The Anthrozoology Symposium, Conscious Beings: Rethinking Animality and Awareness

We invite you to the eighth edition of the international symposium The Anthrozoology Symposium, Conscious Beings: Rethinking Animality and Awarenessorganized during November 6 – 8, 2025 by the Gheorghe Zane Institute for Economic and Social Research (Romanian Academy – Iași branch) in collaboration with the Faculty of Animal Husbandry and Biotechnology (USAMV Cluj Napoca), the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (USV Iași), AEDC Anthrozoology Education Dogs Canines, TIES Interspecies Hub and the Museum of History of Moldova (Moldova National Museum Complex Iași).

Throughout our history, the relationships between humans and other animals have been a constant source of inspiration, generating concepts, ideas and images that have helped us understand our own identity. There have been many complex and profoundly different ways in which humans have related to other beings and seen and understood animals. But until recently, only one way of seeing the world was favored, neglecting and rejecting all others.

Today, both modern science and ancient wisdom are leading us to transcend human privilege, to see and investigate other animals’ consciousness, action, and way of being in the world in new and innovative ways. But we need the audacity to go beyond classical meanings, familiar notions, and limited vocabulary. Seeking alternative approaches, such as kindness, empathy, compassion, or animism, as ways to connect with and understand other living beings and life forms, can lead us to amazing discoveries.

In this year’s edition of the Symposium, we invite you to explore the varied and fluid ways in which consciousness, awareness, sentience, agency, animality, and other related concepts and ideas have been defined and understood over time. We invite you to explore together how these definitions, images and notions have conditioned our understanding of animals, including humans, and nature in general.

For more information, please visit the event website: https://anthrozoology.acadiasi.org/