CHAT Fellow Presentation: The Biology of Dignity, with Alex Blanchette, 10/21
48 Professors Row
Join us on October 21 for a CHAT Fellow presentation with Alex Blanchette!
About Alex: My research revolves around conditions of industrial labor and life in the post-industrial United States. My first book, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Duke University Press 2020), is an ethnography of work within some of the world's largest meat corporations, one that follows the making of the modern pig across every facet of its existence from genetics to 1,100 post-death commodities. It examines the transformations to human existence — in terms of living arrangements, the value of labor, biological embodiment, and senses of identity — necessary to sustain contemporary qualities and quantities of industrial animal life in the rural United States. In collaboration with others, I have also published an edited book called How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press 2019) that surveys how transformed, unstable, and ruined environments are altering the value of human work and livelihood.
