Elan Abrell is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing focus on human-environment interactions, scientific knowledge production, and technological innovation in the contemporary United States. His forthcoming ethnography of animal sanctuaries, Saving Animals: Practices of Care and Rescue in the US Animal Sanctuary Movement (University of Minnesota Press), examines how sanctuary caregivers respond to a range of ethical dilemmas and material constraints while attempting to meet the various and sometimes conflicting needs of rescued animals. He was a 2017-18 Farmed Animal Law & Policy Fellow at the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard University, as well as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Animal Studies Program at Wesleyan University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, CUNY.
Elan Abrell
Adjunct Instructor in Anthropology and Animal Studies
Human-animal relations, inequality, environmental crises, law, food politics, industrial agriculture, scientific and technological innovation, social movements, political economy, urban studies, applied anthropology
The Future of Food?: Cellular Agriculture and Animal Obsolescence
This multi-sited ethnographic project focuses on an emerging new industry called cellular agriculture. Specifically, it examines how partnerships between scientists, entrepreneurs, and animal and environmental advocates are contributing to the creation of a new field of sustainable agriculture intended to ameliorate the negative impacts of industrialized agriculture on animal welfare and the environment, especially its unsustainable consumption of land and resources and its contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Cellular agriculture companies are developing new technologies for tissue culturing and the genetic modification of yeast cells to produce animal products without using animals. Current products under development include yeast-produced egg whites, milk protein, and spider-silk and cell-cultured cow, pig, chicken, duck, shrimp, and fish tissue. This project explores how collaborations and conflicts between various stakeholders – including scientists, venture capitalists, public safety advocates, animal welfare activists, and environmentalists – are beginning to reconfigure the technological, environmental, ethical, and economic dimensions of animal-based agriculture.
2019 “Animal Sanctuaries,” in Routledge Handbook of Animal Ethics. Ed. Bob Fischer. New York: Routledge. (in press)
2019 “The Mongoose Trap: Grief, Intervention, and the Impossibility of Professional Detachment,” in Grieving Witnesses: The Politics of Grief in the Field. Eds. Kathryn Gillespie and Patricia Lopez. Berkeley: University of California Press. (in press)
2019 “Sanctuary-Making as Rural Political Action,” Journal for the Anthropology of North America 22(2). (in press)
2017 “Interrogating Captive Freedom: The Possibilities and Limits of Animal Sanctuaries” (introduction to special theme issue). Animal Studies Journal 6(2): 1-8.
2016 “Lively Sanctuaries: A Shabbat of Animal Sacer,” in Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities. Ed. Irus Braverman. New York: Routledge.
2011 “Fracturing Neoliberalism: Ethnographic Interventions” (introduction to special theme issue). With Kaja Tretjak. New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 4(2): 29-32.
2009 “Biocultural Jurisprudence.” With Kabir Bavikatte and Harry Jonas. Bio-Cultural Community Protocols: A Community Approach to Ensuring the Integrity of Environmental Law and Policy. United Nations Environmental Programme.
2009 Imagining a Traditional Knowledge Commons: A Community Approach to Ensuring the Local Integrity of Environmental Law and Policy. With Kabir Sanjay Bavikatte, Gino Cocchiaro, Harry Jonas, and Andrew Rens. Rome: International Development Law Organization.
2008 “Making Enemies: The Reinforcement of Essentialized Cultural Difference through ‘Legalized’ Torture.” Socialism and Democracy 22(2): 207-224.