Final Year Project

Project Title

Ethics, Pedagogy, Allegory, and Ecology: Animals Demand Ecological Justice

Description

My thesis explores stories and allegories as a pedagogical tool, focusing on The Case of Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn, a fable originally written in Arabic in the tenth century by the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā’. The study is grounded in the larger Islamic and literary conceptions of allegory, and within scholarship on the Anthropocene. I argue that it is imperative that children be taught to recognize the interdependence of ecology. The relevance of the fable in contemporary times is highlighted by discussing the treatment of animals in the present times, and linking it to the larger ethical issue of mistreatment of animals as commodities under commercial and industrial paradigms of capitalism.