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Q&A with Claire Parkinson and Lara Herring, Editors of Animal Activism On and Off Screen

2024-08-26T14:40:25+10:00

Professor Claire Parkinson is Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies, Associate Head of English and Creative Arts, and co-director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS) at Edge Hill University.

Dr Lara Herring is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK.

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Congratulations on the publication of your book, Animal Activism On and Off Screen! Tell us a bit about how this project came together?��

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C&L: Thank you. We’ve known each other for many years and had previously worked together on a couple of funded research projects. This book brought together different research areas that we had been exploring individually and together, in screen studies, vegan celebrity, and animal rights. There was one catalysing event that really sparked the idea for this project. We were both fascinated by the public and critical reception of Joaquin Phoenix’s speech at the Oscars in 2020, and his activism during the awards season that had preceded it. Phoenix won the Best Actor Award for his performance in the film Joker (2019) and used the awards ceremony as a platform to talk about animal rights. Over the last 10 years, there has also been a notable increase in the number of films and television programs that featured veganism. It was clear that there has been a real shift in how animal activism was being done and depicted. This was where the seeds of the idea for this book really began. The aim of the project was to bring together research and commentary on animal activism in film and television, with celebrity studies, an area in which there has been relatively little work done on animal rights and vegan activism. We also wanted to include voices from the activist and filmmaking community alongside those of academics and we were fortunate to be able to do exactly this.��

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Animal Activism On and Off Screen is a collection of contributions that examine the relationship between animal advocacy and the film and television industries. Contributors include scholars, activists and film industry professionals. How important is it to include a broad range of voices when exploring this topic?��

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C&L: Yes, from the outset we knew we wanted to have this range of voices in the book. It was always important to us that this book should represent not only scholarly views but that it should give space to those from the filmmaking and activist communities. This sounds as if we have categorised contributors as either scholar, activist or filmmaker and it couldn’t be further from the truth. We think it’s important to point out that many of those contributing to the book are hyphenates: filmmaker-activists; scholar-activists; activist-scholar-filmmakers. For those involved in critical animal studies, for example, their scholarship and activism are intrinsically bound together. The same is true for many of the contributors to this book and indeed, the identity of filmmaker and activist is one of the questions we explore with Liz Marshall, who is well-know to so many as the director of The Ghosts in Our Machine (2013) and Meat the Future (2020). We were incredibly fortunate to be put in touch with Liz through a mutual friend and we were delighted when she agreed to be interviewed for the book. Through Liz we were able to contact Lorena Elke Dobbie, an activist and documentary film researcher who contributed an incredible chapter to the volume that also grapples with these different facets of identity. We consider ourselves very fortunate to have worked with such an amazing and talented group of people who have all been committed to the idea of this book from the start.��

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The book is broken up into three parts that investigate: representations of activism on screen; activist texts and their reception; and celebrity vegans and animal advocates. Was this a conscious decision or an organic one?��

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C&L:��From the beginning, we knew we wanted to explore three facets of activism and the screen industries, and we wanted to make links between activism in the onscreen and offscreen spheres. At the start though, we had only the idea of the three key themes and there was no intention to split the final book up into different parts. As time went on and we began to identify and secure contributors it became clear that the book was naturally evolving in such a way that we found ourselves with chapters falling quite neatly into one section or another. We thought it would be a good idea to make the on and off-screen elements of the book clearer by using the three discrete parts and we think this works well, helping to navigate the reader through the key guiding themes.��

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Animal Activism On and Off Screen includes a number of case studies – from documentaries like Blackfish (2013) to feature films like Okja (2017). What potential do you see for activism in both fiction and non-fiction films to make meaningful change? Do you believe one genre is more effective than the other?��

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C&L:��When people think of animal activism films, they tend to think of non-fiction. So perhaps what comes to mind is undercover filmmaking which takes place in industries where animals are exploited, such as farms, slaughterhouses and laboratories, or documentaries such as Cowspiracy (2014) or Earthlings (2005) which have been able to reach larger audiences due to increased internet access and distribution platforms such as Netflix. As many of our contributors discuss, there is no doubt that non-fiction film and television has reached large audiences and, in many cases, played a part in making meaningful change. Debra Merskin and Carrie Freeman’s chapter on the ‘Blackfish effect’ is a great example of this and the authors look at what lessons can be learnt from the success of that film. We were also interested in looking at fiction genres and so there are chapters that focus on TV crime series and films such as Okja (2017) and Cloud Atlas (2012). As the book demonstrates, it’s not possible to identify one genre as being more effective than another; there is more than genre at stake. We have to take into account audience reach, marketing, promotion, timing, how the film is used, in addition to questions about narrative and aesthetic choices and what resonates with audiences. What the chapters in this book have done, is to distil all these components through case studies and analyses and offer suggestions for future activist communication strategies.��

