relating animality and textuality in ways that open up ambiguity and, thus, imaginative spaces for potential conviviality and flourishing." In contrast to the current emphasis on competencies, solutions, and teleological thinking, this kind of learning, Bartosch suggests, "is geared toward bearing witness, ruminating on its meanings, and thus repositioning oneself within a larger web of ecological and semiotic diversities under threat." Teaching literary HAS and emphasizing "[c]apabilities, resilience, and multispecies flourishing," then, could be important means of preparing students for the uncertain and perilous times ahead.
In "'Preventing Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals': Historical Animal Welfare and Animal Rights Education," Andreas Hübner outlines future historical animal welfare and animal rights education, sketching concepts and themes such as animal agency and historicity as well as the relational, spatial, and material practices employed between humans and animals. Hübner then historicizes present-day attitudes toward anthropocentricism and discusses educational and learning processes that (can) help to overcome human-animal dichotomies in the history classroom. Hübner presents subject-specific recommendations for critically integrating topics into future curricula and shows that it is possible to teach in a way that acknowledges the role of nonhuman actors. He thereby challenges conventional human-centered narratives of historical learning.
Current objectives of human-animal studies : why the story of Harriet the tortoise should be retold
(2022)
In her article, "Current Objectives of Human-Animal Studies: Why the Story of Harriet the Tortoise Should Be Retold," Mieke Roscher responds to Haraway's call to action in "When Species Meet" in order to propose a political history of animals. To develop this new historiographical approach, she turns to concepts of agency and human-animal interaction as the most widely discussed paths to making visible the involvement of animals in "our" shared history. Built on the story of Harriet, a Galápagos tortoise and a decisive historical figure living in the Galápagos Islands during Darwin's visit in 1835, who died as recently as 2006, Roscher shows how praxiography, material culture, and spatial approaches could be connected to tell different stories to the ones currently being told by traditional historiography. Tortoises and turtles in particular have already influenced historical thinking, not least because they have come to symbolize the extinction discourse as well as debates on climatic change and the Anthropocene. Hence, Roscher introduces a political history of animals that pays attention to agency and relations (and agency as a relation), practices and materialities, spaces and places, and offers a way to retell Harriet's life story - and the life stories of many other animals - in the future.
In light of the dramatic growth and rapid institutionalization of human-animal studies in recent years, it is somewhat surprising that only a small number of publications have proposed practical and theoretical approaches to teaching in this inter- and transdisciplinary field. Featuring eleven original pedagogical interventions from the social sciences and the humanities as well as an epilogue from ecofeminist critic Greta Gaard, the present volume addresses this gap and responds to the demand by both educators and students for pedagogies appropriate for dealing with environmental crises. The theoretical and practical contributions collected here describe new ways of teaching human-animal studies in different educational settings and institutional contexts, suggesting how learners - equipped with key concepts such as agency or relationality - can develop empathy and ethical regard for the more-than-human world and especially nonhuman animals. As the contributors to this volume show, these cognitive and affective goals can be achieved in many curricula in secondary and tertiary education. By providing learners with the tools to challenge human exceptionalism in its various guises and related patterns of domination and exploitation in and outside the classroom, these interventions also contribute to a much-needed transformation not only of today's educational systems but of society as a whole. This volume is an invitation to beginners and experienced instructors alike, an invitation to (re)consider how we teach human-animal studies and how we could and should prepare learners for an uncertain future in, ideally, a more egalitarian and just multispecies world.
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
This article draws on the nearly 1800 letters which survive from the Benedictine convent of Lüne, near Lüneburg in northern Germany, and were written between c. 1460 and 1555. It explores the textual and visual strategies which nuns in the later Middle Ages used to negotiate their enclosed status. It suggests that the language and imagery of openness were a means for the nuns to remind those outside the convent wall of their presence and purpose in life.
The monastic enclosure
(2022)
The moral and physical enclosure of monks and nuns is central to the founding documents of Western monasticism. But even there it encountered the need for monasteries to interact with their societies, through recruits, hospitality, and the monastic economy. The increasing intensity of this tension is traced through key reforming texts, until later English visitations open up religious houses to closer scrutiny, ironically aided by inmates' quandary over whether to conceal or reveal their secrets.