Animals Across Borders: Rethinking More‑than‑Human Geographies

A multidisciplinary conference that explores how animals move across, unsettle, and redefine territorial, ecological, and conceptual borders
About this Event

Registration

8:30 - 9:00 AM

• Checking-in, Coffee & Breakfast

Keynote

9:00 - 09:45 AM

• Marcy Norton (University of Pennsylvania) "Do Animals Have Personhood? A Historical Approach to Other-Than-Human Subjectivity"

Panel 1

09:45 - 11:45 AM

Beyond Containment: Animals, Infection, and the Governance of Life

• Niu Teo (University of Chicago) “Animal Rites: Legislating pig pains in the US 1990s”
• Sooah Kwak (University of Pennsylvania) “The Pig Multiple: Biosecurity, Waste, and Leaky Boundaries in Korea’s Leprosy Settlements”
• Thomas White (Kings College London) “Borders, Livestock Disease, and Sovereign Anxieties in Contemporary Mongolia”
• Emma Crowe & Carlos Andrés Baquero-Díaz (New York University, MOTH) “Listening Across Borders: Animal Communication Technologies and the Reconfigurations of Legal Geographies”
• Chair: Mindi Schneider (Brown University)

Lunch

11:45 - 12:45 PM

Workshop

12:45 - 2:00 PM

• Paolina Lu (UC Davis) “Cricket Capitalism: Taste, Labor, and the Future of Food”
• Charlotte Marlene Hoes (University of Goettingen) “Crating a World: Boxes as Spatial Stratifications of Care in the Global Wildlife Trade”
• Chair: Brad Weiss (William & Mary)

Coffee Break

2:00 PM - 2:15 PM

Panel 2

2:15 - 3:45 PM

Colonial Legacies of Multispecies Movement: Accessing Land, Bordering Life, and Ordering Knowledge

• Jia Hui Lee (University of Bayreuth) “Species and Colonialism as Relational Systems: The Case of African Rodent Taxonomy”
• Ailish Lalor (Harvard University) “During the Flood: The Afobaka Dam, Maroon Transmigration, and Operation Gwamba in Suriname, 1964-1971”
• Columba González-Duarte (The New School) “Monarchs, Borders, and Mobility Justice”
• Chair : Marianna Szczygielska (Max Planck Institute)

Coffee Break

3:45 - 4:00 PM

Panel 3

4:00 - 5:30 PM

Transcending Borders: Indigenous Knowledge in Human-Animal Relations

• Marian Leech (University of Pennsylvania) “Earthshapers, Healing Skins, Commodity Currencies: Beaver-Human Relations in Early Modern Europe and North America”
• Carlos Roberto Galaviz (UNAM National Autonomous University of Mexico) “Man-Eaters and Messengers: Nocturnal Fauna Among Ancient Nahuas”
• Charlotte Dawson (University of Arizona) "Penned In: Bison, Indigenous People, and Multispecies Subjectivation on the Reservation"
• Chair: Marcy Norton (University of Pennsylvania)

Closing Discussion Q&A

5:30 - 5:45 PM