Call for papers:
XXI ESRS congress: A common European countryside? Change and continuity, diversity and cohesion in the enlarged Europe
22-27 August, 2005 Keszthely Hungary
Working Group 24:
Conceptualising animal welfare: towards an understanding of how we enact, govern and represent our multiple relationships with non-human animals.
Animal welfare has become an important issue for consumers, producers and policy makers (Bennett, 1995) and recent years have seen a large expansion in the amount of welfare legislation within the EU (Wilkins, 1999; Bennett, and Blaney, 2003). Academics have also become increasingly interested in animal welfare both as a topic in its own right and as a means of gaining insights into wider nature-culture relations, however their task has not been straightforward as animal welfare is a complex and multifarious phenomenon that has little respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries and that cuts across and links together actors from many different social fields. Moreover, the concept of animal welfare varies between different actors involved in different practical encounters with animals, for example animal scientists and ethologists may view welfare in terms of a set of reliable, valid and repeatable monitoring standards, whereas farmers and producers might frame animal welfare in more practical, experiential terms and consumers might be reduced to encountering animal welfare issues as choices between different food products and their accompanying logos and yet despite these differences a common thread endures.
This workshop will attempt to unravel some of the complexities of animal welfare as it is experienced, governed and imagined by different actors.
Papers are invited on the following themes:
(a) Conceptualising animal welfare
Competing discourses and definitions of what constitutes animal welfare/animal rights.
Alternative ways of theorising the relationships between humans and non-human animals.
How human to non-human animal relationships are performed (e.g. the (ethical) embodied practices involved with keeping farm animals, companion animals or working animals).
(b) Animal welfare in the food chain
The retail and marketing of welfare-friendly products
The consumption of welfare-friendly products (especially comparisons between consumers from different European countries)
The non-consumption of meat and animal products (exploring the practical ethics of vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians etc.)
Animal welfare from the point of view of stockholders and food producers.
Vertical linkages from 'farm to fork' (e.g. how consumer or retailer strategies can impact on producers and animals)
(c) Governing animal welfare
Animal welfare regulation at a European and state level
Non-state 'governance' of animal welfare (e.g. producer, retailer or consumer led initiatives to regulate welfare)
For further information please go to: http://www.esrs.hu/keszthely2005
Please send, by 15 April 2005, your abstract for a paper (not longer than 300 words) to the working group convenors:
Mara Miele: [log in to unmask]
Adrian Evans: [log in to unmask]
Cardiff University, School of City and Regional Planning
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