Domesticated over 10,500 years ago, cows are currently found in every country across the globe yet there is still much to learn about their varied histories, geographies, and lives. Part of the reason for this is a lack of soft infrastructure for scholars to connect with each other across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. This network aims to gather researchers who have an interest in broader ‘bovine scholarship’ and more specific ‘cow scholarship’ to share, learn, and engage in knowledge creation with one another.

Network Founders: Claudia Hirtenfelder (17ch38@queensu.ca) and Andrea Petitt (andrea.petitt@gender.uu.se).

Files List

  • 2nd Bovine Scholarship Workshop (Program)  
    In category: Program.
    Uploaded by Claudia Hirtenfelder on 31 March 2022.
  • Call for Presenters and Participants for the 2nd Bovine Scholarship Workshop  
    In category: Call.
    Uploaded by Claudia Hirtenfelder on 19 November 2021.

    After the success of our first Bovine Scholarship Workshop in October 2021, we are pleased to announce that we will be hosting a second Bovine Scholarship Workshop from the 30-31st of March 2022. 

    After good feedback from our first workshop we have decided to keep the numbers fairly small and to ensure that there is ample time for discussion of ideas. 

    The workshop will be held over two afternoons (13:00-17:00 CET) on the 30th and 31st of March 2022. There are limited spaces to present and attend the workshop. If you are interested in presenting your application should include: a 200-250 word abstract, a 150 word bio, affiliation and email address. Please note that you do not need to have an affiliated paper with your abstract and that works in progress are welcome. If you are only interested in participating (but not presenting) and this is your first time applying to a Bovine Scholarship Workshop your application should include: a 200-250 word motivation for why you would like to attend and what your interests in bovine scholarship are, a 150 word bio, affiliation, and email address. The deadline for all applications is 28 January 2022. 

    For more details regarding the workshop and how to apply please consult the attached file. 

  • Women and Cattle "Becoming-With" in Botswana  
    In category: Journal Article.
    Uploaded by Andrea Petitt on 31 October 2021.
  • Bovine Scholarship Workshop (5-6 Oct 2021)  
    In category: Program.
    Uploaded by Claudia Hirtenfelder on 24 October 2021.

    To better understand the multiplicity and dynamism of human-cow relations, this workshop aims to bring together scholars who are working on questions of human-cow relations from a variety of contexts and who are asking questions about these relations from a multitude of lenses (such as historical, geographical, gendered and phenomenological). Domesticated over 10,500 years ago, cows are currently found in every country across the globe yet there is still much to learn about their varied histories, geographies, and lives. This despite cows’ centrality to human pursuits of agriculture, colonization and capitalism as well as their implication in climate change. Furthermore, even as social research on cows emerges from all continents there is little opportunity to understand how these different cow geographies and stories are connected and/or produce varied realities and knowledge.

  • Milking economies: Multispecies entanglements in the infant formula industry  
    In category: Journal Article.
    Uploaded by Claudia Hirtenfelder on 24 October 2021.

    Abstract
    In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. Our purpose in this paper is to understand how this deal – and the new Feihe formula factory located in Kingston, Canada – is underpinned by a series of multispecies entanglements across cow, human and goat mothers in China and Canada. To do so, we analyse official correspondence between the CDC, Feihe and City of Kingston; market reports for the dairy, goat and infant formula industries; and news articles about the Feihe infant formula plant. Conceptually, we develop an anti-colonial, multispecies entanglement framework to chart the violent inclusions, exclusions and typologizations that make milk and formula economies possible. We are specifically interested in how the Feihe–CDC deal (re)configures entanglements across species, nation, race, science and motherhood. To understand these relations, we heuristically imbricate two different sets of entanglements that underpin this deal: milk drinking, empire and genetic purity across race, breed and species; and motherhood, science and technology across humans, goats and cows. We use our threefold entanglement framework to better understand the violence of these imbrications and to work towards a multispecies feminist ethic in the infant formula industry.