ONLINE: This four-session program examines the vexed interchange between humans and animals in commodity culture. We encounter animals daily, although likely we pay little attention to, or don’t recognize, these encounters for what they really are. We eat animals, we wear them. Our beauty, health and home products are tested on them. Animals perform for us and satisfy our need for intimacy, entertainment, and novelty. Human action and indifference removes animals from their natural lives, and displays them for a variety of human pleasures. Western culture - and its mix of theologies generally - positions animals as subservient to humans. Laws subjugate their bodies in the same discursive frame that prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to sub-title Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “The Man Who was a Thing.” Course sessions will include: Anthropocene: The Sense of an Ending; Dominion: What History Teaches; Commodity: Some Animals we eat, some we hate, some we wear; The Moral Circle: Sentience and animal rights. | Lecture + Q&A.
Max enrollment: 40.
