I taught this course at Wesleyan University in Spring 2025 to a class of 15 students, mostly seniors and sophomores. I was tasked the previous semester with developing a philosophy course that would count toward the animal studies minor. My goal was to take an expansive approach to animal philosophy, meant to demonstrate that this subfield is pertinent to other areas of social and political philosophy and can include subjects beyond a narrow focus on the ethical status of nonhuman animals. This course focused on discourses of animalization, the construction of the human as a moral and political entity, and the ways in which structures of racism and colonialism may be imbricated with structures of human supremacy. I knew while developing the course that many of my students would have already taken an introductory animal philosophy class, which Wesleyan offers every year, and would have some exposure to philosophy of race.
I divided the course into five units, the first four of which each culminated in a short paper: (1) Theoretical Background, where we covered basics in (social) ontology and the philosophy of race; (2) Material Entanglement, which I placed early in order to foreground the ways in which racialized others and nonhuman animals are entangled in the same systems of material oppression, before diving into discursive entanglement; (3) Ideological Entanglement, which explored the different theories—both liberatory and oppressive—that take race and animality to be co-constitutive; (4) Political Futures, which expanded the normative and political dimensions of the previous unit; and (5) Art, which served as a cool-down at the end of the semester and an opportunity to synthesize and apply the various theories we’d encountered thus far. I originally planned to have a final lesson on a topic of the class’s choosing, but we ran out of time at the end of the semester. Ultimately, however, the art unit was a great way to end the course. I added a few more films/ TV shows/short stories/artists and let students choose which ones they wanted to watch or whether they wanted to bring in further options. I gave them prompts to consider, most of which encouraged connecting the art pieces to previous readings from the course, and structured both days as student-led discussions. We ended up organically touching upon many of the themes from throughout the course in these final discussions.
Generally, the class was quite informal and discussion-based. I led the first unit, and then had students volunteer to lead discussions throughout the second unit. This opened the class up considerably. By the third unit, I no longer felt as though the students needed much structure in order to participate. This was partially the result of the size of the class, but also stemmed from the topic. Students found it surprising, controversial, and ultimately generative. They often disagreed with one another or felt personally/politically/philosophically challenged by the ideas presented in the texts. The shorter writing assignments throughout the semester also helped with student engagement, although they might need to be rethought in schools with a stronger culture of AI use in at-home essays.
If I were to teach the course again, I would try to add a unit on other oppressed social kinds and their relationships to animalization. To cover gender oppression and ableism, for example, we could read excerpts from The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams and Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation by Sunaura Taylor, among other texts. These topics kept coming up throughout the course, so I wish they had been formally incorporated. There are other small tweaks I might make—readings to switch in and out, etc. If anyone plans on teaching a course based on this syllabus and would like to hear more details, please feel free to email me!
Maya von Ziegesar
Maya von Ziegesar is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, a Visiting Instructor in Philosophy at Wesleyan University, and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan University. She is also a Managing Editor at Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her first co-edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Asian American Philosophy, is tentatively scheduled for publication in 2027.
