The last few decades have seen the emergence and rapid growth of a new field of multi- and inter-disciplinary inquiry, called variously “Human-Animal Studies” (HAS), “Animal Studies”, or “Anthrozoology”. Contributions to this field draw upon a wide range of disciplinary formations: sociology, philosophy and history; studies of literature, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture; biobehavioural biology; science, technology, and medicine studies. What unites HAS work from all these disciplines is a determination to find new ways of thinking about animals and about human-animal relationships.
The more politicized branch of Human-Animal Studies is called Critical Animal Studies (CAS). CAS is concerned with critiquing taken-for-granted notions of human exceptionalism (or anthropocentrism) and analysing speciesism in various cultural contexts. CAS is also intersectional by nature, focusing on how human-to-human forms of oppression and marginalization connect with human-to-animal forms of oppression and marginalization.
Many of the academics and students involved in this area at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha University of Canterbury use Critical Animal Studies theories and methods. CAS is also vital to many of the courses we offer. At the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies we believe that research and scholarship on animals and human-animal relationships brings with it a responsibility to challenge anthropocentrism and speciesism, and to foreground the interests and agency of animals.
Among the many lines of inquiry pursued by HAS/CAS researchers associated with NZCHAS are the following:
- exploring human-animal experiences, representations, beliefs and practices in Māori, Indigenous and other non-Western worldviews, philosophies and experiences; decolonizing concepts of animals, the environment, nature, and human-animal connections imposed by colonialism and racism
- exploring and critiquing how notions of animality are fundamental to a range of concepts that play an important ideological and intellectual role in modern Western thought: for example “nature”, “culture”, “society”, “civilisation”, “the human”, “the native”, “the exotic”, “the primitive”;
- examining the place, treatment and actions of animals in science, farming, industry, tourism and other human practices;
- analysing the representation of animals in literature, film, television, the visual arts, and other cultural forms;
- researching the history of humans' changing attitudes towards and treatment of animals;
- developing new paradigms in philosophy, the arts and the sciences for thinking about animals and their relationship to humans.
