Animal advocacy, fear and loathing in academia: a response to Helena Pedersen

ABSTRACT Helena Pedersen’s powerful keynote address poses the question: What prevents education from becoming a transformative force in times of ‘omnicide’, that is, ‘the annihilation of everything’? She locates at least part of the response in ‘institutional anxiety’, which constitutes a (social-) psychological barrier to radical change. In particular, she discusses anxiety related to the moral standing of non-human animals as a threat to human exceptionalism in educational practice and research. Institutional anxiety, as I show in my discussion of a recent manifestation at a university in South Africa, also occurs in post-liberation societies, when ‘university teachers confront’ or consider confronting ‘their own colleagues with requests for deconstruction of the anthropocentric infrastructure of their own workplace’ (Pedersen), colleagues they know to have been historically marginalised or disenfranchised. However, as I hope to make clear in my response, there are some ways of confrontation that are less divisive than others.