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work (“BASAN”). BASAN brings together top animal law scholars from
across North America, including U.S. law schools such as Yale and Harvard,
to support advances in animal law, animal policy making and related animal
studies.
Such support comes at a critical time, with animal law and policy
addressing the global issues that dominate news headlines, such as climate
change, threats to species populations and extinction, rollbacks to wildlife
protections, the global trade in wildlife, animal personhood cases and commercial
exploitation of animals deemed livestock. The Brooks Institute
engages additional projects such as the sentience and cognition of nonhuman
animals and stages annual summits in animal law, animal policy
and animal studies across multiple disciplines.
Here at UVic, Deckha’s Brooks Initiative research grant is funding several
projects, including the Animals & Society Research Initiative (“ASRI”),4 an
interdisciplinary research hub promoting critical thinking on interspecies
relations. ASRI brings together faculty and graduate scholars across multiple
disciplines, including law, sociology, geography, philosophy, psychology,
anthropology and art history and visual studies. ASRI’s events across
the academic year include a distinguished lecture series, with guest scholars
in animal law and policy from New York University, University of Sydney,
Harvard Law School, the University of Washington and more. The
annual ASRI Emerging Scholars Workshop for law students, graduate students
and early career scholars attracts applicants specializing in animal
law and policy from around the world.
ASRI brings together students, faculty, independent scholars and community
members to consider and debate how anthropocentrism and
speciesism, along with their entanglements in other power-laden social
forces, shape our societies and communities in terms of how humans and
humanity imagine, represent, interact with and are constituted by animals
and animality. The initiative seeks to foster understanding of the intricacies,
complexity and depth of human–animal relations and identities as
well as how we can move at local and global levels to a less violent, more
harmonious interspecies society.
The highlight event for the 2019–2020 academic year was the Inaugural
Lecture in Animal Rights, Law and Policy, presented remotely on March 10,
2020 by Kristen A. Stilt, professor of law at Harvard Law School, to an audience
at UVic Law’s Fraser Building. Dr. Stilt is Faculty Director of Harvard’s
Animal Law & Policy Program, which has built momentum since Harvard
Law School first offered an animal law course in 2000. At the time it became
the ninth law school to offer a course in animal law. Twenty years later, over