Description

Amy’s focus on the animal protection movement in Germany is on the generational, political, and moral dimensions of desires to change animals’ legal status. Her work centered on the implications of constitutional protections for animals for 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 situated 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.