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Introduction: Encountering Animals: Essays in Critical Animal Studies
by Jieun Cho
Cite As: Cho, Jieun. 2025. “Encountering Animals: Essays in Critical Animal Studies.” EAS 590: Critical Animal Studies, May 1. https://asianpacific.duke.edu/blog-post/introduction-encountering-animals-essays-critical-animal-studies.
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How might we encounter animals in an age shaped by mass extinction, farmed tissues, vegan aesthetics, rescued companions, and managed wildness?
This collection of essays grew out of a semester-long seminar (“Critical Animal Studies”) which I taught in Spring 2025 at Duke University. A small group of humanistically minded scholars, we began with John Berger’s provocation to “look at animals”—a call to recognize the implications of the human gaze on animal life. From there, we moved through critical discussions on animal rights, factory farms, heritage conservation, multispecies kinship, decolonizing naturecultures, and supply chain ecologies.
We soon realized that “looking” is not enough. We wanted to stay with animals not only as symbols or resources, but also as fellow historical beings who labor, resist, travel, care, and play. To encounter animals, we propose, is not only to observe them, but to allow ourselves to be observed—to explore, with some discomfort and curiosity, what might happen when they look back, and how things might unfold otherwise from there.
The essays in this issue are partial responses to that invitation, and in turn, extend their own invitations to the reader. Haocong Cheng juxtaposes his childhood memory of the “docile sheep” with his ongoing research on Maoist China, showing how the unruliness of hybrid sheep disrupted state-led engineering projects for fine wool production and transformed herders into adaptive caregivers and nimble technicians. Karey Balkind reflects on the entanglement of equine labor and kinship in the horse-show industry through the story of two bonded horses, Willie and Latte, tracing how workers, including herself, cultivate alternative gestures of care and knowledge that resist the productive logics of the human–horse contract. Mingkang Hao offers a meditation on temporary cohabitation with a cat, Jura, whose claws and care reshaped her expectations of domesticated companionship. And Viviana Hammond examines the ethics of humane slaughter in a farm-to-table setting, questioning whether her closeness to Rice and Beans, the lambs she raised, can ever truly absolve the act of killing—even when framed through good care and companionship.
Taken together, these essays ask what it means—and what it takes—to encounter animal life not through mastery or metaphor alone, but through cohabitation, interdependency, and the friction of interspecies life—in homes, barns, archives, and kitchens.
Refusing to collapse animals into self-important moral narratives, these pieces collectively invite us to stay with their difference, unpredictability, and ways of being that may never fully align with our own. Proposing openings rather than resolutions, the stories that these student scholars tell offer critical exercises in ethical hesitation, in being affected, and in imagining how the terms of encounter might be rewritten.
About the author
Jieun Cho is a postdoctoral associate and cultural anthropologist at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. Her research, titled “Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan,” investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.
Various stages of her work have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate School at Duke University. Since 2021, she has also been a Contributing Editor of the Society for East Asian Anthropology section of Anthropology News.
Before joining academia, she worked in the IT and energy industries in Korea and Japan.