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Ecocriticism and Critical Animal Studies

2025· reference-entry· en· W4412418671 on OpenAlex
Greg Garrard, Yazdan Gordanpour

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEcocriticism and Environmental Literature
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsEcocriticismBiologyEnvironmental ethicsEcologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Ecocriticism is a field within literary studies that asks how cultural artifacts illuminate, contribute to, or mitigate environmental crisis. Critical Animal Studies (CAS) is a cluster of humanities disciplines that explore the meaning and significance of the notions of “human” and “animal” and the material and symbolic consequences of these foundational representations. Understanding the potential contribution, as well as the limits, of such humanities perspectives is vital for successful cross-disciplinary collaboration. Much ecocriticism analyses environmental literature, including nature writing, and is of limited scientific significance. In the case of invasion biology, though, science writers, humanistic scholars, and novelists have questioned the cultural and empirical basis of such key concepts as “native” and “alien” and urged attention to the inherently political nature of historical baselines, biogeographical boundaries, and definitions of human agency. Conservation laws and policies in general are shaped by specific cultural contexts, as well as transnational scientific interests, and milestones in the development of scientific ecology, including the recognition of “pollution” and “chaos,” retain traces of their cultural history. Contemporary environmental non-fiction incorporates empirical findings and decenter the writing self in ways that complement dispassionate scientific writing. CAS explains the role of language in defining “the human” and excluding “animals,” both by assigning language use exclusively to humans and by attaching negative values to animality. CAS questions Western culture’s preoccupation with asserting human uniqueness and superiority (also known as “anthropocentrism”), which is expressed in science through the taboo on “anthropomorphism.” CAS scholars also discuss cultural artifacts, including movies and literary texts, in terms of their representation of animals and celebrate examples that undermine anthropocentric assumptions. Ecocriticism and CAS reframe the questions asked by environmental scientists in ways that acknowledge cultural difference and complexity and advance understanding of the vital science–policy nexus.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Science and technology studies, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesScience and technology studies
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.731
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.018
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.053
GPT teacher head0.343
Teacher spread0.291 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it