Workshop “War/Memory”

This is the first workshop in a series of three forming part of the research project Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene. It revolves around the themes of war and memory and will take place on 3 – 5 April, 2019 at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. This workshop seeks to explore the critical potential of this motif as well as its limitations and pitfalls when it comes to thinking about the destruction of the natural world. How can the zoo in wartime serve as a focal point that brings together discourses on (neo-)colonialism, imperialism, racism, and speciesism? And to what extent can this motif serve to obscure or distract from complexities and inequalities by potentially reinstating a monolithic human-animal binary, which these discourses are working to undermine?

The workshop will not take the form of panels and presentations, but rather of brief position papers by select participants followed by plenary discussion. A workshop reader will be distributed to all participants in advance. For a more detailed description of the program, click here.