Short Abstract

Animal farming is in crisis. While alternatives are often imagined outside intensive systems, the economic and productive pressures of industrial agriculture create a sense that “there is no alternative”. This panel explores how alternatives are imagined, enacted, and suspended within the sector.

Description

Industrial animal agriculture is facing numerous crises – zoonotic disease, antimicrobial resistance, climate change, labour precarity, and animal suffering(1-3). While “alternative” human-animal relations are imagined outside industrial systems, e.g. biodynamic farming, animal sanctuaries (4) or peasant ecologies (5), such imaginaries of multispecies co-existence hit up against an industry where economic valuation and tight margins often produce a sense that “there is no alternative”.

We invite contributions that interrogate how change emerges as “otherwise” and when it operates as adaptive continuity, e.g., legislation, audit, and valuation devices that stabilise business-as-usual. How are alternatives performed – through knowledge practices, experimentation, narratives, and infrastructural redesign – and what are the social and political stakes of presenting something as different? (6) What temporalities and futuring techniques (technologies, roadmaps, milestones) enact a notion that things are changing, and how do these unfold in care practices, risk management and audit? In turn, how does the absence of an alternative come about?

Centring human-animal relations, we welcome ethnographies, historical analyses, multimodal engagements, and collaborative approaches focusing on specific problems (animal wellbeing, emissions, disease, labour conditions, farm digitalisation) or on industry actors charged with improvement, including veterinarians, scientists, regulators, farmers, and animals.

1Hinchliffe, S. 2022. Postcolonial Global Health, Post-Colony Microbes and Antimicrobial Resistance. Theory, Culture & Society, 39(3), 145-168.

2Porcher, J. 2011. The Relationship Between Workers and Animals in the Pork Industry: A Shared Suffering. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 24(1), 3-17.

3Blanchette, A. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Duke University Press.

4Abrell, E. 2021. Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care. Minnesota University Press.

5Martín, R. I., & Mol, A. 2022. Joaquín les gusta: On Gut-Level Love for a Lamb of the House. Ethnos, 89(4), 723-740.

6MacKay, C. 2023. Grass-Fed Beef, Alterity, and Care: Complicating Food Binaries, Relations, and Practices. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 36(2), 1–17.

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