2024 Val Plumwood Memorial Lecture: Dr. Erika Cudworth

In 2024, the AASA Val Plumwood Lecture was delivered by Dr Erika Cudworth. Erika works in the School of Applied Social Sciences at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She has published multiple books that have shaped the animal studies field including Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The complexity of difference (2005), Social Lives with Other Animals: Tales of sex, death and love (2011), and The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism with Stephen Hobden (2018). Her latest book, Animal Entanglements: Muddied living in dog-human worlds, was published in 2024.
Erika draws on aspects of her work in animal sociology which frame human relations with non-human animals in terms of a social system of domination - anthroparchy. Anthroparchy describes a system of social relations of human domination in which the non-human living world of beings and things are subordinated in complex relations of humancentrism, privilege and power.