Animal Liberation: 50 Years On

Animal Liberation: 50 Years On

Reflections, Revisions and New Horizons 

Online, 3rd April, 2023 11am-1pm BST

Register via Eventbrite.

An event hosted by the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre to mark the 50th anniversary of Peter Singer’s "Animal Liberation".

A liberation movement demands an expansion of our moral horizons, so that practices that were previously regarded as natural and inevitable are now seen as intolerable.

Peter Singer

On 5th April 1973, under the title "Animal Liberation", the New York Review of Books published Peter Singer's reflections on the book Animals, Men and Morals. In this short piece, Singer's own famous theory, which focuses on the equality of all sentient creatures, emerges almost fully formed. Singer provocatively claims that the book poses "a challenge to every human to recognise his attitudes to nonhumans as a form of prejudice no less objectionable than racism or sexism".

So how must we reflect on that same challenge, and revise it, 50 years on? What does it mean, now, to continue to call for animal liberation? What new horizons might animal liberation today open up? And what role can philosophy and culture play in that expansive movement?

50 years on from the publication of Singer's classic essay, the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre welcomes Peter Singer and four world-leading writers about animals to reflect on these and related questions.

Speakers:

Danielle Celermajer, author of Summertime: Reflections on a Vanishing Future (2021)

Alex Lockwood, author of The Pig in Thin Air (2016)

Laura Jean McKay, author of The Animals in that Country (2021) 

Eva Meijer, author of When Animals Speak: Towards an Interspecies Democracy (2019)

Peter Singer's Animal Liberation Now, the first fully revised and updated edition of Animal Liberation since 1990, will be published in the US, UK and Australia/NZ in late May/early June.

The event is free and open to all: please register at Eventbrite for joining instructions.