Lecture｜Multi-species Asia: Toward Animal Perspectives

2026-09-17 - 2026-11-30

【International Conference】Multi-species Asia: Toward Animal Perspectives

📅 Date: October 1 (Thu.) –October 3 (Sat.), 2026
📍 Venue: Room 8004, College of Liberal Arts, National Sun Yat-sen University
🗣️ Languages: Mandarin Chinese / English
📝 Registration: link
📖 Full Program: link

What might familiar questions of history, religion, conservation, and justice look like if we no longer approached animals solely from a human perspective?
Animals have long entered scholarly inquiry as resources, symbols, objects of management, or forms of cultural representation within human societies. But what happens when we shift our perspective toward animals themselves—and toward the relationships they form with humans, environments, religious worlds, and political orders? Might “Asia” then appear differently, as a landscape constituted through diverse forms of multispecies coexistence?
The international conference “Multi-species Asia: Toward Animal Perspectives,” taking place at National Sun Yat-sen University from October 1 to 3, 2026, brings together scholars and practitioners from Taiwan, India, the Philippines, and Europe. Drawing on anthropology, religious studies, history, literature, art, and ecological conservation, the conference explores animals not merely as objects of human observation, governance, and representation, but as beings with agency, relationships, and histories that participate in shaping the worlds we inhabit together.
From serpents and Buddhist sacred geographies, animal management in Tang China, and street dogs in colonial India, to canaries, bees, the Philippine eagle, Bornean gibbons, and animals in contemporary Taiwanese art and literature, the conference moves across geographical and historical contexts to examine colonial violence, religious ethics, habitat transformation, conservation politics, artistic representation, and the continually negotiated relationships between human and nonhuman lives.

📅 October 1 (Thu.), 11:15–12:45
Keynote｜From Kinship and Worship to Multispecies Relations
On October 1, Ambika Aiyadurai, Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IIT Gandhinagar), will deliver the keynote lecture: “Multispecies Relations in Asia: Stories of Kinship and Worship.” Aiyadurai’s research in the Eastern Himalayas of India engages environmental anthropology and multispecies ethnography, with particular attention to Indigenous communities, wildlife conservation, and the kinship, ethical, and political relations between humans and animals.

📅 October 2 (Fri.), 13:30–15:00
Keynote｜Wildlife Conservation and the Conditions of Domesticated Animals
On October 2, Ven. Chao-Hwei, Professor at Hsuan Chuang University, will approach questions of animal ethics from a Buddhist perspective in her keynote lecture: “From ‘Human Management’ to ‘Human–Animal Intersubjectivity’: Wildlife Conservation and the Conditions of Domesticated Animals from a Buddhist Perspective.” Her lecture asks how conservation, domestication, and multispecies ethics might be reconsidered when animals are no longer understood merely as lives to be “managed” by humans.

📅 October 3 (Sat.), 11:15–13:15
Roundtable｜Living with Predators
The October 3 roundtable, “Living with Predators: Conservation, Compassion, and Coexistence in Multi-species Asia,” brings these questions into some of the more contested terrains of multispecies coexistence. What does “coexistence” mean when the ecological roles of large predators encounter human fear and safety, animal suffering, conservation practices, and Indigenous knowledge?
The roundtable brings together Ven. Chao-Hwei; Ambika Aiyadurai; Yi-Shan Lin, Founder and Executive Director of the Taiwan Animal Equality Association; Lavuras Abaliwsu, Chief of the Alilje Community of the Rukai people and Supervisor of the Clouded Leopard Association; and Shih-Hsuan Yu, PhD Candidate at the University of Cologne and Secretary-General of the Clouded Leopard Association. Together, they will open a dialogue across different Asian contexts, ethical traditions, conservation practices, and multispecies relations.

🗣️Conference Panels｜Multispecies Perspectives across Asia
Alongside the two keynote lectures and the roundtable, the conference features a series of paper panels that bring multispecies inquiry into conversation across different geographical, historical, and cultural contexts in Asia.
The presentations range from serpents and Buddhist sacred geography, animal management and instrumental value in Tang China, and street dogs and colonial violence in India, to questions of Humanistic Buddhism, canaries, and animals in contemporary Taiwanese art and literature. Research from the Philippines and Borneo turns to bees, the Philippine eagle, and gibbons to explore Indigenous knowledge, land transformation, habitat fragmentation, and multispecies justice. Moving from marine–terrestrial animal transformations in Qing-dynasty Lingnan to digital creatures, the conference further asks how the boundaries of “the animal” and “the multispecies” are constituted and reconfigured across different epistemologies and media.
Please see the full conference program for all speakers, paper titles, and session details.
Organizers
Global Co-Becoming and International Sinology Research Center (GCIS), National Sun Yat-sen University
Center for Transcultural Co-Becoming and Global Sinology, College of Liberal Arts, National Sun Yat-sen University

Sub-Project Ⅳ: Environmental Crises and Multi-species Justice in the 21st Century: Toward Decolonization Beyond the Human—International Center for Cultural Studies (ICCS), National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
 

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