Dominic O’key
Biographic Data
| ID | 2767444 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dominic O’key |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dominic |
| FAMILY NAME | O’key |
| SIGNATURE | O’KEY D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2833-4999 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Capturing elephants with Tsitsi Dangarembga
In the early days of the new millennium, Tsitsi Dangarembga filmed a televisual documentary about wildlife conservation conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe’s national parks. With the film’s attention trained on the social injustices of nature preservation, Elephant People refocuses awareness from the animal lives deemed worthy of protection to the neighbouring humans rendered vulnerable by that very act of doing so. The film's narrative has thus…
On Method in Animal Studies
W hat is the "animal" of literary animal studies?What are the affordances of and challenges for a mode of reading premised on the claim that its objects of research represent beings who are subjects of a life?Three recently published journal articles compel us to consider these questions as problems of method.Through their attention to terminology, historiography, and metonymy, the essays link the figure of the animal with its real historical ref…
Reproductive technology’s animal unconscious
Preclinical animal testing has played a critical role within medical history. Yet it remains an underdiscussed topic within the medical humanities. What might happen, then, if we analyse the animal studies of the lab via the method of cultural critique that is animal studies? This essay responds to this question by exploring the roles that animals play, and are made to play, within the technologies for, debates about and narratives of human repro…
Animal Studies
This review essay explores some key contributions to animal studies in 2023. In Section 1, Humanitarianism Beyond Humanism, I consider how Benjamin Meiches’s Nonhuman Humanitarians tracks animal labour as a form of post-humanitarianism. Section 2, Animalist India, turns to Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference and Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India, two complementary examinations of human–animal relations in India. Then, in Section 3, Zoologic…
Animal Studies
In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caugh…
Extinction in Public
This essay argues that the concept of extinction, polysemous if not overdetermined, is becoming an emergent keyword of contemporary public life as it faces the climate crisis. To make this argument the essay critically considers the ways in which extinction is currently being made public—within and by the environmental humanities but also in the wider public sphere of political and cultural contestation. The essay begins by problematizing the con…
Tracking the Wolf
Harold Schweizer, On Lingering and Literature
Extinction in the Postcolony
Review of Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 288 pp.; 7 illus. $26.95 (pb
Han Kang's The Vegetarian and the International Booker Prize
In 2016, the English-language translation of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian was awarded the Booker group’s International Prize for fiction. Although reviewers have tended to interpret the novel’s plot pessimistically, as a perilous descent into starvation, literary critics have argued that The Vegetarian dramatises an ecofeminist refusal of carnism and patriarchy. Yet both of these interpretations neglect crucial textual and extra-textual f…
Why look at taxidermy animals? Exhibiting, curating and mourning the Sixth Mass Extinction Event
What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transforming the representational techniques employed by natural history curators? And what are the prevailing ideologies and emotional registers of contemporary exhibitions about anthropogenic extinctions? This essay answers these questions by analysing how recen…
Animal Collectives
From Virginia Woolf's Flush to Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear, there are numerous literary works narrated by a singular animal, a first-person nonhuman “I.” But there are very few texts narrated by animals, by a “we” who speak as a collective. Why is this? And what does it tell us about the political unconscious of both animal narration and literary animal studies? This essay asks these questions in order to develop the prevailing analyses…
Animal Borderlands
In 2019, two major science fiction films were released to UK audiences that stage parallel scenes of human-nonhuman confrontation in the far-out darkness of space. Claire Denis’ High Life and James
Why look at taxidermy animals? Exhibiting, curating and mourning the Sixth Mass Extinction Event
What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transforming the representational techniques employed by natural history curators? And what are the prevailing ideologies and emotional registers of contemporary exhibitions about anthropogenic extinctions? This essay answers these questions by analysing how recen…
Animal Borderlands
In 2019, two major science fiction films were released to UK audiences that stage parallel scenes of human-nonhuman confrontation in the far-out darkness of space. Claire Denis’ High Life and James
Animal Collectives
From Virginia Woolf's Flush to Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear, there are numerous literary works narrated by a singular animal, a first-person nonhuman “I.” But there are very few texts narrated by animals, by a “we” who speak as a collective. Why is this? And what does it tell us about the political unconscious of both animal narration and literary animal studies? This essay asks these questions in order to develop the prevailing analyses…
Why look at taxidermy animals? Exhibiting, curating and mourning the Sixth Mass Extinction Event
What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transforming the representational techniques employed by natural history curators? And what are the prevailing ideologies and emotional registers of contemporary exhibitions about anthropogenic extinctions? This essay answers these questions by analysing how recen…
Harold Schweizer, On Lingering and Literature
Extinction in the Postcolony
Review of Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 288 pp.; 7 illus. $26.95 (pb
Han Kang's The Vegetarian and the International Booker Prize
In 2016, the English-language translation of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian was awarded the Booker group’s International Prize for fiction. Although reviewers have tended to interpret the novel’s plot pessimistically, as a perilous descent into starvation, literary critics have argued that The Vegetarian dramatises an ecofeminist refusal of carnism and patriarchy. Yet both of these interpretations neglect crucial textual and extra-textual f…
Animal Studies
In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caugh…
Extinction in Public
This essay argues that the concept of extinction, polysemous if not overdetermined, is becoming an emergent keyword of contemporary public life as it faces the climate crisis. To make this argument the essay critically considers the ways in which extinction is currently being made public—within and by the environmental humanities but also in the wider public sphere of political and cultural contestation. The essay begins by problematizing the con…
Tracking the Wolf
Animal Studies
This review essay explores some key contributions to animal studies in 2023. In Section 1, Humanitarianism Beyond Humanism, I consider how Benjamin Meiches’s Nonhuman Humanitarians tracks animal labour as a form of post-humanitarianism. Section 2, Animalist India, turns to Naisargi N. Davé’s Indifference and Yamini Narayanan’s Mother Cow, Mother India, two complementary examinations of human–animal relations in India. Then, in Section 3, Zoologic…
On Method in Animal Studies
W hat is the "animal" of literary animal studies?What are the affordances of and challenges for a mode of reading premised on the claim that its objects of research represent beings who are subjects of a life?Three recently published journal articles compel us to consider these questions as problems of method.Through their attention to terminology, historiography, and metonymy, the essays link the figure of the animal with its real historical ref…
Reproductive technology’s animal unconscious
Preclinical animal testing has played a critical role within medical history. Yet it remains an underdiscussed topic within the medical humanities. What might happen, then, if we analyse the animal studies of the lab via the method of cultural critique that is animal studies? This essay responds to this question by exploring the roles that animals play, and are made to play, within the technologies for, debates about and narratives of human repro…
Capturing elephants with Tsitsi Dangarembga
In the early days of the new millennium, Tsitsi Dangarembga filmed a televisual documentary about wildlife conservation conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe’s national parks. With the film’s attention trained on the social injustices of nature preservation, Elephant People refocuses awareness from the animal lives deemed worthy of protection to the neighbouring humans rendered vulnerable by that very act of doing so. The film's narrative has thus…
Geographies of human-animal interactions (8 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Art (4 works) · History (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature (3 works) · Environmental ethics (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Narrative (3 works)