Here are the details for our project conference, coming up from September 26-28th 2024 in Vienna. This 3-day conference has been organised as part of our research project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism. We are delighted to host Prof. Alice Crary as keynote speaker.
Attendance is free, in person and online. Live closed captioning will be available for the whole event. (See the Accessibility Information below for full accessibility info and further details). The conference language is English.
To register for online attendence, contact me (Ruadhán) at ruadhan (dot) flynn (at) vetmeduni.ac.at
Poster by Bryony Archer.
At the Limits of Imagination: Otherness in Humans & Nonhuman Animals
Vienna, 26-28 September 2024
University of Vienna, Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, Lecture Hall 3D (3rd floor)
Organized by Carlo Salzani, Martin Huth and Ruadhán J. Flynn, University of Innsbruck
Keynote speaker: Alice Crary (The New School for Social Research)
Outline, Program, and Accessibility Information
Outline
This three-day conference will take place at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna as part of the project “The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism” (P 35137-G; funded by the FWF, Austria). It will focus on the possibilities and limits of imagination and empathy with regards to humans and non-human animals, and on the tensions inherent in comparing or comparatively analyzing both groups.
Imagined similarities and dissimilarities play a pivotal role in ethical theories with regards to treatment of both human and non-human groups. It has been argued, for example, that racialized and disabled people, and nonhuman animals, have been discriminated against according to the same logic that grounds inclusion and exclusion upon the possession of certain distinctively human ‘abilities’: rationality, language, autonomy, agency, etc. (e.g., Crary 2016; Taylor 2018; Crary and Gruen 2022). The presumed absence of these ‘abilities’ is equated with a negative and inferior form of embodiment, against which the human norm has in turn been defined. For instance, cognitively disabled humans, racialized and colonized groups, women, and also non-human animals have all, to differing degrees, been understood as inferior forms of life on the assumption that they deviate negatively from this human norm: on the assumption that they can be understood in terms of privation, deficient in some distinctively ‘human’ respect.
A convergence of critical studies of disability, animality and race appears fruitful to many. Such perspectives call into question the traditional, Western model of subjectivity predicated upon the possession of certain (primarily cognitive) abilities and challenge the limits of our ability to imagine other subject positions. However, conflating their ethical status also risks reinforcing the dehumanization of those human groups by instrumentalizing their oppression in the service of animals (Boisseron 2019; Crary 2016; Kittay 2019).
Social exclusions and divisions may seem to rest, in part, on a failure to accurately imagine the perspectives of those constructed as radically other. Overcoming such exclusions seems to require an extension of practices of empathy and imagination in order to bridge differences in embodiment and social position. However, while it seems clear that we can achieve a sophisticated and finely detailed bodily communication with people with ‘non-normate’ embodiment (Garland-Thomson 2017) and also animals (Huth 2020), many scholars remain skeptical about our ability to imagine experiences from a radically different perspective. It is also clear that contingent but deeply ingrained biases inhibit our recognition of, or empathy for, those we perceive as radically other.
The conference is free, all are welcome, and no registration is required for in-person attendance. To register for online attendance, email ruadhan.flynn@vetmeduni.ac.at
Program
| Day 1 (Sept. 26) | |
| 13:30 | Martin Huth, Carlo Salzani & Ruadhán J. Flynn (Innsbruck): Introductory Remarks |
| 14:00 | Session 1 Martin Huth (Innsbruck): You are Not Like Me: A Political Phenomenology of Otherness between Imagination and Abjection Ruadhán J. Flynn (Innsbruck): Communication Unlimited: Stumbling, Stuttering and Working with Impairment |
| 15:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00 | Session 2 Daniel Simons (Oxford): Human Zoos, Animal Zoos: Fellow-lodgers and Fellow-companions Leonie Bossert & Davina Höll (Vienna/Mainz): The Limits of Imagination in the Light of Microbe, Nonhuman Animal, and Human Entanglements |
| 17:30 | Coffee Break |
| 18:00 | Keynote Address Alice Crary (New York): Animals and Wonder |
| 19:30 | Reception |
| Day 2 (Sept. 27) | |
| 9:00 | Session 3 Alexander Altonji (New York): “A Knowledge too Humble to Know it is Knowledge”: Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe, and the Limits of Imagination James Trybendis (New York): Alien Mourning: On the Limitations of Imagining Mourning and Grief of the Other |
| 10:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00 | Session 4 Gary Comstock (Raleigh): Imagining Other Species’ Pains Zdravko Radman (Zagreb/Split): “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Reconsidered |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 14:00 | Session 5 Julia Langkau (Geneva): Imaginative Resistance in Empathy with Political Opponents Dorna Behdadi (Gothenburg): Perspective-taking, Address, and Attentiveness to “Moral Audience” |
| 15:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00 | Session 6 Annette L. Bickford (Toronto): Interpreting Intentionality: Are Yacht-ramming Killer Whales “Orcanizing”? Ciska De Ruyver, Claire Diederich & Christel Moons (Namur/Ghent): Species Bias: Striving to Understand the Non-human Animals’ Perspective |
| 19:00 | Conference Dinner |
| Day 3 (Sept. 28) | |
| 9:00 | Session 7 Isabella Clarke (Northampton): Borderland Co-becoming Oscar de Nijs Bik (Antwerp): Poetry and Porousness in a More-than-human World |
| 10:30 | Coffee Break |
| 11:00 | Session 8 Andrew Benjamin (Melbourne): Living in Peace with Animals: Pythagoras’ Speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Simon Ryle (Split): The Ecstatic Alterity (That I Am): Passive Flesh in Dostoyevsky, Levinas and Piccinini |
| 12:30 | Lunch |
| 14:00 | Session 9 Radu Damian Nedescu & Deniz Efsunkar Cazu (Bucharest/Schiedam): To Have Done with the Reductive Typology of Neurodifference: Autistic Alterity Reimagined through Heterography-Homography Ombre Tarragnat (Paris): Perception, Figuration, Amplification, Disorientation: Tools for an Autistic Phenomenology of Animality |
| 15:30 | Coffee Break |
| 16:00 | Session 10 Laura Restrepo-Giraldo (Paris): Multispecies Radical Imagination: The Practice of Speculative Fabulation as a Political Approach to Non-human Animal’s Alterity Isabel Arciniegas Guaneme (New York): A Home for Perla – How Is Writing About a Dog? |
| 17:30 | Final Discussion |
Accessibility Information
If you have any questions or suggestions about access, please contact Ruadhán at ruadhan (dot) flynn (at) vetmeduni.ac.at
- Live closed captioning (in English) will be provided for the entire conference.
- The conference venue is wheelchair accessible (step-free access: Liebiggasse entrance; then turn left and follow the hallway to the end. Go through the door and take the elevator to the third floor.)
- If you would like a venue orientation on Wednesday 26th before the conference opening, please let us know. We are also happy to meet you outside the venue each day, if you would like guidance to the room.
- All conference sessions will be streamed via Zoom; attendees are welcome to join online (email ruadhan (dot) flynn (at) vetmeduni.ac.at ).
- There will be an optional reserved seating area for people wearing masks.
- Most public transport in Vienna is fully accessible. See this page for public transport information, and this page for more general information about access in Vienna.
