Course Credits (3)
Animals: We encounter them in the wild, in our homes, and on our plates. They appear in our oldest cave paintings and sacred texts, inspiring awe and disgust, love and fear. Some are reviled or disregarded as pests or vermin. Increasingly, human activities threaten other species, even as we farm and exploit animals at massive scales for research and industrial agriculture. As wildlife, we compete with animals for habitat and natural resources, causing biodiversity loss. Given the high stakes of mass extinction, and impressive diversity of ways that humans relate to other animals across time and space, in this course we ask: how do humans relate to their fellow animals, with what effects? And how should we remember and protect other animals in our sustainability schemes and debates? In this interdisciplinary seminar course, we explore the entangled and troubling relations between humans and other animals. We focus on the plethora of ways which the “animal” has been differently classified, managed, cared for, and understood over time and space, with significant life-and-death consequences. Students will use animals as a critical lens to examine contemporary issues of concern in Sustainability and Human – Animal Studies today; including biodiversity loss and mass extinction, human-animal conflict, multispecies justice, impacts on species from climate change, mass animal exploitation and death in scientific research and food systems; consequences of our diets; zoonotic disease / biosecurity and public health risks; political ecology and wildlife management options; and the environmental humanities. Through case study research, students will share compelling animal stories, reaching across the domains of geography, culture, science, theory, history, and sustainability. This course will leave students with a richer appreciation of our animal selves, our multispecies world, our outsized impacts on non/human Others, and possible futures for life on Earth.
About Professor Isaacs
Dr. Jenny R. Isaacs serves as Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Human Ecology at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching are positioned at the intersection of nature, techno-science, and politics. She is a political ecologist and animal geographer who critically studies the science and politics of biodiversity conservation and wildlife management, across borders, cultures, space, and scale. Her recent conservation research focuses on controversial state campaigns and technologies to manage endangered, migratory, highly mobile, nuisance, and invasive species. Dr. Isaacs completed her Ph.D. in Geography at Rutgers University, her M.A. in Sustainability Studies at Ramapo College, and earned a B.A. in English and a B.M. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Dr. Isaacs currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Buffalo Field Campaign in West Yellowstone, Montana – an Indigenous-founded and co-led wild bison advocacy group, and the Executive Board of The American Association of Geographers’ Animal Geographies Specialty Group. She also works as Associate Editor for the ‘Political Animals’ section of the peer-reviewed journal Society & Animals. Her professional conservation work has included service with The National Park Service, The United Nations, The Wildlife Conservation Society, The New Jersey Audubon, the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey, and Educational Testing Services in Princeton, NJ. Before working in higher education, she worked as an outdoor educator and a state-certified high school teacher of English and the Performing Arts in Boston and New York City.
At Rutgers, Jenny coordinates student participation in bison conservation outside Yellowstone Park for the Buffalo Field Campaign, and she places coastal environmental management volunteers with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey, the NJ DEP Conservation Corps, and more. She is a member of the Critical AI and Archipelagoes Faculty Working Groups on campus, and she recently represented Rutgers as an accredited observer at the United Nations 15th Biodiversity Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal.
(Biography is from the Department of Human Ecology Website)