Juno Salazar Parreñas

Summary

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (Duke UP, 2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, the 2019 Society for Medical Anthropology’s New Millennium Book Award and the Anthropology of Work and Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing’s 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize. Her articles appear in such journals as American Ethnologist, Anthropology and History, Cahiers d’Anthropologie Sociale, Catalyst: feminism, theory, technoscience, Environmental Humanities, History and Theory, positions: asia critique, and Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology, and Society. Her article, “Producing Affect: Transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center,” received the 2013 General Anthropology Division’s Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship Prize. She is a former columnist for the Los Angeles based monthly magazine The Lesbian News. Her collaborations and conversations with artists such as Daniel Lie, Ines Lechleitner and Islands Songs (Nicolas Perret and Sylvia Ploner) have been hosted by MoMA, Ö1 Kunstradio, and Dokumenta 14. At Cornell, she teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses that include environmental ethics, introduction to feminist, gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses that speak to Southeast Asian studies. 

Research Focus

• Queer Biosocial Diversities

• Properties of Animal Retirement

• Triage for a Sick Planet: The Emergence of Integrative Approaches to the Study of Humans, Animals, and Environments

While at the Society for the Humanities, Parreñas will work on two research projects. The first project, Properties of Animal Retirement, examines the question of when care becomes cruel via a global ethnographic comparison between animal sanctuaries and other sites holding geriatric animals in Germany, South Africa, Singapore, and the United States. It argues that studying animals, which are often treated as apolitical and noncontroversial subjects, are a means to critique global inequality. Pre-COVID-19 fieldwork for this project was supported by the DAAD and a grant from The Ohio State University. The second project, Triage for Planetary Health, tracks the emergence of One Health and other transdisciplinary efforts to study human, animal, and environmental health together. It examines how such integrative approaches might change or perhaps even reinforce ideas of humanity and animality in a context of dehumanizing social inequalities. Preliminary research suggests that One Health and other integrative efforts are meant to undo disciplinary compartmentalization that began in the 19th century in order to face 21st century problems that are rooted in global structures that began in the 15th century. This project is in its initial stages.

Publications

Books

• Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2018.
• Gender: Animals, Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA. 2017.

Articles and Chapters

• "Afterward: Ecological Inqueeries." Co-authored with Nicole Seymour. 2022. Environmental Humanities 14 (3).

• "Pronouns for an apocalyptic future: asymmetrical terms for a new era." 2021. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society 4 (1): 1989849. https://doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2021.1989849

• "Power, Care and Species Difference in Orangutan Rehabilitation in Sarawak: A Roundtable." Co-written with Alicia Izharuddin, Monamie Bhadra Haines, Faizah Zakaria, and Robert Cribb. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 94, no. 1 (2021): 203-215. https://doi.org/10.1353/ras.2021.0019

• “From Decolonial Indigenous Knowledges to Vernacular Ideas in Southeast Asia.” September 2020. History and Theory. 59(3):413-420. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12169

• “Specificity.” April 2020. Indonesia. 109: 65-70. https://doi.org/10.1353/ind.2020.0008

• "An Anthropology of Primatology Exceeds the Primate Order: a feminist and queer critique." 2019 Cahiers d’anthropologie sociale (18: Primates):126-143. https://doi.org/10.3917/cas.018.0126
• “The Job of Finding Food is a Joke: Orangutan Rehabilitation, Work, Subsistence, and Social Relations.” 2019. How Nature Works. Alex Blanchette and Sarah Besky eds. School for Advanced Research Seminar. University of New Mexico Press, pp. 79-98.
• “Arrested: Orangutan Sexuality and the rehabilitation of wildness through captivity in Malaysia.” 2019. History and Anthropology. 30(5): 527-532. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2019.1638773
•  “Orangutan Rehabilitation as an Experiment of Decolonization.” 2017. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Peer-reviewed Critical Perspectives. 3(1).
• “Engaging Decolonization and Decoloniality in Science and Technology Studies.” 2017. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Peer-reviewed Critical Perspectives. 3(1). Co-authored with Kristina Lyons and Noah Tamarkin. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28794
• “Introduction.” 2017. Gender: Animals. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA.
•  “Hunting.” 2017. Gender: Animals. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks. Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA.
• “The Materiality of Intimacy: Rethinking ‘Ethical Capitalism’ through Embodied Encounters with Animals in Southeast Asia.” 2016. positions: asia critique. 24(1):97-107. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-3320065
• “Producing Affect: transnational volunteerism in a Malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center.” 2012. American Ethnologist. Volume 39, Issue 4, pp. 673-687. 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01387.x

Public Scholarship

• “The Semi-Wild.” Ö1 Kunstradio (Art Radio on Austrian national public radio). October 14, 2018. This was a 20-minute sound installation stemming from collaboration with the artist Ines Lechleitner: http://www.kunstradio.at/2018B/14_10_18.html
• "A Joke of a Job: Naturalizing the Work of Semiwild Orangutans." 2018. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsites, July 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/a-joke-of-a-job-naturalizing-the-work-of-semiwild-orangutans
• “YNK: You Never Know #17, Blasted Landscapes/Abundant Futures #4 with Juno Salazar Parreñas.” Documenta 14: Savvy Funk Radio Broadcast, FM 103.0 MHz in Berlin, FM 90.4 MHz in Kassel, SW 15560 kHz, and streamed worldwide on Deutschlandfunkkulture (German national radio’s culture station). July 4, 2017. This was a 13-minute interview about my forthcoming manuscript followed by a live soundscape by Islands+Songs. Other broadcasts featured Dipesh Chakrabarty and Juanita Sundberg. Available online: https://www.mixcloud.com/Islands_Songs/ynk-12-_-june-29th-_-blasted-landscapes-abundant-futures-3-_-with-juno-salazar-parre%C3%B1as/
• "Multispecies Ethnography and Social Hierarchy." Engagement: a Blog Published by Anthropology and Environment Society of the American Anthropological Association. September 15, 2015.
•  “Queerly Questioning.” A regularly featured column that I have written since July 1997. The Lesbian News. Oldest monthly magazine of its kind, publishing since 1975.

In the news

• Studying connections between animal-human health