Eat Your Own Leg: Multispecies Justice in the Time of Planetary Crisis

Join us, Thursday, Oct 6th for "Eat Your Own Leg: Multispecies Justice in the Time of Planetary Crisis”. Happening in Miller Hall 105 at 2:30pm.

In this talk, Jain will critically analyze the cultural and social dynamics of the production and consumption of animals in our current food system with these goals in mind: on the one hand, uncovering the broadly deprived status of non-human animals and in turn, ideas of human supremacy, which therefore at the least fail to challenge and at the most are actively complicit in the capitalist relations embodied in the food system and its damaging effects on the environment and contributions to pandemic; and, on the other hand, understanding activist communities that concern themselves with multispecies and environmental justice, enacting radical forms of relationship between species in the ways they eat and farm, challenging the social and economic relations of capitalism embodied in industrialized animal agriculture and its environmental, social, and health consequences. 

This lecture is presented in partnership with the Flora Baker Fund.

About the speaker: 

Andrea R. Jain, Ph.D. is professor of religious studies at Indiana University, Indianapolis, editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and author of Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture (Oxford 2014) and Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality (Oxford, 2020). She received her doctorate degree in religious studies from Rice University in 2010. Her areas of research include religion and capitalism; environmental justice; global spirituality and modern yoga; sexuality and religion; and theories of religion. 

Jain’s current work, including the documentary film Predation, centers questions about our current planetary crisis with special attention to the relationships between human societies and non-human animals, a diagnosis of capitalism’s multispecies injustices, and the activists who build multiscpecies coalitions in order to imagine radically different futures.