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Dr Kári Driscoll (Comparative Literature) will give two workshops on 28 and 29 October in the context of his VENI Project Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene. The overall theme of the workshop is: Extinction — Conservation — Reanimation. 

There will be two keynote lectures:

Susan McHugh (ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ of New England)

• 28 October, 2020
• Time: 17.15–19.00
• Location: Online 

Like zoos themselves, zoo fictions have troubled histories of intermingling discourses of colonialism, race, and species. Several recent examples reframe these histories in terms of sex and gender by ending with a peculiar figure: xenopregnancy, or a human preparing to give birth to a member of another species, who is explicitly enabled by her connection to a zoo. At a literal level, the fictions follow late-twentieth-century realities of conservation-minded experiments with impregnating members of common domestic species with fetuses of endangered wild ones, practices that led to rare successes in producing zoo creatures. But the uneven entanglements of exotics, erotics, and pronatalist ideologies across these tales raise further questions about how zoos can become sites for mitigating not only fears of extinction but also new beginnings for species, including our own.

Juno Salazar Parreñas (Cornell ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ)

• 29 October, 2020
• Time: 17.15–19.00
• Location: Online

Critically endangered orangutans that have been displaced by deforestation and agricultural industrialization are sent to rehabilitation centers. Confined in such spaces, they have free access to each other. This fosters a problem of systematic sexual violence borne by female orangutans, including prepubescent ones. Forced copulation facilitated by rehabilitation centers is ultimately valued as a strategy for population growth amidst the Sixth Extinction, even though acts often involve prepubescent female orangutans and therefore are non-reproductive. How is the exploitation of female sexual reproduction a central strategy for conservation practitioners? How might ideologies of growth impact qualities of life for endangered wildlife? This talk uses interdisciplinary qualitative methods of animal behavioral sampling, participant-observation, discourse analysis, archival research, and interviews to explain how animal welfare is compromised at the expense of human cultural values in growth and heteronormative sexuality.