Special Event Animals, Capital, and the Law

“Off-Animals, Creatures of an Exhausted Industrial Capitalism”
Alex Blanchette (Tufts University)
Discussant: Amy Fitzgerald (University of Windsor)
“Off-animals,” as they are called by some managers of North American pork production, are the biological refuse of agribusiness’s efforts to realize standardized hog life and death. Ranging from aged boars to misshapen pigs, recent attempts to industrially slaughter these creatures for meat has led to a shadow infrastructure of killing that underpins the world’s largest factory farms. Arching through and beyond Blanchette’s recent book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (2020), this talk outlines an ethnography of these animals to offer new lines of sight onto the waning state of industrial labor and value in Canada and the United States today.

Registration is required.

Please register here: https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1ELK-Ml-TbmKB0LBMlvmcQ