ANIMALS AND US VIOLENCE, CAPITAL, JUSTICE

Course Objectives: The goals of the course are

• to expose students to sociological perspectives on the place of animals in human society and on the relationship between animals and humans, and
• to expose students to social science research which investigates the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective of violence, capital formation, and understandings of justice, and
• to expose students to qualitative sociological research methods.

Course Content: This course explores what animals can teach about politics, particularly in relation to violence, capital accumulation, and formation of the relations of justice. We will look through various affective entanglements of intimacy and dominance, care and violence,, detachment and control between humans and animals. We will examine entwined histories of modernity, capital accumulation, knowledge/power, urbanization, the making of law, class, property relations in the cities across the developed/the developing world, the West/non-west, the global north/south. The course is an introduction to the rapidly growing field of animal studies. It offers a focus on the main concepts of animal rights and liberation politics, forth by climate catastrophe: Animality, sentience, dominance, domestication, trans/ carcerality, Anthropocene, post/transhumanism, speciesism, biopolitics, necropolitics, anthrozoology, mass extinction, wildlife and zoonotic diseases.