January 21-23, 2026 in Halle (Saale)
funded by the German Research Foundation and the Just Transition Centre
Organised by Dr Larissa Fleischmann, Department of Human Geography and Just Transition Center, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and Wisse van Engelen, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne
This interdisciplinary workshop explores the manifold boundaries that shape the field of animal health, drawing on case studies from across the globe. We build from the notion that a critical engagement with the social, historical and political contexts in which the management of infectious animal diseases unfolds, fruitfully expands veterinarian expertise on disease control (Enticott & Ward, 2020; Schulz & Boklund, 2020). Yet, theory and practice of promoting animal health often remain structured by epistemic boundaries, territorial borders, and species divides (Enticott, 2017; Hinchliffe, Allen, Lavau, Bingham, & Carter, 2013; Law, 2006; Magouras et al., 2020; Smart & Smart, 2012). Moving beyond Eurocentric and anthropocentric perspectives, this workshop aims to advance approaches to animal health that are attentive to local histories and global power relations, while recognising its multispecies dis/entanglements. We seek to critically examine how practices of animal health perpetuate – or challenge – hierarchical forms of power and domination shaped by modernist logics and colonial legacies.
We bring together perspectives that challenge conventional binaries and explore animal health from a diverse set of angles, such as veterinary medicine, geography, anthropology, and history. Through case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, this workshop seeks to decentre dominant paradigms and foster dialogue across disciplines, regions, and epistemologies. In doing so, we aim to collectively work towards an understanding of animal health as a contested process that is embedded in unequal global histories and situated local contexts—ultimately opening space for reimagining the politics, practices, and futures of animal health.
Questions that we aim to explore in the course of this workshop include but are not limited to the following:
- How do actors in the field of animal health draw, maintain and reproduce boundaries—between species, regions, responsibilities, or expertise—and with what (intended and unintended) consequences?
- How do related boundaries shape practices of diagnosis, preparation, prevention, and intervention – and how do they exclude other ways of knowing and acting?
- How are the boundaries of animal health contested, negotiated and crossed by various actors?
- And what alternative approaches might allow for more fluid and transgressive understandings of animal health—approaches attentive to multispecies justice, diverse historical trajectories and local contexts?
Keynote Lecture I & II
Wednesday, January 21st | 17:15–18:45
Wesley Mwatwara
Colonial Cartographies of Care: Veterinary Histories, Bordering Practices, and the Politics of Animal Health in Africa
Abstract
This keynote explores the historical and political dimensions of animal health governance in Africa, emphasising the colonial legacies that continue to shape veterinary practices, spatial interventions, and multispecies relations. Drawing on archival and field-based research from Southern Africa, the presentation interrogates how veterinary regimes, particularly during the colonial and postcolonial periods, have operated as instruments of control, exclusion, and epistemic dominance. It examines how veterinary fencing, disease zoning, and biosecurity protocols have not only structured landscapes and livestock economies but also reinforced racialized and capitalist hierarchies.
The talk critically engages with the material and symbolic roles of veterinary fences, illustrating how they demarcate zones of risk, regulate movement, and co-produce social and ecological inequalities. These spatial politics are situated within broader historical trajectories, where veterinary medicine served settler interests and suppressed African knowledge regimes. The enduring influence of these colonial cartographies is evident in contemporary disease control strategies, international regulatory frameworks, and the marginalization of local epistemologies.
Furthermore, the presentation reflects on the multispecies entanglements inherent in animal health interventions. It highlights how certain species are framed as disease reservoirs, often leading to violent practices like mass culling. These interventions raise ethical questions about which lives are deemed protectable and which are expendable, revealing the biopolitical logics underpinning veterinary governance. By weaving together historical analysis, spatial critique, and multispecies perspectives, this keynote calls for a reimagining of animal health beyond its colonial and anthropocentric foundations. It advocates for decolonial, context-sensitive approaches that recognize diverse ways of knowing and being, and that promote multispecies justice in the face of global health challenges.
Keynote Lecture II
Wednesday, January 21st | 17:15–18:45
Else Vogel
Veterinary Care and its Discontents: More-Than-Animal Health and Metabolic Politics in European Animal Farming
Abstract
In this lecture, I situate animal health within a broader ‘metabolic politics’: how more-than-human eating and feeding relations on farms are shaped, regulated, and cared for amid tensions between economic production, food safety, animal welfare, public health, and sustainability. I show that metabolic politics revolves around various bordering practices: creating and problematizing distinctions between what is healthy/unhealthy, natural/unnatural, and fitting/wasteful; attaching and separating various eaters and feeders; and setting boundaries around the farm and its territory.
Rather than viewing the metabolic-political practices of animal farming as exerting a totalizing human power over life, I propose to see them as fragile, fallible, and lively multispecies experiments in crafting different, always troublesome metabolic worlds. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in the Dutch dairy sector, I present two such experiments, focusing on veterinarians, professionals who help harness the metabolic capacities of animals and their ecologies while at the same time addressing associated pathogenic, digestive, social and ecological vulnerabilities.
First, I discuss how so-called Cow-Calf-Contact systems challenge the standard Dutch practice of separating calves from their mothers immediately after birth in order to maximize milk production for humans and limit disease spread. Second, I show how vet-led learning circles for dairy farmers aimed at protein efficiency and reduction of compound feed and fertilizer respond to growing concerns over nitrogen pollution amidst intensification. In these cases, what counts as health—and for whom or what—comes into question, and the boundaries, objects, and norms of veterinary expertise and care are thereby challenged and expanded. The redrawing of veterinary care highlights how knowledge and care is continually renegotiated and reshaped in more-than-human entanglements.
Keynote Lecture III
Thursday, January 22nd | 16:15–17:45
Gareth Enticott
Crossing the Line: Borders and the Dogs of Empire
Abstract
For countries like New Zealand, sheepdogs are essential to the efficient functioning of pastoral economies and the development and maintenance of empires of wool and meat. These contributions are barely recognised: either in academic accounts of sheepscapes, or modernising discourses of grassland revolutions. However, a closer examination of these silences reveals the fragility of these modernist discourses of pastoralism and their accompanying colonial circulations, and their reliance on boundaries that are constantly in the making.
Focussing on the biopolitics of sheepdogs – their lives and deaths – this paper firstly explores how sheepdogs themselves were constituted in New Zealand, explaining how colonial ideas of what made a ‘good dog’ were challenged through formal and informal shepherding practices. Secondly, the paper examines how these lives were saved in the face of constant epidemics of canine distemper. Efforts to make a New Zealand specific vaccine highlighted the fragility of colonial knowledge relations. Instead, the making of a vaccine came to rely on a pragmatic approach to knowledge, that reconstituted relationships between shepherds, the veterinary profession and scientists.
Venue: Löwengebäude, Hörsaal XIII, Universitätsplatz 11, 06108 Halle (Saale)
Virtual Attendence via Webex (Password: Animals_2026), no registration required:
https://uni-halle.webex.com/uni-halle/j.php?MTID=md1a40a22a4d5e2c36fb2cc1a330b07ce