What’s Left for the Animals? A discussion on multispecies politics and anticapitalist resistance
Tue, Apr 29, 2025
6:00 PM–8:00 PM
The Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC. Free and open to all.
Industrial animal agriculture is one of the most destructive fields of industry and a central driver of climate change, deforestation, forced migration, environmental violence, loss of biodiversity, and violence against other animals. Despite this, serious critique of industrial animal agriculture and the role of nonhuman animals in capitalist economy remains marginal in left political discourse. Join us for panel discussion with Terike Haapoja, Ashley Dawson, Leigh Claire La Berge, Arnaud Gerspacher and moderated by Thyrza Nichols Goodeve on animal liberation and multispecies politics in the framework of anticapitalist resistance. Questions that emerge in this discussion include: why animals matter for left politics? Are nonhuman animals part of the working class? Is socialism good for other animals? How do we build a multispecies left politics?
About the Participants:
Terike Haapoja is a Berlin-based visual artist. Her current research [Against] Animal Capitalism reflects critically on the anthropocentric ontologies within marxist theory that inform current day left politics, and argues that recognizing animal labor as a central arena of capitalist exploitation is necessary for anticapitalist struggle. Haapoja’s current research builds on her extensive research and creative work on multispecies politics in relationship to knowledge production (Closed Circuit – Open Duration, 2008), governance (The Party of Others 2011), law (The Trial, 2013), history (Museum of the History of Cattle, 2013) and ideology (Museum of Nonhumanity, 2016). Haapoja’s work has received several awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship for the [Against] Animal Capitalism project in 2022.
Ashley Dawson is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York, where he teaches postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities. He has published numerous books on aspects of the fight for climate and environmental justice, including, most recently, Environmentalism from Below (Haymarket, 2024) and Decolonize Conservation! (Common Notions, 2024). Dawson is the Climate Justice Fellow for 2024-25 at the arts organization Culture Push, and is also a faculty fellow at Social Practice CUNY. He is currently creating a series of short documentary films about the impact of energy infrastructure in NYC.
Leigh Claire La Berge is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, part of City University of New York. Her first book, “Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s”, tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, “Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art” explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called “decommodified labor,” or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire is the co-editor of the collection, “Reading Capitalist Realism”. She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled “Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary”.
Arnaud Gerspacher is an environmental art historian and critical animal studies scholar whose research focuses on animals in modern and contemporary art. He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2017 and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Art Department at City College CUNY. His writings have appeared with Columbia University Press, Yale University Press, Routledge Press, Art Margins, art-agenda, Oxford Art Journal, and October journal. His first book, The Owls Are Not What They Seem: Artist as Ethologist, was published by The University of Minnesota Press in 2022. His current book project, Dangerous Analogies: Towards an Ethological Art History, analyzes the different uses of human-animal analogies in art and the history of ethology, from the historic avant-garde up to the global contemporary present.
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (Moderator)is a writer, interviewer, and cartoodlist. She writes about art as a world building activity. Her interests include art as a “structure of feeling,” human/nonhuman animal ontologies, the natural fantastic, the aesthetics of wonder, the history of modernism(s), surrealist methodologies, dystopias, heterotopias, and utopias, and the metaphysics of technology. Her book-length portrait of Donna Haraway, How Like A Leaf (1999) has been re-published in several languages including Turkish, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish. She is the co-author with John Shoesmith of Scribbles, Comments, and Codes: The Marginalia of Marshall McLuhan (Arcana Books, 2025) and the editor of Anatomy of the Crit, Volume 1 and 2 (Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA, forthcoming in 2026). She teaches in the MFA Art Practice, MFA Fine Arts, and MFA Computer Arts programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.