The 2025 Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA) Conference, Centring Animals Across the Disciplines, asks us to pause, reorientate, and engage our imagination, intellect, and practice to place non-human animals at the centre.
What does the world look, feel, taste or sound like when we, as scholars, artists and activists, put animals at the centre of our engagement?
What critically informed insights emerge?
The 2025 AASA Conference will occur in person at the University of Southern Queensland’s beautiful Toowoomba campus from 5 – 7 November.
The Conference will offer a vibrant setting for conversations, projects, debates, and speculative futures, with the aim of identifying cross and trans-disciplinary synergies, and integrating First Nations knowledge in the interests of other species and the more than human world.
Image: Dr Fernando do Campo – The Bear Pits At Sydney Girls High School
Call For Papers - Deadline For Abstracts 30 June 2025
We invite proposals that seek to centre animals from a range of disciplines and perspectives. Many First Nations perspectives respect non-humans as part of an interconnected multi-being world. Meanwhile, the ‘animal turn’ has seen many disciplines attend more closely to animals. What, for example, does it mean to put animals at the centre of law/lore and legal theory, social work, or creative arts practice? What questions and possibilities emerge from centring animals in our conversations on home/homelessness, climate change, health, gender, history, or war (as examples)? We encourage perspectives on animals, animal studies and the challenges of transcending anthropocentrism and disciplinarity. We also encourage proposals on the relations between Indigenous justice movements and multispecies justice movements.
AASA is committed to providing a safe and supportive experience for First Nations participants. We warmly welcome abstracts from Indigenous scholars, advocates and creative practitioners for papers, collective activities, panel discussions, creative works, and community presentations. Indigenous perspectives continue to evolve, as featured in AASA’s 2019 groundbreaking Decolonising Animals conference and we seek to continue these discussions at AASA 2025. The Indigenous Engagement Sub-Committee, which includes First Nations scholars in the Association, is working with Conference organisers to facilitate this.
We invite proposals of no more than 200 words for:
- academic papers, creative papers, or community/industry-informed papers
- discussion/yarning circles on a particular topic
- pre-formed discussion panels
- submission of artwork to the exhibition, film screenings, performances, readings, and other Non-Traditional Research Outputs (NTROs)*
If you would like to propose an alternative session, please email the conference organising committee directly to discuss via info@animalstudies.org.au.
Abstracts close on 30 June 2025. Submit here
*Please note we have limited space and technical support to present artworks in the exhibition. Presenters will need to look after their own freight of any exhibition material to and from Toowoomba, QLD. Selected NTROs and other creative works will be chosen on their merit as well as on the practical logistics of presenting such work at the conference.