Agenda

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ANIMALS AND COLONIALISM
Virtual lecture series organized and moderated by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond (University of California, San Diego) and Federica Timeto (Ca’Foscari University, Venice), in collaboration with the Environmental Humanities Degree at Ca’ Foscari University. 

Fighting for Animals in an Anti-Black World
Claire Kim, University of California, Irvine

This talk asks animal advocates to reckon with the fact that their work unfolds in the context of structural anti-Blackness, in the U.S. and around the world. Do animal studies and the animal movement as currently constituted tend to reproduce the abjection of Blackness in pursuing the liberation of nonhuman animals? If so, what possibilities exist for building an animal movement which supports Black liberation as well?

Claire Jean Kim is Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at University of California, Irvine, where she teaches classes on comparative race studies and human-animal studies. She is the author of Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (Yale University Press 2000), Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age (Cambridge University Press 2015) and Asian Americans in an Anti-Black World (Cambridge University Press 2023). Currently, she is co-editing The Oxford Handbook on Multispecies Justice (2025). She has published in popular venues such as The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The American Scholar, and Ms. Magazine, and has appeared as a commentator on MSNBC, NPR, and PBS and in numerous podcasts and documentary films. Dr. Kim is also a poet whose work has been published in The Ilanot Review, The Missouri Review, and Ghost City Review, among other places.

May 23 6:00 p.m. CET
9:00 a.m. PT; 12:00 p.m. ET; 1 a.m. JST [May 24]; 2 a.m. AEST [May 24]
​​Registration 23/05