Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice?

Charlotte E. Blattner · Kendra Coulter · Will Kymlicka

Dec 2019 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Is animal labour inherently oppressive, or can work be a source of meaning, solidarity, and social membership for animals? This challenging question drives this thought-provoking collection which explores the possibilities and complexities of animal labour as a site for interspecies justice. The book assembles an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars who carefully grapple with the many facets, implications, and entanglements of animal labour, and who, crucially, place animals at the heart of their analyses. Can animals engage in good work and have humane jobs? What kinds of labour rights are appropriate for animal workers? Can animals consent to work? Would recognizing animals as workers improve their legal and political status, or simply reinforce the perception that they are beasts of burden? Can a focus on labour help to create or deepen bonds between animal advocates and other social justice movements? While the authors present a range of views on these questions, their contributions make clear that labour must be taken seriously by everyone interested in more just and ethical multispecies futures.

About the author

Charlotte Blattner is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Law School, where she researches at the intersection of animal and environmental law. From 2017-2018, she completed the Postdoctoral Fellowship for Animal Studies at the Department of Philosophy at Queen's University, as part of which she began focusing on issues of animal labour. She earned her PhD in Law from the University of Basel, Switzerland, as part of the doctoral program "Law and Animals - Ethics at Crossroads", and was Visiting International Scholar at the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School in 2016. Her book Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders is forthcoming from OUP. Kendra Coulter holds the Chancellor's Chair for Research Excellence and is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Labour Studies at Brock University in Canada. She is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and a member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She is an award-winning author who has written widely on many facets of labour involving animals including Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy at Queen's University. He is the author of seven books published by Oxford University Press: Liberalism, Community, and Culture (1989), Contemporary Political Philosophy (1990; second edition 2002), Multicultural Citizenship (1995), Finding Our Way: Rethinking Ethnocultural Relations in Canada (1998), Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, Citizenship (2001), Multicultural Odysseys (2007), and Zoopolis: A Political theory of Animal Rights (2011). He is also the co-editor of several volumes including Citizenship in Diverse Societies (OUP 2000), Multiculturalism and the Welfare State (OUP 2006), and The Strains of Commitment: The Political Sources of Solidarity in Diverse Societies(OUP, 2017). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His works have been translated into 34 languages.