Rimona Afana
Rimona Afana received a grant from CAF for her project “Nonhuman Captivity: Challenging the Criminality of Confinement.”
Captivity defines the lives of billions of nonhuman animals: confined, tortured, killed for profit. Though sentient beings suffer physically and psychologically from confinement, the practice remains routine across sectors like food, clothing, medicine, entertainment. Animals’ need for freedom, autonomy and bodily integrity collides with our “right” to (ab)use them. For both wild and domesticated animals, captivity is part of a continuum of torturous practices and is often the precursor of killing. Drawing on law, criminology, psychology, and ethics, Rimona documents why the captivity of beings with complex sentience is a non-criminalized crime.
Project activities include: research and publications (an article on legal, legislative, and civic initiatives against nonhuman captivity; an article on well-meaning captivity: harms experienced by animals trapped in shelters and sanctuaries; an article on the parallels between human and nonhuman captivity); presentations (conferences, webinars, guest lectures); organizing an online symposium on captivity (two presentations panels and one debate panel); and artwork (poems, drawings, paintings, collages) tied to her research. Since the normalization of captivity rests on its invisibility, the project develops a critical approach to nonhuman captivity and seeks to inspire creative, courageous ways to challenge it.
Rimona Afana is a Romanian–Palestinian researcher, lecturer, activist, and multimedia artist. Her research on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against nature and against nonhuman animals is published in leading law and criminology journals and books. Her artwork appears in literature journals, arts magazines, festivals and exhibitions. Over the past twenty years she has also created or contributed to many civic projects on human and nonhuman rights, in different countries.