Australasian Animal Studies Association

Arcari, Dr Paula

Making Sense of 'Food' Animals Book Cover

Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

Edge Hill University, UK
Research interests / activities

Understanding how to challenge habitual ways of thinking and acting about nonhuman animals is the central focus of my research. I am particularly interested in mundane and normalised practices involving animals and the temporal and spatial sites in which they occur. It is in these depoliticized or ‘off-staged’ sites, associated with entertainment, education, and fun, that I believe the most persistent understandings of animal use as largely benign and unproblematic, can be accessed.

In 2019 I was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to be located at Edge Hill University's Centre for Human Studies with Richard Twine and Claire Parkinson. My research is titled, 'The visual consumption of animals: challenging persistent binaries'.

Potential areas for research supervision
Human/Nature relations; Critical Animal Studies; Social practice theories; Post, non-, and more-than-human theories; Critical theory; Foucault