“Extending the Rights of Personhood, Voice, and Life to Sensate Others: A Homology of Right to Life and Animal Rights Rhetoric,” Communication Quarterly 51:3 (2003): 312-331. (original) (raw)

The Rhetorics of Animal Rights

2002

In this chapter, Anita Guerrini, a science historian, criticizes the way in which the ethical debate over the use of animals in research has been car• ried out. She notes that the debate has been hindered from its inception by a strate!D'whereby the advocates of the various positions attempt to discredit the opposition in ways that deflect attention from the central grounding of their arguments. She categorizes these rhetorical approaches as fUndamentally a search

The Politics of Animal Rights Advocacy

Relations, 2013

The main aim of this paper is to make the case that the politics of animal rights advocacy rests with establishing the moral and legal status of animals as a public policy issue. Presently, animal rights is primarily framed as an optional lifestyle choice. It is not understood as a matter for mainstream politics, including public policy, the policies of political parties, regulations and legislation. Starting with Barbara Noske’s concept of the animal industrial complex, I consider the present status of the many traditions, cultural norms, economic and other incentives which license our instrumental use animals for human gain. I propose a five-part evaluation process of social movements and use it to evaluate the modern animal rights movement. I critique its present strategy with its emphasis on personal lifestyle choice as inadequate in challenging the animal industrial complex. I conclude the modern animal rights movement must implement a long-term strategy which advances animal i...

The Uneasy Conscience of the Animal Rights Movement

The Probe, 1997

The paper explains how activists arguing in favor of animal rights frequently employ incomplete information, information out of context, as well as contradictory evidence when making their case.

Beyond complicity and denial: Nonhuman animal advocacy and the right to live justly

Intervention or Protest: Acting for Nonhuman Animals

Contemporary animal ethics literature has focused predominantly on examining the ways in which animals are wronged by human practices and institutions. Consequently, academics and activists alike have pursued interspecies justice by debating, disseminating, and upholding the moral and political obligations humans owe to other species. Our paper argues that this duty-oriented approach to animal scholarship and advocacy is important but incomplete. Analysing silence and avoidance as the active products of particular cultures of denial, we suggest that an exclusive focus on human obligations to animals hinders the conception and realisation of interspecies justice in four ways. First, it neglects the ubiquitous and deeply embedded cognitive, emotional, and social barriers to our attentiveness to animal suffering and exploitation. Second, it fails to grant explicit normative and political significance to those barriers in terms of how they impoverish or remove conditions for recognizing and fulfilling our obligations to animals. Third, the duty-centric approach may foreclose opportunities for open, good faith dialogue between animal rights supporters and “mainstream” academics and laypersons. Fourth and most broadly, it constrains the prospect of collectively striving for a rich and nuanced yet accessible vision of what is required to live well together. By identifying and examining these obstructions to intellectual and emotional engagement with the plight of animals, we demonstrate the plausibility and significance of the assertion that humans are wronged through their unknowing and/or unwilling complicity with animal exploitation. As moral and political agents, humans are owed the possibility of living just and reflective lives; we are owed the right not to be perpetrators. Synthesizing an analysis of denial with the right not to be a perpetrator, our paper offers to animal rights discourse a more robust and inclusive approach to cultivating public engagement with just forms of interspecies community.

The Philosophy behind the Movement: Animal Studies versus Animal Rights

Society & Animals 2011, 19:4

Recently, many pro-animal thinkers have expressed critical views on the animal rights movement. In particular, the movement has been criticized for being philosophically uninformed, politically regressive, and practically unpersuasive. This paper investigates these criticisms and seeks to map out the philosophy behind the grassroots animal rights movement, specifically. It concludes that the criticism presented by animal studies scholars is often misplaced due to a lack of understanding of the philosophical notions within the movement, but that the critics are right to argue that the movement needs to place more emphasis on persuasion.

Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement

How do activists create cultural change? Scholars have investigated the development and maintenance of collective identities as one avenue for cultural change, but to understand how activists foster change beyond their own movements, we need to look at activists' strategies for changing their targets' mindsets and actions. Sociologists need to look at activists' boundary work to understand both the wide-sweeping goals and strategies that activists enact to generate broad-based cultural changes. Using data from participant observation and interviews with animal rights activists in France and the United States, and drawing on research on ethnic boundary shifting, I show how activists used two main strategies to shift symbolic boundaries between humans and animals, as well as between companion and farm animals-(1) they blur boundaries through focusing and universalizing strategies and (2) they cross boundaries physically, discursively, and iconographically. This study contributes a new theoretical and empirical example to the cultural changes studied by scholars of social movements, and it also provides a useful counterpoint to studies of symbolic boundary construction and maintenance in the sociology of culture.

The Animal Rights Struggle

Amsterdam University Press eBooks, 2016

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest movements around the world, and academic theories are racing to catch up with them. This series aims to further our understanding of the origins, dealings, decisions, and outcomes of social movements by fostering dialogue among many traditions of thought, across European nations and across continents. All theoretical perspectives are welcome. Books in the series typically combine theory with empirical research, dealing with various types of mobilization, from neighborhood groups to revolutions. We especially welcome work that synthesizes or compares different approaches to social movements, such as cultural and structural traditions, micro-and macro-social, economic and ideal, or qualitative and quantitative. Books in the series will be published in English. One goal is to encourage nonnative speakers to introduce their work to Anglophone audiences. Another is to maximize accessibility: all books will be available in open access within a year after printed publication.

Explaining Support for Animal Rights: A Comparison of Two Recent Approaches to Humans, Nonhuman Animals, and Postmodernity

Society & Animals, 2001

Questions on "animal rights" in a cross-national survey conducted in 1993 provide an opportunity to compare the applicability to this issue of two theories of the sociopolitical changes summed up in "postmodernity": Inglehart's (1997) thesis of "postmaterialist values" and Franklin's (1999) synthesis of theories of late modernity. Although Inglehart seems not to have addressed human-nonhuman animal relations, it is reasonable to apply his theory of changing values under conditions of "existential security" to "animal rights." Inglehart's postmaterialism thesis argues that new values emerged within specific groups because of the achievement of material security. Although emphasizing human needs, they shift the agenda toward a series of lifestyle choices that favor extending lifestyle choices, rights, and environmental considerations. Franklin's account of nonhuman animals and modern cultures stresses a generalized "ontological insecurity." Under postmodern conditions, changes to core aspects of social and cultural life are both fragile and fugitive. As neighborhood, community, family, and friendship relations lose their normative and enduring qualities, companion animals increasingly are drawn in to those formerly exclusive human emotional spaces. With a method used by Inglehart and a focus in countries where his postmaterialist effects should be most evident, this study derives and tests different expectations from the theories, then tests them against data from a survey supporting Inglehart's theory. His theory is not well supported. We conclude that its own anthropocentrism limits it and that the allowance for hybrids of natureculture in Franklin's account offers more promise for a social theory of animal rights in changing times.