Nonhuman Kinship Roundtable - April 13th, 1PM CST - Register for this C21 Virtual Event!

Join the Center for 21st Century Studies (C21) at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in our second Lonely No More! Symposium Roundtable!

Nonhuman Kinship

Wednesday, April 13, 2022 | 1-2:30PM CST

Virtual Event

Register here!

How does loneliness manifest for nonhuman animals and in the nonhuman world? How might we rethink loneliness and connection with nonhumans in mind? As we reimagine and reinvent kin, how do spaces for human-nonhuman connection grow and develop in the age of robots, machines, computers, and AI?

The participants include:

• Barbara J. King – Emerita professor of anthropology at William & Mary and a freelance science writer and public speaker. The author of seven books, including the newest Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and the Wild, Barbara focuses on animal emotion and cognition, the ethics of our relationships with animals, and the evolutionary history of language, culture, and religion.
• Kite aka Suzanne Kite - Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California, and PhD candidate at Concordia University. Her research on contemporary Lakota ontologies, epistemology, and AI will inform our discussion about the future human-nonhuman relationships, and the use of art and performance as reflection.
• Juno Salazar Parreñas - Assistant professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, Parreñas will help us consider loneliness and extinction as we work to articulate the differences between loneliness, loss, and pain, informed in part by research from her award winning book Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation.
• Sonia Zhang - PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the New School. Her current research interests revolve around loneliness, how it has formulated as a public health problem and how social roboticists look to creating technologies of love and care to help alleviate it.

For more details about Lonely No More! please visit our Book Club, listen to our 6.5 Minutes With… Podcast, and view our Other Events and Opportunities! You may also watch our first roundtable discussion on YouTube, Lonely Infrastructure. Questions about our programming? Contact us at c21@uwm.edu.