GCST2603 Animal/Human Cultures
Questions:
In the final week of this unit we will be exploring some hopeful possible avenues for animal/human relations. In this unit we will encounter many sites of suffering, violence, and exploitation in these relationships.
But we’ll also encounter sites in which dedicated people, and other animals, are working to better understand and care for each other, to craft flourishing futures.
I’d like you to write a two minute presentation draft that tells us about one such effort going on anywhere in the world. It can be a real project, or a speculative proposal. I’m not expecting you to come up with the project yourself, but rather to document other people’s (or animals’) clever ideas.
You might focus your video on a campaign to encourage people to go vegan?
Creation of a set of speculative and somewhat monstrous creatures who might guard endangered species in their natural habitats. Or, you might focus on one of the thousands of other projects that are seeking to intervene into and improve animal/human relations.
Rather than just telling us about this project in a journalistic way, I’d like you to engage with it creatively and critically.
This means drawing on the ideas and concepts we have discussed in this unit to tell us: why this is a good idea, what its limitations are, what assumptions or prejudices are built into it, perhaps how it might be improved through taking seriously the kinds of animal/human concerns that are the focus of this unit.
The main thing is the ideas you’re exploring, but I would also encourage you to think a bit about how the medium of film might allow you to communicate these ideas in different ways to your written work in this unit.
