40.4 - Animal Politics

HSR Vol. 40 (2015) No. 4:

Forum I: Animal Politics.

Svenja Ahlhaus & Peter Niesen (Eds.): Animal Politics. A New Research Agenda in Political Theory.

While other academic disciplines have all established highly visible branches of Animal Studies in recent decades, Political Theory has struggled to carve out a distinctive approach. What can freedom, equality, citizenship or democracy mean in political communities of humans and animals? The editors of this HSR Forum suggest the new field of Animal Politics, i.e. the study of human-animal relations in Political Theory, is marked by a concern with animals as politically subjected beings, as individual bearers of coercive claims and as candidates for political membership. The first half of the contributions in this HSR Forum critically engage with Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s pioneering work Zoopolis, especially with their call for applying the vocabulary of citizenship to animals. The other contributions probe the chances for Animal Politics confronting social and political issues such as religious exemptions to animal welfare law or the status of animals at war. The aim of this HSR Forum is to outline and critically evaluate Animal Politics, and provide an alternative both to anthropocentric Political Theory and unpolitical Animal Ethics.

Forum II: Football History.

Jutta Braun (Ed.):Football History. Selected Contributions to Sport in Society.

During the last three decades, different occasions have given reason and motivation for new research and interpretation of German football history: First, the caesura of 1989/1990 lifted the curtain regarding East German football history. Ten years later, the decision to host the World Cup in 2006 in Germany was immediately followed by an upswing of academic as well as societal interest in Football History. This HSR Forum comprises some of the consequent intellectual debates, especially centering on the political and cultural impact of the World Cups in 1954 and 1974, as well as the history of the Bundesliga. At the same time, the perspective of Football history on the European level was taken into account. The effects of the booming commercialization of European football are examined as well as its cultural substance, notably by creating European collective “sites of memory.” Moreover, football history is also increasingly analyzed as a momentum of public discourse: be it as the background for propaganda and myths of victims and villains during the Second World War or, even today, a continued source of national stereotypes.

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