The Animal Challenge to Sociology

1. The Animal Challenge to Sociology

2. What’s the problem? • Human treatment of other animals (speciesism) • Exploitation and oppression: • Agri-business and factory farming • Animals and science • Humans, other animals and the environment: • Dairy farming and deforestation • Food security and food chains (risk and insecurity) • Human health

3. Vampires, Werewolves and Superman • Other animals as ‘Other’ • Identity and the nonhuman • Social categories, social boundaries and social order • Durkheim, sociology and ‘the social’

4. Sociological responses 1: social sciences can adapt • Phenomenology: • Bodily engagement as ontologically prior • Sensuous experience as source of knowledge • Shared by human and nonhuman animals • Symbolic Interaction: • Meaning and semiotics • Mead and ‘human exceptionalism’ • Jerolmack and interactional communication • Irvine and ‘animal selves’

5. Sociological responses 2: social sciences are part of the problem (Latour) The modernist constitution Humans/ Culture Nature/ Nonhumans Ontological divide

6. The end of the social • Descartes: a world of insensible objects and rational subjects • Binary thinking an invention of modernity: • Reason – prejudice • Culture – nature • Human – things • Structure – agency • Subject - object • Welcome to the world of the monad: the stuff out of which the world is made • The social not co-extensive with humans and modern societies.

7. Enactment and performativity • Objects are enacted in practices: an object is not a substance, it is a performance. • Key role of translation: interface connecting objects in network • Networks as generative mechanisms: • …anything can become more or less real depending on the continuous chains of translation. It’s essential to continue to generate interest, to seduce, to translate interests. You can’t ever stop becoming more real. (Latour 1996:85)

8. Chains of translation are means of linking one thing with another: • historically contingent • more or less stable, more or less enduring. • no layer of the world is a transparent intermediary • every object, animate and inanimate, has capacity to mediate

9. Actors, actants and agency • Material agency: • Actor: anything that modifies a state of affairs • Objects have agency as part of a network (hence actants) • Actants only take precise shape (become more or less real) through connections and networks • Agency of humans incomprehensible apart from agency of nonhumans • Agency not a property of entities but emergent property of networks between heterogeneous actants • Action not dependent on intentionality

10. Theseus and the escape from Crete

11. Theseus gets real

12. Theseus’ ship realised

13. Can the challenges be met? • Yes: • Sociological analysis extended to animals: • Environment • Human- animal interaction • Exploitation, oppression, speciesism • Relations between human and nonhuman animals: culture, structure and agency • No: • Sociology is part of the problem: • Based on binary thinking • Ignores the nonhuman • Agency, performativity and networks