Emerging with Oddkin: Interdisciplinarity in the Animal Turn

The Animals and Society Institute facilitates an annual interdisciplinary meeting of emerging scholars from around the world, encouraging attendees to interrogate what it means to be a scholar, with an emphasis on animal studies within our respective disciplines. In that vein, we assess what it means to be an emerging animal-studies scholar in three interconnected but distinct academic disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and social work. We elaborate on three dominant themes: (1) the place of animals or the “animal turn”; (2) our subjectivity and how we find unorthodox networks or what Donna Haraway refers to as our “oddkin”; (3) and our inherent roles as interdisciplinary scholars and the liminal positions we occupy, as we address complex social problems like climate change. By reflecting on how we have encountered barriers and overly strict binaries collectively and as individuals, we can begin to deconstruct these obstacles and create opportunities.