[PHILOS-L] CFA - Workshop: Speciesism, Power and Human Prejudice (MANCEPT 2026)

[Hannah Battersby]

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CFA - Workshop: Speciesism, Power and Human Prejudice (MANCEPT 2026)

Speciesism has become a central concept in moral, social and political scholarship and movements concerning animals. Broadly understood, speciesism refers to discrimination based on species-membership and is often compared to racism and sexism. Nonetheless, unlike racism and sexism, speciesism is still generally regarded as an acceptable bias by the public and, also amongst philosophers, opinions diverge.

Nowadays, most philosophers reject forms of speciesism which rely merely on membership in the human species. However, anthropocentric approaches which are justified in more indirect terms are widespread. Indeed, these have received renewed defences recently – including accounts which rely on rationality or social categories, among others.

This raises pressing metaphysical, normative and epistemic concerns about what it means to be a human, whether anthropocentric approaches to moral and political theory can be successfully defended, and a wider question about why philosophers might be compelled to defend them at all. At the same time, there are a variety of related concerns that are more overtly political in character, which theorists of race and gender attend to, but which are under-addressed in the literature on animals. These include issues regarding systems of power, structural injustice, social hierarchy, domination and oppression.

This panel is therefore broadly concerned with the following question: if speciesism is similar to racism and sexism, what lies behind the former’s largely unchecked dominance in our thinking, conduct and social structures? And how might we better understand its continued socio-political power, within and beyond analytic political and moral philosophy? The panel will consider a range of related sub-questions including, but not limited to, the following:

• How should we define and understand speciesism? What similarities with and differences to racism and sexism does it have?
• Must speciesism be morally wrong? Furthermore, must it constitute an injustice?
• What are the psychological-philosophical roots of speciesism? And why has speciesism not experienced a similar widespread condemnation to racism and sexism?
• In what ways does speciesism continue to impact political and moral philosophy, contemporary politics and beyond?
• How might speciesism be related to forms of social hierarchy and oppression seen in racism and sexism?
• How do social, institutional and political structures impact speciesism? And how might these need to be reformed?

Confirmed speakers: Hannah Battersby (KU Leuven), Catia Faria (Complutense University of Madrid), François Jacquet (Université de Strasbourg), Matthew Wray Perry (University of Sheffield) and Valérie G. Topf (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

For remaining speaker slots, we invite submissions of abstracts of 250–300 words from scholars within philosophy, political science, law, animal studies, and related disciplines. Abstracts should be suitable for a presentation of roughly 20-30 minutes. Please email your anonymised abstract to valeri...@unipv.it by 11th May 2026. Responses to submitted abstracts will be provided by 22nd May 2026.

Please note that registration, travel and accommodation fees must be covered by speakers themselves. Information on current registration fees – and bursaries for accepted abstracts – will be available on the MANCEPT website. This year’s edition of the workshops will take place in-person only.

https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/activities/mancept-workshops-2026/

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