“Shared Worlds”: Why These Conversations Matter Now
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“Shared Worlds”: Why These Conversations Matter Now
06/18/2026
On August 1, 2026, the Vegan Studies Initiative at Arihanta Institute will host “Shared Worlds: Concepts, Conflicts, and Connections in Human–Animal Studies.” The timing could not be more appropriate.
For decades we have been living in an era shaped by ecological destabilization, zoonotic disease threats, intensifying political polarization, racial injustice, forced migration, and rapid technological change. Human–animal relationships are not marginal to these crises—they are deeply entangled with them. Industrial animal agriculture accelerates climate change and biodiversity loss. High-density confinement systems amplify pandemic risk. The logic of animalization continues to inform racialized and colonial hierarchies. Technological innovation, from lab-grown meat to outer space research, often proceeds through the instrumentalization of anthropocentrism in thought and nonhuman life in flesh.
“Shared Worlds” was designed to explore and address this complexity. Organized around three themes—concepts, conflicts, and connections—the conference invites participants to move between theory and practice, philosophy and policy, religion and activism.
The day opens with a keynote from Richard Twine, whose talk, “Exploring Sites of Care as Sites of Vegan Subjectification,” discusses how everyday practices of care—such as veterinary work and feeding children or patients—often occur within systems that commodify animals, creating tensions within the animal-industrial complex. It explores how these sites of care can generate resistance, highlighting the emergence of vegan professionals and families who challenge Capital’s reduction of nonhuman life and affirm animal subjectivity.
The morning’s “Dog Worlds” panel—featuring Kamini Gogri, Inna Häkkinen, and Agnieszka Grynkiewicz—explores interspecies relationships across religious, literary, and psychological terrains. Presentations range from dogs and Bhairava in South Asian religious traditions, to interspecies survival narratives in nuclear disaster fiction, to the complexities of co-regulation and relational autonomy in urban human–dog bonds. Together, these papers unsettle rigid human/animal binaries and show how vulnerability, dependence, and resilience are navigated within shared ecologies.
The conference then turns toward structural conflict. The “Chicken Worlds” panel—featuring Vasile Stanescu, Crystal Health, and Amber Canavan—critically examines cage-free reforms and corporate welfare campaigns within industrial egg production. Panelists interrogate whether incremental reforms meaningfully reduce suffering or whether they ultimately reinforce the stability of industrial systems. These debates resonate beyond animal advocacy, reflecting broader global questions about reform, co-optation, and the limits of market-based solutions to systemic injustice.
The two afternoon panels widen the frame even further. “Hidden (Ab)Uses”—featuring Rimona Afana, Jack Lampkin, Paula Siemieniec, and Nathan Poirier—addresses animals used in outer space research, the sexual and reproductive violations embedded in animal industries, and the contested politics of in vitro meat. These presentations foreground the intersections of capitalism, technological ambition, and multispecies harm.
The closing panel, “Not Only About Animals”—featuring Dana McPhall, Monica Mattfeld, and Raj Kumar Singh—insists that human–animal studies cannot be isolated from struggles against white supremacy, ableism, and colonial displacement. The speakers examine anti-Blackness and animalization, gendered ableism in eighteenth-century equine labor, and the moral complexity of meat consumption among Tibetan refugees navigating ecological history and exile. In doing so, the conference situates animal ethics within broader movements for social justice.
The Vegan Studies Initiative at Arihanta Institute seeks to build scholarly infrastructure for precisely these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations. By bringing together scholars, students, and advocates from across fields and continents, “Shared Worlds” reflects a commitment to inquiry and practice that is philosophically grounded, contextually sensitive, and politically engaged. If climate change, public health, racial justice, food systems, and technological ethics are defining issues of our time, then examining the human–animal boundary is not a niche concern. It is central to understanding and reshaping the world we share.