Call for Participants: Workshop “Captivity/Escape”

Following the first workshop on “War/Memory” as part of the research project Reading Zoos in the Age of the Anthropocene, the second workshop on “Captivity/Escape” will take place on 7 – 9 November, 2019 at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The workshop will feature keynote presentations by Thijs de Zeeuw and Lori Gruen.

I invite scholars, including advanced PhD students and early-career academics, as well as artists, writers, and zoo professionals, to participate. You do not need to have attended the first workshop to participate in the second (or the third). The workshop will not take the form of panels and presentations, but rather of brief position papers by select participants followed by plenary discussion. A workshop reader will be distributed to all participants in advance.

There are three ways you can take part: 1) you can present your own ongoing work on zoos and captivity, in which case you should provide a short essay or draft (no more than 15-20 double spaced pages) to be included in the reader; 2) you can offer to lead a discussion on a particular text, image, video, piece of music, archival document, material object, etc., of which you are not the author but which you consider to be important and relevant to the topic, and which can likewise be circulated in advance; or 3) you can simply attend the workshop and participate in the discussion without presenting. (When putting together the programme, I aim to have a good balance between Option 1 and Option 2, with a slight preference for Option 2.)

Please note that while coffee, lunch, and dinner will be provided, my budget cannot extend to covering travel and accommodation. Several hotels in the centre of Utrecht do offer special rates for university events, however.

If you would like to take part please send a short bio and description of your current or recent research and/or practice relating to the figure of the zoo to Kári Driscoll (k.driscoll@uu.nl) by the 1st of September, 2019.