1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Central
Friday, February 13th, 2026
Alexander Blanchette
Daina Bray
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Levis Faculty Center, Room 210
919 W. Illinois St, Urbana
Event Description
How does recognizing the fundamental entanglements of humans and the more-than-human world impact notions of "justice"? Drawing on perceptions from diverse communities, disciplines, and social, political, and historical contexts, this symposium will provide a space for us to grapple with the question: What might a more just world or worlds look like in the 21st century?
Alex Blanchette and Daina Bray join an interdisciplinary group of scholars for an extended conversation about multi-species justice.
1:00 PM | Opening remarks, Jane Desmond
1:15 PM | Alex Blanchette, The Biology of Dignity: Workplace Democracy, Multispecies Health, and American Slaughter
This talk revisits the history of slaughterhouse unionization and workplace democracy as an inadvertently more-than-human project. The talk’s goal is not to romanticize labor in troubling environments, however, but instead to theorize the ways human solidarity could ripple through animal bodies, minds, and the microbial ecologies of the rural United States.
2:00 PM | Conversation with Will Sander (Director, DVM/MPH joint degree program)
2:15 PM | Audience q&a
2:45 PM | Introduction, Kenworthy Bilz (Law)
3:00 PM | Daina Bray, We Are In This Together: Farmed Animals & Multi-Species Justice
Drawing from her background in farmed animal advocacy, Daina will discuss how the law’s failure to address the many externalized harms of industrial animal agriculture endangers not only the animals themselves but also workers, farmers, the environment, the public health, and food security. Legal exemptions for animal agriculture—grounded in the treatment of animals as property available for commercial utilization—are creating many present harms and endangering our collective future.
3:30 PM | Conversation with Chris Green (Executive Director, Animal Legal Defense Fund)
3:45 PM | Audience q&a
4:00 PM | Closing panel and closing remarks
| 2/13/2026 |    |