Fourth Oslo Minding Animals speaker confirmed: Liv Emma Thorsen

All four plenary speakers for the October 14-15 Oslo Minding Animals event "Shared worlds" are now in place. The fourth speaker to be confirmed is professor Liv Emma Thorsen of University of Oslo (Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages). Her talk will be entitled "Shared worlds? Animals in natural history museums".

Already confirmed:
* Rod Bennison: "Considering the exploitation of animals in sport, and understanding the 'Sport of Queens'"
* Tora Holmberg: "Sharing the lives of many: Urban controversies over animal hoarding and animal rescue"
* Nelly Mäekivi: "Misunderstandings in shared environments: The case of zoos"

See our event page, and Facebook page, for further info (registration is free for anyone interested).

No funding for MAO - "Shared worlds"

We the organizers of the Oslo Minding Animals event "Shared Worlds" (see also our Facebook page) have applied for funding from two different Norwegian sources (Lisa Kristoffersens Minde and Lovsamlingsfondet - in June, I was involved in writing/editing applications), and have now received negative replies from both.

In all likelihood this means that we'll have to scale back the plans for the event, at least as far as additional international speakers is concerned. We'll settle this in a meeting of the organizing team this coming Friday.

Minding Animals Oslo: Speakers in place?

The last week or so we have made progress getting the program for our forthcoming Oslo Minding Animals event in place. We have all four speakers confirmed - but since two of them are conditional on a successful funding application, which will be decided in two weeks time, we are not quite ready to go public with all the names yet.

Zoosemiotics and MAO planning

1. Yesterday the organizing team of the forthcoming Oslo Minding Animals Pre-Conference Lecture event (October 14-15) had its second Skype meeting. In focus was our event webpage, which is about to be launched. We also established an email account, shared.worlds.oslo [] gmail.com. Meanwhile, Martin Lee Mueller has withdrawn from the organizing team.

2. Today I have worked with plans for the Futures of Zoosemiotics roundtable, which will be arranged in Tartu, April 6th, as part of the conference Zoosemiotics and Animal Representations (program here). I have taken part in discussing the time schedule/format, made a preliminary list of roundtable participants to invite (after February 15th), and written a 10-line presentation of key questions of the roundtable.

MAO: First meeting carried out

The first, virtual meeting of the organizers of the Minding Animals Prelecture event in Oslo (MAO) next year was carried out Thursday December 16th (I took part from Rio de Janeiro, where I am for a month around Christmas). 2 and a half hour of chat...

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Kristian Bjørkdahl is not joining us after all, but have in stead suggested Martin Lee Mueller, also of Centre for Development and the Environment, who now has joined our organizing team (eco-phenomenological, deep ecological master thesis, 2008: Symphony of Silences: A Journey Through a Multicentric World).
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The MAO event will now for sure span over 2 days, October 14-15, 2011. The task for the participants for Saturday October 15th will be to work out and compose a manifesto on the relationship between academia and activism with regard to human-animal relations.