The research group plans four events in the academic year 2025-26:

• Introductory Session: Critical Animal Studies Futures (De Sering, February 10, 15-17h)
• Plenary Master Class: Eva Meijer (UvA, March 4, 14-17h
• Field Visit with Anna Kooi: Swampland Futures: Undraining the Delta (Het Voedselmoeras, April 16, All day, start time TBC).
• Walking tour with Rochelle Villani (May 7, start: Oudemanhuispoort, 15-17h)

ECTS: 1 EC for attendance and readings of 2 sessions + a 500-1000 word pass/fail reflection | 2 ECTS for attendance and readings of all 4 sessions + a 500-1000 word pass/fail reflection

Open to: ReMa students, PhD candidates, Academic Staff. If there is space, we would like to keep the events open to non-academics as well.

Contact info organizers (for registrations and questions about ECTS): d.nadkarni@uva.nl

Registration deadline: January 20, 2026.

To register, please email Divya at d.nadkarni@uva.nl

Maximum no. of participants: 15

Description of the Critical Animal Studies Research Group

‘[N]ot all contemporary work in critical animal studies has explicitly feminist and  intersectional orientations or theoretical bases, despite the field’s original  commitments to seeing and challenging oppressions as interlinked (Best et al.  2007)’ (Kuura irni et al. 1). 

The discipline of critical animal studies functions as an analytic to understand the politics of oppression and marginalization in the broader sense, extending beyond the sociopolitical world of the human-animal. This Critical Animal Studies (CAS) research group i) aims to develop a critical understanding of the systematic oppression nonhuman animals face in a world dominated by corporate interests; ii) it invites us to think through the interconnectedness of patriarchy, imperialism, speciesism, capitalism, sexism and racism; iii) it asks what alternative and emancipatory forms of social and political life nonhuman lifeworlds might teach us in this contemporary moment of exacerbated political, economic and ecological violence.

CAS’s activities in 2025-2026 focus on the ways in which we cohabit with nonhuman life in urban spaces, and what kind of emancipatory politics we can imagine with nonhuman perspectives. We ask: How are non-human animals represented in media and culture and through what language? Where do concepts like ‘crazy cat lady’ and ‘domesticated animal’ come from? How did colonial and capitalist logics transform our landscapes into productive territory, and whose lives have been erased? In what ways can we explore more-than-human-agency and decolonial food systems? What does it mean to touch the body of a non-human animal? How can we rethink urban ecologies as sites of cohabitation and kinship, not extraction or mere utility?

Ecofeminist and decolonial thought are intrinsic to CAS. Through the group’s rejection of anthropocentrism and institutionalized oppression, it takes an activist stance against any type of violence, like factory farming and animal testing. Instead, members are invited to reimagine multispecies futures shaped by curiosity, care and kinship. 

CAS’s ecofeminist and decolonial approach fits perfectly within cultural analysis, and offers a unique approach to examining today’s social, political and ecological crises. In the Netherlands, CAS is still niche, though the discipline has been growing a lot internationally in recent years.  It would be fruitful to start this research group at NICA to bring together scholars in the Netherlands who are already working with CAS, and to build a solid foundation for new research in the field.

The group has four main activities in the academic year 2025-2026.

1. Introductory Reading Circle: Critical Animal Studies Futures | 10 February, 2026, 15:00-17:00, De Sering + vegan dinner afterwards
How do we talk about the non-human life we cohabit with? What new forms of politicality can we imagine with the generative life-world building practices of nonhuman animals?
Preliminary readings (final reading list TBC):

• Adams, Carol J. 2015. The Pornography of Meat. New York: Lantern Book
• Ko, Aph. 2019. Racism as a Zoological Witchcraft. A Guide to Getting Out. New York: Lantern Books.
• Gruen, Lori, and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, eds. 2018. Animaladies: Gender, Animals, and Madness. New York: Bloomsbury.
• Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. A short history of the blockade: Giant beavers, diplomacy, and regeneration in Nishnaabewin. University of Alberta, 2021. Pp 24-53

2. MASTERCLASS WITH EVA MEIJER: What should CAS mean for our crisis time? (1 ect) (Max 15 participants) | March 4^th, 2026, 14:00– 17:00 UvA

Eva Meijer will present a masterclass with their latest reserch on interspecies democracy. There will be room for interaction and for brainstorm together.  We will receive an abstract and a final reading list closer to the date.

Provisional Suggested readings (Final Readings TBC)

• Meijer, Eva. Muizenleven. Amsterdam: Cossee, 2025.
• Meijer, Eva. When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy. New York: NYU Press, 2019.

3. Swampland Futures: Undraining the Delta (Field visit with Anna Kooi) | April 16, 2026, All day. Het Voedselmoeras, Den Haag.

Exact start time TBC. Participants will have to pay for their own travel. Bring your own lunch. Closer to the day, if there are people interested in travelling together, we are happy to arrange a group ticket to save on train costs. 
This field-based workshop invites participants to reimagine the Netherlands as swamp rather than "reclaimed land." Through a visit to an experimental Food Swamp in The Hague, we examine the violence of drainage: displacement of marsh communities, peatland destruction, and ongoing subsidence. We explore how colonial and capitalist logics transformed wetlands into "productive" territory, making the Netherlands a global agricultural leader. After walking through the swamp, participants engage in a fermentation activity that reflects on cooking as a cross-species collaboration and explores more-than-human agency, slow processes and western ideas of purity and hygiene. The session considers decolonial food systems suited to amphibious living—water plants, marsh crops, aquaculture—and how more-than-human cohabitation might reshape urban ecologies.Anna Kooi is a cook, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of social practice art and academic inquiry. Through speculative menus and embodied research methods, she explores how food practices—cooking, fermentation, foraging—serve as archives of colonial histories and (more-than-)human ecologies. Anna is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente's Rurban Futures Collective. Her research examines how artists mobilize aesthetic and relational tools to contest colonial land relations, recover place-based knowledges, and generate menus as creative outputs for postcolonial ecological repair. Anna is a member of artist collective Afra Tafri Creations and has collaborated with Cascoland, Colaboratory Kitchen, the Slow Food Youth Network, and Food Council MRA.

Readings:

• Kelley, Lindsay. "Digesting Wetlands: Cooking and Eating Across Species." In Leonardo Electronic Almanac 22, no. 1, edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. Cambridge, MA: LEA / MIT Press, 2017.
• Proulx, Annie. "Discursive Thoughts on Wetlands" (Chapter 1) in Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, 2022.

4. Applying critical animal studies to the city centre of Amsterdam (Walking tour with Rochelle Villani) | 7 May, 2026, 15h – 17h + self-paid drinks for those who would like to join.

During a two hour walking tour starting at OMHP, we interact with the landscape of the city from a critical animal studies-perspective. We will explore facades that include or allude to non-human animals in comparison to facades that portray enslaved persons. On Dam Square we discuss the negative position of pigeons in the postmodern city and their histories, and one street further, we will analyze a hamburger restaurant. The visit ends with a special meeting with one of Amsterdam’s most famous pets, which will spark the discussion on what it means to use non-human animals for social media, and in a broader sense, what life in the city looks like for ‘domesticated’ animals. After the visit there is a borrel in a nearby café to continue discussions that arose during the tour.

Suggested readings TBA.