Lecture by Lori Gruen

Living on this planet involves participating both wittingly and unwittingly in the death of sentient individuals. Through industrial agricultural practices and industry more broadly, through habitat destruction and climate change, the impact is catastrophic. And because these losses are so enormous, many of us are trying to pay more attention to grief, mourning, and sometimes even shame. The practices that lead to the suffering and death of other animals are practices that, in addition to causing pain and ending life, also render those lives meaningless. Developing counter-practices of mourning can help make those lives and, importantly, our relationships to those who are now gone, intelligible. But since there are few recognizable practices for grieving humans in contemporary society, developing meaningful mourning practices for other-than-human animals and the rest of nature is all the more challenging. 

 

Lori Gruen, William Griffin Professor of Philosophy Emerita at Wesleyan University, founded Wesleyan Animal Studies. She is also a faculty founder of the Center for Prison Education. She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015); Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011, second edition 2021), and Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), Animal Crisis, co-authored with Alice Crary from Polity Press (2022) and Carceral Logics, edited with Justin Marceau (Cambridge, 2022).

Gruen has been involved in animal issues as a writer, teacher, and activist for over 40 years. Her relationships with scholars thinking about animals, activists working to protect animals, and, perhaps most importantly, with many different animals, uniquely inform her perspective on how we need to rethink our engagement with other animals. She has published extensively on topics in animal ethics and ecofeminism and has become known as a bit of an archivist for chimpanzees in the US given her work documenting the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US (http://first100chimps.wesleyan.edu) and the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000 (http://last1000chimps.com).

Sponsored by the Smith College Conway Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center and Philosophy Department.