Definition of cria

\ ˈkrē-ə \ plural crias

: a baby llama, alpaca, vicuña, or guanaco… the scarcity of alpacas is based on their slow rate of reproduction, since females usually deliver one baby, called a cria, per year.

CRIA

Conversations on Research at the Intersections of Animality

About the series: CRIA began as a series of remote “guest lectures” for a course in Feminism and Food, taught at the University of Alberta by Chloë Taylor in the winter of 2021, which focused on the politics of animal agriculture from intersectional perspectives. These conversations have been edited and animated as videos and with the permission of interviewees are being shared here. The conversation series has also continued into 2022 and 2023.

Lauren Corman and Darren Chang on Intersections and Covid-19

In this first conversation in the CRIA series, which took place in December 2020, critical animal studies scholars Lauren Corman and Darren Chang discuss an article that they had recently published, “From Wet Markets to Meatpacking: Why Animal Advocacy Fails without Anti-Racism” (August 2020), racism in animal advocacy, and the need for critical animal studies scholarship and animal activist to be intersectional more broadly. In the course of the conversation, Lauren and Darren also discuss how they were expanding upon this original essay; their longer article was published in May 2021 in a Special Topics issue of Animal Studies Journal on “Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Covid-19” as “Multispecies Disposability: Taxonomies of Power in a Global Pandemic.”

Lauren Corman on Intersections, Animals, and Food

In this second conversation in the CRIA series, Brock University critical animal studies scholar Lauren Corman discusses topics such as intersectionality, food waste, and the imbrications of of racialization and animalization in attitudes towards human urban foragers and urban raccoons. Two of Lauren’s publications are taken as a starting point for this conversation: her interview, “Subjectivities and Intersections,” in Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food, and her Journal for Critical Animal Studies article, “Getting their Hands Dirty: Raccoons, Freegans, and Urban ‘Trash’.”

Maneesha Deckha on Postcolonial Feminism, Law, and Veganism

In this third conversation in the CRIA series, which took place in December 2020, University of Victoria Law professor and critical animal studies scholar Maneesha Deckha discusses her new book, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press, 2021), how her work in postcolonial feminism brought her to think about animals, and the role that law has to play in resisting speciesism, among other topics.

Dinesh Wadiwel on Capitalism, Animal Agriculture, and Aquafarming

In this conversation, University of Sydney Marxist philosopher, critical disability studies scholar, and political theorist of human-animal relations Dinesh Wadiwel describes his response to epidemiologist Rob Wallace on the relationship between industrial animal agriculture and epidemics and pandemics such as Covid-19. Among other topics, this conversation also touches upon Wadiwel’s work on the politics and ethics of industrially farming fish.

Vasile Stanescu on In Vitro Meat and “Animal Realism”

In this fifth conversation in the series, Mercer University communication studies and critical animal studies scholar Vasile Stanescu responds to some of the earlier conversations as they touched upon in vitro meat and explains why he is opposed to this new food technology. In this conversation Vas also talks a bit about his forthcoming book, tentatively titled Cash Cow.

Kelly Struthers Montford on Colonialism, Prisons, and Food

Kelly Struthers Montford is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University. She did her PhD at the University of Alberta, writing a dissertation that explored food laws and the politics of how we define food from the perspective of political ontologies, anti-colonial theory, prison abolition, and critical animal studies. In this conversation, Struthers Montford explores some of these topics, from food laws and labeling and food ontologies to cattle colonialism and prison farms.

Tayler Zavitz on the Repression of Animal Activism

Tayler Zavitz is an animal activist and PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Victoria where she is writing her PhD on the historical and contemporary repression of animal activism in Canada. She also has a BA and MA in Critical Sociology from Brock University where she specialized in Critical Animal Studies. In this conversation, Zavitz explains some of the ways that animal activism is criminalized, socially stigmatized and dismissed, including the ways that animal activists are represented in the media. She also discusses the relationship between feminism and animal advocacy and the significant role that women have played in animal activism.