The 6th and final Workshop in this series, entitled 'The Animal Within' will take place on Tuesday 16th March at Bristol University's Veterinary School. In this final workshop, we take a wide ranging look at the ‘human animal’, drawing upon the varied inputs of psychology, media studies, social sciences as well as zoology and biology, to explore how far various animalisms in the understanding of human behaviour might ultimately go.

The speakers a the workshop will be:

Lynda Burke:  New directions in human-animal studies

Kay Peggs:  Ethical correspondences

Joanna Latimer: Posthumanities

The 5th Workshop in the series, entitled 'Knowledge and Animal Cultures' took place at the University of Reading on Tuesday 12th January.

 The aim of the workshop was to explore how our growing understanding of animal societies and social behaviours– drawing partly from primatology – invites a less dualistic and exclusive sense of what constitutes ‘society’, ‘culture’ and strictly ‘human’ behaviour, and, in doing so suggests a possibly less autonomous sense of mind, subjectivity and engagement. Focusing both on the methodological and the ontological issues associated with ‘objective’ accounts of the animal, the workshop explored the human, and non-human social context in which both animals and humans are implicated and enrolled.

The Speakers at the Workshop were:

Francoise Wemelsfeder: How animals communicate quality of life: qualitative assessment of animal behaviour

Stephen Lea: What do we now know about what animals know, and what does it matter?

Rebekah Fox:  Everyday negotiations of the animal-human divide in pet-keeping

Kate Hill:  The birth of ethnoprimatology

Richie Nimmo:  Primate Visionaries: Constituting Hybrid Knowledges