“Making the unimaginable imaginable?” The power of artmaking in understanding animal vulnerabilities and “humanimal” relationality in Organization Studies

Abstract

The vulnerabilities of nonhuman animals in human–animal relationships have received scant attention in Organization Studies (OS). What could OS scholars learn about animal vulnerability and “humanimal” relationality by turning to the context of artmaking, where sensate animals, human artists, spaces, materialities, artworks, affects and critical audiences come together? Building on feminist vulnerability literature and insight from posthumanist affirmative ethics, we here analyze Finnish artists Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson’s artmaking, works, and their exhibition Siat – Pigs in particular, where the agency and vulnerability of animals can be conceived in non-anthropocentric, immersive and affective ways. We contribute to OS research by demonstrating the affective power of posthumanist artmaking that comes with the radical repositioning of the human in relation to others, as well as political motivation to elicit empathy for the plight of animals in the factory-farming complex. Specifically, we show how these insights can illuminate what is currently not centered or discussed enough in OS, help us to better acknowledge co-constituted humanimal vulnerabilities, and extend discussions on empathy in OS to include (hyper-vulnerable) animals in the factory-farming complex. We contend that by extending vulnerability ascriptions to animals, caring with the unseen and silenced agents in society, acknowledging our shared vulnerability and by taking further action, we can gradually change the exploitive ways in which humans have treated other animals in our organized society, and more emphatically work for the well-being of the many unseen “others.”