Making Sanctuary: Transforming Multispecies Relations in the Contemporary United States

Making Sanctuary: Transforming Multispecies Relations in the Contemporary United States
Elan Abrell, J.D., Ph.D., Harvard Law School
April 25, 2018, 1:00-2:30 PM
Schmitt Hall, Rm. 104
Sponsored by the MSU Department of Anthropology

In the last few decades, animal sanctuaries have proliferated around the world as advocates have sought to save animals from various contexts in which they are exploited, harmed, or killed by human action.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a range of animal sanctuaries across the United States, Dr. Abrell will examine how activists are conceiving and operationalizing new models for ethical relationships with animals as alternatives to dominant property-based relations.

Situating this study of the US animal sanctuary movement in the broader history of anthropological approaches to human-animal relations, Dr. Abrell argues that activists and animals are co-creating new kinds of human-animal ecologies in keeping with broader efforts to live more harmoniously with other species under the material and social conditions of the Anthropocene.

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