Apr 1, 2025
Reading Group: Animal Fibers as Sources of Inquiry
- 16:00 to 17:30
- Reading Group
- Dept. III
We warmly invite you to join our next "Fibers of Existence" Reading Group session (Rm. 141 and online).
We’ll be exploring strategies for addressing how animal materials are studied and debated in research, particularly in relation to new materialism.
Our readings for this session are:
- Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. "Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism. "Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–685.
- Subramaniam, Banu. Introduction to Botany of Empire: Colonial Science and the Making of the Modern World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024.
Readings available here:
https://wg-cloud.gnz.mpg.de/s/gSpTxA34xwWw4Ry
Contact and Registration
The reading group is open to all. Please request the link per mail if you want to participate via Zoom: ideoliveiradornelas@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
About This Series
This reading group fosters multidisciplinary discussion aimed at resetting the boundaries of what counts as and can be known about animal materials as sources of historically sensitive inquiry. Building upon our ongoing conversations on how the identification and analyses of animal materials exist across different realms of expertise and disciplines we pose the following questions:
- How do animal fibers result from processes of rendering animal tissues?
- How do different scholars locate animal fibers in time and space despite their historical invisibility?
- How can historicizing studies of animal materials productively challenge assumptions of human exceptionalism? How does the study of animal materials relative to knowing fibers confront, confuse, or affirm distinctions between animals and plants?
- What has motivated people in different professions to develop substitutions that mimic animal materials or their behaviors?