Agora Talk by Associate Professor Dinesh Wadiwel and Dr. Tristan Bradshaw

Abstract

In this dialogue, Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney) and Tristan Bradshaw (University of Wollongong) will discuss the philosophy of the commodity form as described by Karl Marx is Capital Vol.1, and its implications for animals as raw materials within animal agriculture and as eventual consumption products. Dinesh and Tristan will reflect on the philosophical problem of how an object or relation becomes 'commodified' and consider what this means for understanding contemporary human animal relations. This dialogue will mark the occasion of the soft cover release of Dinesh's book, Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP 2023). 

Bio

Dinesh Wadiwel is Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies at University of Sydney. He is author of Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP, 2023), The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and is co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew of Foucault and Animals (Brill 2017). Dinesh is also a disability rights researcher and was part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. 

Tristan Bradshaw is a political theorist and classicist with a particular focus on Aristotle and his receptions in contemporary critical theories, especially Marx and post-Marxism. After three years at the University of Sydney as lecturer in political theory and then postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, he joined the School of Liberal Arts at the University of Wollongong as Lecturer in 2022. He received my PhD in political science from Northwestern University in 2021, where he was an Andrew W. Mellon doctoral fellow. He also co-directs, with Dr Ben Brown (University of Sydney), the Critical Antiquities Network (CAN) and its monthly online forum, the Critical Antiquities Workshop. For more information on CAN, go to criticalantiquities.org.