Our First Keynote Speaker
The organising committee for AASA 2025 is overjoyed to announce Danielle Celermajer as our first keynote speaker. Read Dany’s abstract for her talk here:
Researching our way through the Eremocene: how a few other animals taught me about relational, embodied ways of knowing.
Of the many words used to describe this era, the Eremocene, or the age of loneliness is the one that most powerfully speaks to me, gesturing as it does to the experiential dimension of the alienated, exceptionalist forms of human life that are also devastating the Earth and Earth others. In this talk, I will share a number of stories of how other animals have insinuated themselves into my practice as an animal studies scholar, and the ‘thinking’ we have done together. These stories will enable us to challenge three aspects of separatist forms of human life that also show up in research practice. The first challenge is to the standard view of humans as researchers and other animals as objects of research, even ones that we respect and treasure. Collaborative research practices with other animals, which may take weird forms like Penny the pig throwing a book I am reading into the bushes disrupts this dichotomy, along with the distribution of capabilities (like knowing, theorising and so on) it organises. The second (related) challenge is to the understanding of theorising (as the highest form of thought according to Plato) as transcendent, distant and fundamentally immaterial relations. As a counterpoint, I offer me picking up manure and other practices with other animals as a form of theorising. The third challenge is to the view that the most robust forms of knowledge are ones that derive their claims from an abstracted analysis across cases. By way of rebuttal, I offer a passionate defence of the anecdote, where it is in his very particularity that blind 35 year old Wookie the horse creates precisely the knowledge capable of making a difference in a world of alienated relations and knowledges.
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.
