Animals and Epidemics

The current epidemiological crisis of the COVID-19-Pandemic illustrates once more, how non-human animals are deemed epidemic villains in a world where anthropocentric impacts on the global ecological system have reached a problematic extent. At the same time, there remains a question on how to properly (and historically) narrate the agency of animals in any kind of disease outbreak without continuing to one-sidedly place the blame on animals and instead take them serious as subjects of a story that moves beyond one-sided accounts. Epidemics and pandemics indeed prove pivotal for historic reflexions on the specific relations between non-humans and the human species in any given historical situation.

The project, which is pursued in cooperation with Christian Jaser (University of Klagenfurt), Nadir Weber (University of Bern) and Axel Hüntelmann (Charité Berlin), aims to highlight the epoch-shaping power of pandemics and asks how pandemics in turn affect views on nature, animals and human cultures. It will do so by paying special attention to the visualization of animals in scientific photography and microscopy, but also by creating tropes that are ripe with racial and colonialist undertones. Relying on an animal studies perspective, we furthermore want to discuss the specific materiality of diseases and what this means for scientific research. The results of this project will be published as a co-authored book.