Staff Profiles

Extinction, Critical animal studies, Postcolonial studies, Critical theory

EXTINCTION My project aims to examine constitutive practices and representations of extinction across a range of discursive contexts in order to consider the social and cultural significance of extinction. I wish to come to an understanding of how extinction is determined and by whom, the spaces and times in which extinction occurs and is read as meaningful, and how humans participate in and make sense of extinction. My project utilises a critical methodology, combining the use of theoretical concepts drawn from cultural studies and critical theory, postcolonial theory, ecology and zoology, with document and archival review. Where relevant and appropriate I will also conduct informal interviews and make observations. METHODOLOGY: My methodology is critical rather than interpretive in the sense that my focus will be on critical representations and concepts rather than observation and interviews as a primary source of data. Social science or specialist scientific methodologies are employed in the majority of research projects falling under the rubric of animal studies. More recently, creative methodologies have been employed by artists to understand their relationship with nonhuman animals. While I refer extensively to scientific and social science research, and view such research as valuable and largely compatible with this study, I place a great deal of importance on research positioning and critical reflection, attempting to identify the cultural and political contexts in which previous research has been undertaken. Such an approach involves considering my own social and cultural position as well. In this sense I am reading scientific findings within the social and cultural contexts that they are produced. Conceptual sites of focus for my study include: • Specific species extinctions • Spaces of extinction • Times of extinction • Colonisation • Writing and recording extinction • Criteria for determining and enunciating extinction • Epistemological limits of extinction • Discursive dissemination of extinction These sites will be used to organise and structure my research. RESEARCH POSITIONING AND ETHICS Understandings of environment and the impact of colonisation intersect with my work. However, the most important effect my previous employment at Curtin, in particular at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies, has had on my research is in terms of the need to position it and myself as clearly as possible. A great deal of social and scientific research undertaken in Australia and other countries with histories of colonization has presented itself as authoritative and interdictory, devoid of clear positioning and critical reflection. In my research I try to identify my own cultural status as a Sri Lankan Australian whose parents migrated to Australia in the 1950s, and acknowledge that I live and make a living in Perth, Western Australia, on land traditionally owned by Noongar people. My research has to date not involved interviews, nor has it involved the direct handling of animals except for museum specimens. I have undertaken both Human Research Ethics training and introductory Animal Ethics/Animal Welfare training, and will follow my institution’s guidelines should I need to work directly with human or nonhuman animals. I have struggled with the idea of the absolute separation in time and space between extinct animals and all animals, nonhuman and human, that still exist today. Once an animal is declared extinct as a species, its significance to all other animals changes. The gaps in existence, knowledge and communication that exist between different nonhuman and human animals are transformed by extinction and its consequences. Extinct species are mythologised, reified, metaphorised, appropriated, idealised, immortalised and sometimes forgotten. Museum specimens, photographic and filmic recordings, and artistic representations take on a referential quality, taking the place of the animal rendered extinct. Scientific and artistic studies now reflect a sense of absence and loss, of the animal’s presence, its body, time and space. At the same time, however, I am aware that the practices of human and nonhuman animals have caused or contributed to the extinction or disappearance of animal species, and that they continue to do so. I want to examine and become more aware of the ways that we participate in, indeed practice, extinction in our social and cultural lives. While species extinction is largely determined by scientific studies, the term ‘extinction’ is also constituted and transformed by other social and cultural contexts, and this process in turn affects the way we understand the extinction of animal species. While I acknowledge that scientific and social science research is vitally important in understanding species extinction, cultural studies provides ways for understanding the public representation and significance of extinction in contemporary society. WORKING HYPOTHESES • Extinction as a social and cultural practice expresses humanity’s awareness of its own demise • Enunciating extinction expresses discursive power while exculpating the enunciator • The category of species is framed by uncertain boundaries • Extinctions are geographically and historically isolated to the death of the last specimen, and • Extinctions occur at the frontier – as far away from the metropolitan centre as possible • The agency of nonhuman animals in detecting human presence and evading observation and surveillance is greatly underestimated.

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, Australian Animal Studies Group, Extinction Studies Working Group