LOEWE
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Food, darling, art motif: New LOEWE focus on the human-animal relationship
The new LOEWE priority "Animal - Human - Society. Approaches to interdisciplinary animal research" will initially be funded for three years with around 3.6 million euros. This was announced by the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art in Wiesbaden on Thursday. Scientists from agricultural sciences as well as from German studies, history, art studies, philosophy and theology are involved.
"With this approval, the state of Hesse also honors our extraordinarily broad interdisciplinary approach," said a pleased Prof. Dr. Winfried Speitkamp, head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History and coordinator of the project. "We are using a combination of subject expertise that is concentrated only in Kassel. In this way, we are conducting basic research, but the project also has direct application relevance in the areas of animal husbandry, animal breeding, animal research, animal presentation, animal law and ethics," Speitkamp continues.
The relationship of humans to animals has been ambivalent since the beginning of civilization: Animals are, for example, meat suppliers, not infrequently they are regarded as enemies (for example, so-called pests or even predators), but sometimes also as best friends. Even in early human times, animals were among the first art motifs; at some times they were seen as embodiments of gods, at other times humans used them as experimental objects. The new LOEWE focus starts with current debates about the treatment of animals (animal experiments, factory farming, animal rights), but deliberately reaches beyond them. One goal is to advance these debates through systematic fundamental considerations. The Kassel scientists assume, on the one hand, that humans and animals must be considered in their mutual relationship to each other. On the other hand, they ask about the historical and social conditions of this relationship. For different constellations have produced and continue to produce very different forms of the human-animal relationship. In the process, notions and realities of humans and animals also change: thus, forms of "creation" of animals are examined, whether through animal breeding (selection, premiumization), animal husbandry (farm animals, zoo animals), animal research (behavioral research, medical research), or animal representation (narrative, visual). "Given the multidimensionality of the topic, the project requires an interdisciplinary exchange on issues, methods and results," Speitkamp explained. "That's why we are building on a Kassel tradition of combining natural and cultural research that goes back to the Enlightenment." The project will start at the beginning of 2014.
The participating disciplines and their leaders in detail: Farm Animal Ethology and Animal Husbandry (Prof. Dr. Ute Knierim), Animal Breeding (Prof. Dr. Sven König), Agricultural History (Prof. Dr. Werner Troßbach), German Medieval Studies (Prof. Dr. Claudia Brinker-von der Heyde), Modern and Contemporary History (Prof. Dr. Winfried Speitkamp), Early Modern History (Prof. Dr. Anne-Charlott Trepp), Medieval and Modern Art History (Prof. Dr. Martina Sitt), Modern Art History (Prof. Dr. Alexis Joachimides), Theoretical Philosophy (Prof. Dr. Dr. Kristian Köchy), Catholic Theology/Biblical Theology (Prof. Dr. Ilse Müllner).
To date, the University of Kassel has been involved in four LOEWE priority projects: ELCH (electron dynamics of chiral systems), VENUS (information technology design), Cocoon (cooperative sensor communication) and IPF (integrative fungus research). The State Offensive for the Development of Scientific and Economic Excellence - LOEWE for short - is a program with which the State of Hesse has been strengthening the research landscape and funding outstanding collaborative scientific projects since 2008. More about LOEWE and the previous Kassel projects at goo.gl/sMhJg and www.proloewe.de.
Picture of Professor Dr. Winfried Speitkamp at
www.uni- kassel.de/uni/fileadmin/datas/uni/presse/anhaenge/2013/Speitkamp_Winfried_7.jpg