Publication Type: Traditional Presentation
Abstract: A 3 year multiple-institution study of adult visitors to zoos and aquariums was conducted to determine what visitors gain from a visit. The study involved over 3500 people at 13 instititons. Findings will be shared but focus will be on implications from the findings for the zoo and aquarium field and for conservation education in general.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This is a thorough study of court cases involving zoos and aquariums in the United States..

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Civil disobedience is the deliberate violation of law committed in public as a form of protest. Since the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, its practice has become a regular feature of the struggle for peace and social justice. Yet little is known about the characteristics of those engaging in civil disobedience or about the personal and political consequences resulting from their actions. What demographics characterize the seasoned protestor? How are protestors handled by the police and treated while in state custody? What are the consequences of their public dissent both personally and professionally? Have their actions resulted in meaningful policy change, and how do protestors define "meaningful?" The present study utilizes a snowball sample of activists arrested for past involvement in civil disobedience to gather information about the precursors to and consequences of civil disobedience in the post-civil rights era.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Recent work on animals has sought to propel us into ethical questions about how one might achieve a “posthuman” universe no longer centered exclusively around the human. While politically and ethically important, such a move does not entirely deal with the complex ways in which animals have been used in the past. This paper explores such a historical moment, the early teens, when film studios established themselves in California, and when Hollywood started to achieve global dominance. Film studios usually had zoos attached to them, not least because of the popularity of “jungle pictures.” Looking at one such studio and zoo—William Selig’s Polyscope Company—I argue that zoos were a crucial part of early Hollywood culture because they allowed for contradictory forms of engagement—both utopian and imperial—that played with but also displaced gender, racial and ethnic hierarchies, becoming a crucial vehicle at a time when the U.S. film industry tried to achieve cultural legitimacy at home and global dominance abroad.

Looking at stories published in Selig Studio’s in-house journal, Paste-Pot and Shears, at accounts of the studio’s and the zoo’s openings, and at synopses and advertising material for many lost animal films (all of which I had a chance to consult at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles), I tease out the crossroads between zoos and moving pictures on three different levels. First, I explore what kind of cultural work these zoos did in connection with U.S. imperialism, particularly how they reconceived of global geography, the relationship between the human, the animal and the environment. Second, I look at the zoo grounds as a social space, in terms of how it structured experiences and encounters. And third, I look at how the studio zoos and the pictures that followed staged and displaced forms of racial and gendered identification. Especially in the discourse surrounding the labor of African American employees at the zoo, the work of female animal trainers and moving picture stars (especially Kathlyn Williams, the star of The Adventures of Kathlyn, an early serial queen melodrama which was partially set in Africa), films such as Hunting Big Game in Africa (1908), a fake documentary about Teddy Roosevelt’s hunting trip to Africa, and the use of child actors, such as Baby Lillian Wade, which helped turn the ferocious into the cute, we can see how zoos not only staged but also displaced the era’s racial and gender conflicts, allowing early cinema to simultaneously assert its imperial power and allow for new forms of identity and identification, thus becoming a crucial tool for an American cinema in search of global hegemony.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The perspectives of human-animal relations and sociology/anthropology of religion are brought together for an analysis of Christian Saints' legends. Clifford Geertz's concept of religion as a cultural system, especially the idea of symbols fostering religious moods and motivations, forms the theoretical base. The symbolic animals dog (Roch & Dominic), bird (Martin & Francis), and lamb (Agnes) are examined, and the moods and motivations evoked by their legendary roles are explored respectively. Subordination and humanization of animals as well as the animal as a helping companion to humans are figured out. A more detailed look upon the different creatures dog, bird and lamb shows the religious contexts that portray animals within human culture. Furthermore, the construction or disappearance of the human-animal boundary will be analyzed in each legend. Agnes' case raises the question of gender ideology which also throws light on the male saints and "their" animals. An analysis of moods and motivations, enriched by the concept of gender ideology, serves to make sociological sense of a crucial part of the dominant – not only Roman Catholic – Christian worldview and ethos. The gender ideological implications made explicit more generally urge towards a sensitivity for the role of power within religious imagination.