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HISTORY, HUMANITIES AND SCIENCES

Institution: California College of the Arts, 5212 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94618
Course Title: Animal Subjects
Instructor: Prof. Kari Weil, Chair, Critical Studies Program, 510-594-3600, [email protected]
Summary: Why do we keep pets, go to zoos, send chimpanzees into space? What distinguishes the animal from the human, and what is it that links u intimately to them? How can we know animals and how might our understanding of the being of animals affect our attitude and responsibility toward them? These are some of the questions we will ask as we examine a wide range of stories, theories and images of animals in history, art, philosophy, literature and anthro-zoology. The course is taught under the category of "Methods of Knowledge," which are interdisciplinary, humanities seminars required of all CCA students in their third or fourth year. These courses are designed to teach critical thinking and to show students how knowledges are produced differently within the disciplines, as within different historical and cultural contexts. View Course Syllabus

Institution: California State University, Long Beach, CA 90840
Course Title: Literature of U.S. History: Human-Animal Relationships in Historical Perspectives
Instructor: Dr. Brett Mizelle, Department of History, 562-985-4431, [email protected]
Summary: This seminar on the literature of history is designed to engage with a wide-range of scholarship on the history of the relationships between human and non-human animals. Throughout the semester we will consider some key questions, including: - How have animals helped define the human and the human relationship with the natural world?
- What do changing ideas about animals, or changing relationships with animals, reveal about larger historical transformations?
- To what extent are animals historical agents? How might we represent animal agency?
-Why might it be worth understanding the contradictory ways in which we live and have lived with animals? View Course Syllabus

Institution: California State University, San Bernardino, CA 92407
Course Title: Interpretation and Values
Instructor: Susan Finsen, 909-880-5871, [email protected]
Summary: This upper division interdisciplinary general education course is designed to allow students to reflect on the values and assumptions implicit in their daily lives, culture, science, media and technology. Examines global environmental crises (global warming), intensive agriculture, and the values that have put us in these crises. Also examines the plight of animals and explores the moral status question.

Institution: Columbia University in the City of New York, Mail Code 2527, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
Course Title: Animals from Aristotle to Agamben
Instructor: Samuel Moyn, Associate Professor of History, [email protected]
Summary: This class is a reading survey about how the Western philosophical and theological tradition has conceptualized the difference between humans and (other) animals. Are humans animals? (What are animals, first of all?) If humans are animals, how to conceptualize their differences? Either way, what are the consequences for how to understand oneself and treat animals? What is the nature of human dignity, and does it depend on some plausible distinction of humans from animals? The course culminates in six prominent contemporary philosophers who have turned the traditions they have inherited towards the problem of animals. (Note: this is not a class about animal rights except indirectly, insofar as the question of whether rights might or might not accrue to animals will depend on a prior study of the status of the human-animal border.) View Samuel Moyn's syllabus at http://www.columbia.edu/~sam2008/Animals.html

Institution: Delaware Valley College, Doylestown, PA 18901-2697
Course Title: People and Animals
Instructor: Richard McCarty, 252-328-1018, [email protected]
Summary: The primary goal of the course is to learn more about ethics or morality from considering the significance of animals in moral deliberation. So in thinking about whether animals have rights, for example, we shall also need to ask wider questions such as, what are rights and how do they fit into the system of morality? Questions such as these lead us to investigate theoretical approaches to the study of morality in general.

Institution: DePaul University, Chicago, IL 60604
Course Title: Externship: Animals in Contemporary Life
Instructor: Betta LoSardo, School for New Learning, 708-633-9091 [email protected]
Summary: This faculty-designed independent study course is designed to address the externship requirement of the School for New Learning. Students will consider their learning styles by revisiting David Kolb's Learning Styles Inventory first introduced in the initial stages of the SNL program. Learners will develop ways of expanding their learning repertoires, and of examining their own ideas as well as those of experts. Specifically, students will pursue information on the historical connections between animals and humans, and on philosophies and issues concerning breeding and use of domestic animals. Students will also be exposed to current issues in animal welfare, including a volunteer experience in an animal shelter. In this course, faculty will provide a framework for assessing the roles and condition of animals—particularly domestic animals—in our culture. Readings will include Peter Singer's noted work on animal experimentation, Animal Liberation. Students will track their own interests through further readings and commentary on their experiences.

Institution: Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Course Title: Studies in Humanities
Instructor: Carol Gigliotti, Ph.D., 604-844-3800 [email protected]
Summary: This course offers the opportunity to explore specific issues and texts in the humanities. Students will gain a better understanding of contemporary thought and methods in philosophy, history or literature, especially as they relate to critical issues in art and design. Mounting concerns about a variety of environmental issues, from pollution to global warming to the extinction of species, have begun to inform the practices in art, design and media. Those concerns imply forms of action being taken about those issues. But what ethical assumptions underlie various actions. Is it a concern for human well-being? For animals? For all life? Or, even more broadly, for ecosystems? In other words, which things count ethically? View Course Syllabus

Institution: M. I. T., Cambridge, MA 02139
Course Title: People and Other Animals
Instructor: Prof. Harriet Ritvo, Dept. of History, 617-253-6960, [email protected]
Summary: A historical survey of the ways that people have interacted with their closest animal relatives, for example: hunting, domestication of livestock, worship of animal gods, exploitation of animal labor, scientific study of animals, display of exotic and performing animals, and pet keeping. Themes include changing ideas about animal agency and intelligence, our moral obligations to animals, and the limits imposed on the use of animals. View Course Syllabus

Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Course Title: History of Animal Use in Science (History 107E/Environmental Studies 107E)
Instructor: Anita Guerrini, Department of History and Program in Environmental Studies, 805-893-7371, [email protected]
Summary: Using a variety of sources, this course will explore the ways humans have thought about and used animals in science and medicine from the 17th century to the present. How has science constructed the boundaries between humans and animals, and what have the consequences been for each?

Institution: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131
Course Title: Animal Activism
Instructor: Tami Harbolt, American Studies Department, 310 Ortega Hall, 505-277-3929, [email protected]
Summary: This evening course introduces students to the history and philosophy of animal rights and welfare. The 19th and 20th century humane movements coincided with other historical social rights movements, such as temperance, abolition, suffrage, and civil rights. Studying the rights of animals allows for a reading of Western culture that considers gender, class, ethnicity, the role of scientific authority, and an exploration of the species boundary. Explores both pro and con arguments pertaining to meat eating, scientific research, pet keeping, hunting, vermin control, and wildlife preservation.

Institution: Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA 98225-9118
Course Title: Ecofeminism (Fairhaven 310d)
Instructor: Greta Gaard, Humanities Department, Fairhaven College, 360-650-3680, [email protected]
Summary: Examines the interconnections between social justice and environmental health, connections that provide the foundation of ecofeminism. Explores the relationship among various forms of human oppression (racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism), animal oppression (speciesism), and the destruction of the natural world. Topics addressed include bioregionalism, wilderness, spirituality, science, economics, deep ecology, electoral politics, violence against women, vegetarianism, overconsumption, pesticide use, and toxic waste.

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