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Do you believe celebrities have a responsibility to lend their voices and platforms to the causes they believe in?��

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C&L:There’s a long history of celebrity activism and we have certainly seen a rise in the number of celebrities who are aligning themselves with different causes and issues over the last twenty-five years. As the contributors to our book demonstrate, when it comes to the value of celebrity activism in the animal rights sphere there are many factors to take into account. Elizabeth Cherry’s research looks at the merit of celebrity association but also highlights some of the concerns about celebrity activism from the point of view of grassroots activists, particularly the impact of celebrity bad behaviour on the movement. Toby Miller argues that celebrity-fronted PETA campaigns are undermined by contradictory messaging. Eva Giraud draws on the concept of media ecologies to reveal the connected expressions of vegan politics associated with one celebrity activist, James Cromwell, and discusses how radical narratives may emerge from commercial media activity. What the chapters in the celebrity section of the book clearly demonstrates is the complexity of celebrity activism and the various ways in which it can both benefit and hinder the animal rights movement.��

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What key insights or messages do you hope readers will��take away from your book? For those who are interested to read more about animal and film history, what other publications might you suggest?��

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C&L:��We hope that readers will take away some insights that can inform tactics, approaches or strategies that can benefit animal advocacy, whether that’s in the form of academic work, creative production, or grassroots campaigns. If people are interested in reading more about animals and the media, we recommend they look at Critical Animal and Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy (2015) edited by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole and Carrie P. Freeman; Seeing Species: Re-presentations of Animals��
in Media & Popular Culture (2018) by Debra Merskin; Animals on Television: The Cultural��Making of the Non-Human (2017) by Brett Mills; and, Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (2020) by Claire Parkinson.��

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Animal Activism On and Off Screen is available now. Order your copy here.��

Q&A with Richard Twine, Author of The Climate Crisis and Other Animals

2024-04-03T16:40:44+11:00

Dr Richard Twine is Reader in Sociology and Co-Director of the Centre for Human-Animal Relations (CfHAS), Edge Hill University, UK.

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Congratulations on the release of your latest book, The Climate Crisis and Other Animals, which explores the gendered, racialised, classist and speciesist impacts of climate change. In your opinion, how important is an intersectional approach to addressing the climate crisis?

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Richard: Thank you. It’s unavoidable and for me it’s the only game in town. Any account that doesn’t understand the emergence of the climate crisis as the interplay between class relations, gender relations, racialised relations, geopolitics, and human-animal (and more-than-human) relations is misunderstanding the social histories of the climate crisis. As I argue in the book, the imaginary of ‘climate justice’ goes some way toward trying to acknowledge this, but it tends to uncritically position itself anthropocentrically, which lends a sort of tragedy to it. To not explicitly entertain a role for the animal-industrial complex in the conjoined climate and biodiversity crises within one of our main oppositional frames is both a perpetuation of anthropocentric thought and practice, and a missed opportunity. Alongside an orientation to the creative questioning of social norms, and situating one’s biography within a denser field of social and historical practice and its varied approaches to social change, an intersectional approach is one of the main ways in which a social science (and the arts and humanities) perspective on the climate crisis is a necessity. It also tells us that positionality matters and how that is already shaping the way that the climate crisis is being differently experienced. Ultimately it opens the door to exploring how the climate crisis is a complex emergence of multiple and overlapping relations of power.

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In the book, you note that emissions may continue rising in poorer regions of the world as a result of combating poverty. What responsibility do wealthier, high-emitting countries have to reduce their own emissions to offset this rise?

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Richard:��Well, I would like to see the practices which cause high emissions come down everywhere. However, there is something of a consensus amongst climate policy makers that those nations that have historically emitted the most (something like 62% of historical emissions come from Europe and the USA) have a responsibility to push transitions first. After all, such countries (my own included) have built their contemporary power via these emissions. Furthermore, in the case of animal source food (ASF) consumption countries in the ‘Global North’ tended to rapidly increase consumption in the second half of the twentieth century, creating unsustainable new norms which were counter to ecological public health and extended the failures of the factory farm. In the book I agree that rich countries should be doing far more now to incentivise both vegan transition and plant-centred diets. At the same time, I refuse both the dominant Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and meat industry discourse that posits ASFs as the answer to food insecurity in poorer countries and the idea that such countries should follow the path of, for example, diet meatification.

