AASA 2025: Centring Animals Across The Disciplines
The University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia
5 – 7 November
The 2025 Australasian Animal Studies Association (AASA) Conference occurs on the 20th anniversary year of AASA. Please join us to celebrate 20 years of animal studies!
Conference registration is now open. Please click here to register.
The conference is held on the lands of Jagera, Giabal and Jarowair peoples. The Jagera people of the foothills and escarpment, Giabal of the Toowoomba area and the Jarowair of the northern areas towards and including the Bunya Mountains.
The 2025 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 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.
Keynote Speakers
Danielle (Dany) Celermajer
Danielle (Dany) Celermajer is Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project at the University of Sydney. Over the last decade, she has turned her attention from uniquely intra-human injustice and human rights to injustices and violence against the more than human world and their intersection with injustice against particular groups of humans. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires as part of a multispecies community, she began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. Her creative non-fiction book, Summertime; Reflections on a Vanishing Future (Penguin Random House, 2021) was written in recognition of the critical urgency of conveying the complex conceptual recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe. Her latest book, co-authored with other members of the Multispecies Justice Collective is Institutionalizing Multispecies Justice, Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Read the abstract for her talk here.
Yvette Watt and Dinesh Wadiwel
Yvette Watt and Dinesh Wadiwel will mark the 20th anniversary of AASA with a conversation on 20 years of AASA: Past, Present and Futures for Animal Studies. Read more about the session in our blog.
Yvette Watt’s artwork and academic research is heavily informed by her background as an activist, and reflects an interest in the relationship between how nonhuman animals are used and depicted in the visual arts and what this might have to say about how these animals are thought about and treated. Related to this is an interest in the role that art can play in engaging the viewer with social and/or political issues.
Yvette is a co-editor of and contributor to Considering Animals (Ashgate, 2011). Other publications include “Duck Lake: art meets activism in an anti-hide, anti-bloke, antidote to duck shooting.” In Animaladies, (2018), “Down on the Farm: Why do Artists Avoid Farm Animals as Subject Matter?”, in Meat Cultures, (2016); ‘Animal Factories: Exposing Sites of Capture’, in Captured: Animals Within Culture, (2014). She has also curated a number of exhibitions including OktoLab19 (2019), and Reconstructing the Animal (2011). Her work is held in numerous public and private collections including Parliament House, Canberra; Artbank; The Art Gallery of WA amongst others.
Yvette Watt left her role as Head of Painting at the UTAS School of Creative Arts & Media in 2022 and is now Principal and Creative Director of Archaica Schola, an art studio and school in Hobart.
Dinesh Wadiwel is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. Dinesh is an active critical animal studies scholar, and also has extensive research experience in disability rights. He is author of The War against Animals (Brill 2015) and Animals and Capital (Edinburgh University Press 2023).
Dinesh is also co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew, of Foucault and Animals (Leiden: Brill, 2016). Dinesh is also a disability rights researcher and was part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
Third Keynote Announcement Soon
Conference Registration and Fees
Conference registration is now open! Please click here to register.
Follow our social media for updates – bluesky, facebook, LinkedIn.
Registration fees:
Member Non-Member
Full, Conference Attendance $350 $430
Full, Optional Dinner $130 $130
Total with Dinner $480 $560
Concession, Conference Attendance $280 $345
Conc, Conference Attendance $80 $90
Total with Dinner $360 $435
Member Non-Member
Full, Conference Attendance $265 $345
Full, Optional Dinner $130 $130
Total with Dinner $395 $475
Concession, Conference Attendance $210 $250
Conc, Optional Dinner $80 $80
Total with Dinner $290 $330
Standard
Full Member one day – $150
Full Non-Member one day- $175
Conc Member one day – $120
Conc Non- Member one day – $150
Early Bird
Full Member one day – $140
Full Non-Member one day- $165
Conc Member one day – $110
Conc Non – Member one day – $140
Location
The 2025 AASA Conference will occur in person at the University of Southern Queensland’s beautiful Toowoomba campus from.
Toowoomba is a regional city of 180,000 residents sitting atop the Great Dividing Range in Southern Queensland. It is a central hub housed between Western Queensland and the Eastern coastline and capital city of Brisbane. In November the weather in Toowoomba is typically a pleasant 15 – 27 degrees, without the high humidity experienced in Brisbane. Rain is possible.
Getting there
The university is approximately 15 minutes’ drive from the Toowoomba CBD on the southern side of the city. Bus and taxis are available.
Flights: Flights direct from Sydney to Toowoomba (only one flight in and out per day – although it looks like they are not flying Tuesday 4 November). There is a bus shuttle and taxi service to take passengers from the airport to the CBD.
There are also flights direct to Brisbane Domestic or International terminals each day. It is a 2 hour drive from Brisbane airport to Toowoomba CBD or UniSQ. There are bus shuttles that can be booked to take passengers from the airport to Toowoomba and car hire options from the airport.
Car: Toowoomba is a 2 hour drive west from Brisbane airport, a 2.5 hour drive north-west from the Gold Coast, and a 2.5 hour drive south-west from the Sunshine Coast.
Accomodation – conference discounts
Highlander Motor Inn https://www.highlandermotorinn.com.au/
4 Star accommodation – motel rooms and 1 – 3 bedroom apartments
15% discount per night when indicating you are attending the AASA Conference
Phone +61 7 4638 4955
managers@highlandermotorinn.com.au
226 James Street, Toowoomba (4 kms from the University, about 8 mins drive)
Comfort Inn Glenfield https://www.comfortinnglenfield.com.au/
3 Star motel, situated close to supermarket and food takeaway outlets
Members Business Rate (which is typically 5% discount on standard rate per night) when indicating you are attending the AASA Conference
+61 7 4635 4466
876 Ruthven Street, Toowoomba (2.5 kms from the University, about 5 mins drive)