As Carol Freeman notes in a footnote to her chapter in Animal Death, ‘what the term “animal studies” defines is still being debated’. The seventeen chapters of this edited volume range across historical, scientific, cultural, and artistic animal-related subjects. They reflect a self-conscious commitment on the part of editors Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey to the transdisciplinary na ... (read more)
Sam Cadman
Sam Cadman is a writer, musician, and lawyer. He is currently a PhD candidate at Deakin University in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. The title of his thesis is Rethinking the Human/Animal Border through Storytelling. In 2013 Sam was shortlisted for the ABR Voiceless Fellowship. He practises part-time in commercial litigation.
One of the animal narrators in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, a dolphin named Sprout who is writing to Sylvia Plath, quotes Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canetti: ‘whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.’ The ten animal souls whose thematically interwoven stories Dovey recounts do not simply ‘make fun’ of humans (far from ... (read more)