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Can you briefly explain the role that human exceptionalism plays in the animal-industrial complex?

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Richard:��Briefly? No. Human exceptionalism, the idea that only human beings are morally considerable is an extremist belief that very few hold to. Nevertheless, the majority remain committed either explicitly or implicitly to the view that animals farmed and killed for human consumption do not matter beyond rather disingenuous welfare frameworks. In the book I agree with Matthew Calarco that human exceptionalism is just one aspect of a broader ideology of anthropocentrism (which also includes the projection of animality onto many human beings). So the book really has a focus on how this broader set of ideas and practices shapes the animal-industrial complex. Furthermore, the book contains a significant development of my theorisation of the animal-industrial complex, employing practice theory as a theoretical framework. But to directly answer your question, human exceptionalism and a dominant inconsistent speciesist take on nonhuman animals act as conceptual justifications for a myriad set of oppressive practices across societal domains that aim to turn the lives and bodies of other species into projects for capital accumulation. At the same time, the habitual performance of these practices serves to stabilise and reiterate as normal and natural the instrumentalist orientation of the animal-industrial complex towards other animals.

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The book cautions readers against adopting false optimism as a way of avoiding nihilistic inertia. Could you expand on this a little?

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Richard:��On the one hand I am being serious but also having a little fun (with the title of my conclusion). I am aware that in writing this book I have made a contribution to the ‘genre’ of climate crisis books. Furthermore, one cannot help but note that a publication industry around the climate crisis is a small way in which capitalism is commodifying the crisis for its own short term benefit. I am not saying that people shouldn’t be writing books about the climate crisis! But what I can do is perhaps poke fun at the ‘genre’ a little, which tends to aim for the optimistic conclusion so as not to drag the reader down into fatalistic depression. In contrast I would say that if you are taking an honest and scientific look at the climate crisis things are genuinely in a very bad state and it would be deceitful to say otherwise. This is also because we are still very much living in an era of intransigence where governments and corporations are digging in to delay change.

However, if my reader is perceptive, they will also glimpse moments of hope in various parts of the book. But they might have to question some of their prejudices and privileges to find that hope. Hope, and indeed joy, is found in the ability of people to change and reinvent their lives (if you had told my 15-year-old self that my now 50-year-old self would have never driven a car, or would have been meat free for 32 years and vegan for 19 years and counting, he would have been surprised). And it’s in the range of pre-figurative practices that I discuss in chapter eight, which show people trying to live differently and more responsibly. Hope is also found in the shared experience of climate and other activism and in the diligent work of climate and other scientists. And finally, as I say in the conclusion, within potential alliances that are yet to be, but arguably should be, and need to be.

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For readers who wish to make everyday choices (e.g. food, transport, shopping) that are better for the planet, what might you recommend?

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Richard:��Talk with people who have already made positive changes. It’s not a lonely path, as many others, likely from similar social circumstances to you, have already changed. Do not assume that change equals sacrifice; rather it can mean both growth and pleasure. Try to reconnect and visualise the relationships between your choices and their impacts. Adopt anti-consumerism and discover alternative hedonism (mentioned in the book). But there’s a far bigger question here about pressing for real leadership from those with the ability to change the whole choice context. This is where real failures are taking place, arguably more than in the individual choices that people are failing to make.

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What other resources would you suggest for people who want to learn more about the climate crisis and its impact on other animals?

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Richard:��I want to give a shout-out to the unsung heroes that are the ecologists and conservation biologists whose work I cover in chapter three. This may be a surprising thing for a sociologist to say, but please read some ecology and conservation biology. These people have been documenting the impacts of climate change on biomes and species for many years now and they deserve to be heard. Also, at the end of my introduction I recommend some recent philosophical work on the subject.

Finally, step outside the box; appreciate that to understand this topic you need to understand how it intersects with other relations of power. A consistent example is gender. There is plenty to read about how dominant social constructions of masculinity normalise dispassion toward others and other animals (e.g., check out Kadri Aavik’s new book). Instead of allowing that construct to continue to shape our self-understandings of what it means to be human, we need to decentre and remake the human in such a way that attends to, with care, our multispecies interdependencies. Ultimately anthropocentrism is maladaptive for human beings, and it turns out that the struggle for our kin is the struggle for ourselves.��

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The Climate Crisis and Other Animals is available now. Order your copy��.