Clare Archer-Lean

The study of English is evolving, and the classroom is at the forefront of witnessing its flux and transformation. The Work of Literature: Literary Studies in the Classroom engages in extended inquiry into the work of English within its sites of learning in these times of rapid change. For scholars of literature, as Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory observed as far back as 2006, ‘teaching is becoming less a job and more an intellectual activity worthy of serious consideration and investigation’.

Creative writing, transdisciplinary literary animal studies, and law-anthropology don’t often appear in the same sentence, but this interdisciplinary mingling is where we as editors meet in animal studies. We were particularly enthused by discussions that emerged during the Australasian Animal Studies Conference, held at the University of Sydney in November 2023, providing a rich source from which to consider the conference theme: ‘Animal Cultures’. Keynote speaker, Carol Gigliotti, wondered about the animal cultural research ideas that can be taken with us to ‘make lives better for animals, both wild and captive'.

For this special issue of Animal Studies Journal, entitled ‘Flourish’, our approach was two-fold. Complementing the 2021 conference of the Australasian Animal Studies Association on animal flourishing, we encouraged papers that explored animal and human-animal communities that are thriving and flourishing, both in the general sense and in terms of flourishing theory. A second area of interest was in works that offer or address creative and non-traditional outputs. The issue opens with papers in these two categories, followed by additional general papers and concluding with a selection of reviews of recent works in the field of animal studies.