Amy Field

Amy FieldFormer Member

Amy Field completed her PhD at New York University in 2017. She was a Fulbright-IIE Fellow with the University of Halle-Wittenberg (2014-2015) and a Guest Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in 2012. Her research investigated the imposition of animal protection law in eastern Germany, foregrounding questions regarding the law’s structuring of human affective ties to non-human animals and the political ramifications of privileging non-human animals as legitimate legal entities. Her main research interests included human and non-human interaction, practices of care, science and technology studies, as well as work in governmentality and legal anthropology. She now works in open access publishing, focusing on journal development and management.

Current position
Independent Postdoctoral Researcher

Research

Amy’s doctoral research, “Our Fellow Creatures: An Ethnography of Farm Animal Protection Regulation in Eastern Germany,” centered on the implications of constitutional provisions of non-human animals, as they pertained to the lived experience and practice of regulatory actors and farmers, and on the multiple understandings of animals’ value as they are transformed into food products over the course of their life cycles. She situates the intersection of law, human-animal interactions, and forms of normativity within global shifts in agrarian restructuring and precautionary narratives in Europe about food production processes and their detrimental effects on people, animals, and the environment. Her work illuminates how animal welfare reforms are relational, cultural processes that have become key sites for wider struggles not only about farm animal ethics, but also about urban-rural interdependence, forms of consumption, ideas about privilege, and the governance challenges generated by globalization.

Publications

  • Field, Amy (2020) "From behind stall doors: Farming the Eastern German countryside in the animal welfare era." in Focaal 88 (2020): 103-116.
  • Field, Amy (2017) "Populist Protest and Counter-Protest in Germany." in Anthropology News.http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2017/05/18/populist-protest-and-counter-protest-in-germany/
  • Field, Amy (2016) "Invited Roundtable Contribution, 'Challenging Legal Orders', organized by D. Hodgson." presented at American Ethnological Society Meeting, Washington, D.C.
  • Field, Amy (2016) "Review. Lien, Marianne (2015) 'Becoming Salmon: Aquaculture and the Domestication of a Fish'." in Anthropology of Work Review 37 (2): 113-114.
  • Field, Amy (2015) "Protest in Parliament." in Anthropology Now 7 (1): 39-50.
  • Field, Amy (2015) "Complications of Compassion: Multispecies Responsibility and Ethical Dilemma among German Farm Authorities." presented at 61st Annual Conference of U.S. Fulbright Program, Berlin, Germany.
  • Field, Amy (2015) "Of Pigs, Persons, and Peripheral Places: Industrial Animal Stalls as Infrastructure." presented at American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Denver.
  • Field, Amy (2014) "Animal Husbandry, Agriculture, and The (Policy) Environment: An East German Before-and-After Story." presented at NYU Berlin.
  • Field, Amy (2013) "Reading the Animal Body, Imagining the Animal Self." presented at American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Chicago.
  • Field, Amy (2013) "Accommodating Farm Animals: Sentience, Property, and New Practices of Animal Care in Eastern Germany." presented at American Ethnological Society Meeting, Chicago.
  • Field, Amy (2013) "Creating Animal Welfare, Recreating Animal Production Practice." presented at NSSR/NYU Thinking with Animals Conference, New York.
  • Field, Amy (2012) "Banning Schächten: Animal Protection Discourses and the Rejection of Religious Slaughter in Multiethnic Germany." Master’s Thesis, Department of Anthropology, New York University.