Abstract: In the early part of the 19th century, an estimated 30-60 million plains bison populated the western plains region of North America. Due to an aggressive campaign of mass slaughter deployed by the frontier army as a tactic in subduing Indigenous populations and by private hunters seeking to cash in on lucrative trade in bison hides and bones, the population collapsed to less than 1000 by the 1880s. Taking up the biopolitical lens of population, I trace a dispositif of sovereign power in the classification of animals as resources to be exploited for military and economic ends—a classification justified by settler colonial epistemologies. Settler colonial logics of classification transformed bison first into commodities and later into private property. Contemporary commercial and conservation bison herds continue to be framed as property under still-active colonial grids of intelligibility. By analyzing the multiple ways the bison body has been commoditized under colonial capitalism, this paper identifies specific challenges to the project of decolonizing animal life as well as opportunities for the intervention of alternative modes of imagining the relationship between human and nonhuman life.

Abstract: Food and Animals have had their turns in Social Sciences (Lien 2004; Tovey; 2003). Food, as Lien (2004) write, is no longer trapped in a ‘black box’ (Latour 1987) of conventional agricultural practice. It has instead been exposed as a hybrid phenomenon (Lien & Nerlich (2004) grabbing everyone’s embodied attention. Animal turn in Sociology and Geography meant that attention began to be paid to the ways humans are being with animals (Urbanik 2012) for instance, farming them on a large scale in order to meet rising meat demands. In this presentation I would like to draw a parallel between the Food Turn and Animal Turn in Social Sciences to illustrate how the two enrich together a conversation about Politics of Food. I would like to explore it further by focusing on a remaining invisibility of Farm Animals that become transgenic meat. Drawing on an empirical study of the EnviropigTM (a transgenic animal destined for human consumption and environmental protection) and inspired by Stenger’s cosmopolitics (2010) (that further emphases a need to overcome natural-cultural divide) I want to emphasise its unique contribution to Politics of Food. I will close by saying that controversies – such as the Enviropig – are not just ‘ideological battles’ but ‘powerful apparatuses for exploring and learning about possible worlds’(Callon et al 2009 p.28) as well as moral worlds (Driessen and Korthals 2012).