On January 31, 2025 the Moving Animals: Wanderings in the Anthropocene conference will be held at Maastricht University. This conference is an opportunity to both reflect on the research conducted over the past five years by the Moving Animals project, as well as hear from invited scholars who have recently been working on the history of animal movement.

Please email: vanessa.bateman@nullmaastrichtuniversity.nl if you would like to attend.

Program
Moving Animals: Wanderings in the Anthropocene
January 31, 2025
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Maastricht University

Since 2019, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University has hosted the NWO Vici Project ‘Moving Animals Project: A History of Science, Media and Policy in the Twentieth Century’. This project set out to study changing human-nature relations by focusing on human involvement with ‘wild’ animals that move (or are being moved) over great distances. Over the past five years, researchers on the project have been analysing how the long-distance movement of these animals has been studied, represented, managed and policed throughout the twentieth century. Four main categories of animal mobility took centre stage: (1) biological invasions, (2) reintroductions of locally extinct species, (3) seasonal migrations and (4) the trading of zoo animals. By probing how these various forms of animal movement have been made knowable, visible and controllable, the project sought to cast a light on the changing place and space of animals in today’s globalizing world.

At our closing conference, we will take stock of the results of the project, look ahead to new questions to be explored, and enter into dialogue (or rather continue this dialogue) with other scholars that explore animal mobilities from a humanities perspective. It is a moment to bring various threads of scholarship together, and look ahead at the future. Apart from (former) members of the project, the conference will have a limited number of invited speakers. Taking various case studies as their starting point, the speakers will use animal movement as a lens to re-assess historical shifts in human-animal relations and offer new perspectives on the Anthropocene.

Session 1: : Objects/Subjects of Science

Simone Schleper (Maastricht University)
Entangled movements: Animal migration research, representations and conservation politics in the 20th century

Tom Quick
‘Lost’ Hounds and City Pounds: Dog Requisition and its Opposition in the US, 1950s-1960s

Matthew Holmes (University of Stavanger)
The Migration Mystery: Avian Minds and Movement in the Nineteenth Century

Session 2: In and Out of Place

Helen Cowie (University of York)
Globetrotters: Alpacas on the Move

Vanessa Bateman (Maastricht University)
(Dis)entangling Wapiti and Red Deer in 20th Century New Zealand

Vincent Bijman (Maastricht University)
The Small Indian Mongoose (Urva auropunctata). The construction of an iconic global animal invasion

Session 3: Containing/Letting Loose

Jonathan Saha (University of Durham)
(Im)mobilizing Animals in Colonial Myanmar: Reflections on Migration and Motility

Marianna Szczygielska (Czech Academy of Sciences)
The Role of Circuses in Elephant Mobility in Central Europe

Monica Vasile (Maastricht University)
Extinction Emergency: a history of saving the takahē rail in Aotearoa New Zealand

Session 4: Recruiting/reordering

Mieke Roscher (University of Kassel)
Moving Animals for the exploitation of “Lebensraum”: Nazi animal politics between the invasion of Poland and the “Masterplan for the East (Generalplan Ost)”

Dolly Jørgensen (University of Stavanger)
Martins Moving In: Recruiting Migrating Purple Martins as Agricultural Workers

Raf De Bont (Maastricht University)
Animals Moving/Being Moved: Towards Some Conclusions