Animals as stakeholders in education: transformations towards interspecies sustainability

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Education can be seen to be closely connected to “hotspots of violence” against animals (Wadiwel, 2015) and sometimes themselves serve as sites of violence where various, often conflicting, human-animal relations are (re)produced. What might an animal-inclusive education look like, where animals are understood as stakeholders in their own right and peaceable relations with other animals are fostered? Using school milk schemes as a case example, this talk explores how schools can be seen as “common violent worlds” between children and animals (Saari, 2021) and explores how we might move towards educational policy and practice that attends to multispecies flourishing and sustainable futures. The talk explores the possibilities of different conceptual tools, such as interspecies sustainability, in guiding educational policy and practice away from its current path of unsustainability and gives two examples of animal-inclusive pedagogies in Finnish higher education, with a critical examination of the challenges and opportunities of implementing these pedagogies in higher education.  
 
GU-CAS will provide free vegan mingle food! 

Om Maria Helena Saari

Maria Helena Saari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education at the University of Oulu and Visiting Scholar at the Human-Animal Studies Hub at the University of Lisbon. She is currently Co-Leader of the Envisioning Sustainability Hub of the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program and Chair of the Finnish Critical Animal Studies Network (CASFinland). She was awarded the Senior Animal Law Researcher Award by the International Centre for Animal Law & Policy (ICALP) for her doctoral thesis ‘Animals as stakeholders in education: Towards an educational reform for interspecies sustainability’. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on animals in education (policy and pedagogy), interspecies sustainability and justice, environmental education, and animal law. She teaches undergraduate courses on environmental education and multispecies childhood studies.