Lecture and Lunch with Alex Blanchette: Off-Animals and the End of the American Factory Farm

Alex Blanchette is associate professor of anthropology and environmental studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (2020, Duke University Press) and the co-editor of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (2019, SAR Press).

Princeton students, faculty and staff, log in with netID to register via webform.

Members of the public welcome. Email Bianca Toliver (bianca.toliver@princeton.edu) for details.

“Off-animals,” as they are called by some managers of North American pork production, are the biological refuse of agribusiness efforts to realize standardized life and death. Ranging from aged boars to misshapen pigs, evolving attempts to industrially slaughter these creatures for meat has led to a shadow infrastructure of killing that, in turn, underpins some of the world’s largest factory farms — and potentially signals their limits. This talk arches through Alex Blanchette’s recent book, Porkopolis, and into his research on the remains of Chicago’s Union Stockyards, in order to examine off-animals as indicators of the waning state of labor and value in the United States today.

Lecture at noon. Lunch to follow in East Pyne 010 corridor.

The Princeton Food Project is a Humanities Council Magic Project.

Lecture and lunch co-sponsored by the Effron Center for the Study of America, Department of Anthropology, High Meadows Environmental Institute, and University Center for Human Values.