ANIMAL PRINT

Much has been made of the binary between human and non-human animals in literature, philosophy, science, and the arts. Early textual production used animal inks on vellum and parchment, indelibly tying words and illustrations to animal bodies extrinsic to the economy of human cultural production. Even today, animal print figures prominently in fashion and decor, having implications of wealth and status. Recent turns in narrative and scientific discourse have begun to refute the essential contrast between human and animal, exposing the extent to which this binary has justified violence against non-human lives and ecosystems. As a result, new ontologies of interspecies relationships have emerged, challenging and building upon centuries of representations of animals in our media.

The Colloquium gathered an array of academic and hybrid papers that reflected on this ostensible binary and co-dependent relationships between human and animal bodies in literature and media. Broadly, the papers explored how animality operates as a category informing oppression, how animals are animated in children’s media to convey moral messages, and how ecocriticism allows us to understand how animality functions in the Anthropocene.

Work on Animal Print began in August 2017. Tasks included developing the Call for Papers, securing funding from organizations throughout Concordia University, and preparing and managing the event and publication budget. My co-organizer, Katheryne Morrissette and I scheduled and chaired monthly status meetings that emphasized collective accountability, managed a team of editors to select papers and prepare them for publication, and founded and oversaw production of Insight Journal. Additionally, I designed promotional materials for web and print, and designed the publication itself. We launched Volume 1 of Insight Journal during the Wine & Cheese reception with which the conference concluded on Saturday, March 24, 2018.

In 2017, I published the inaugural volume of conference proceedings for the Concordia English Graduate Colloquium, which featured a select number of papers that had been presented over the two days of the conference. The initiative was remarkably well-received by panelists as well as faculty and administration in the English department. However, being constrained by the annual conference theme and its pool of participants precludes the ability to solicit and publish work from a more plentiful variety of fields and topics. Katheryne and I felt very strongly that, in order to remain at the forefront of the field of literary studies, interdisciplinarity and accessibility must be top priorities. Insight Journal is part of our remedy to this problem: a general journal of literary and cultural studies based around Special Issue topics that may or may not coincide with the conference’s theme, depending on the scholarly interests of the graduate cohort each year.