Foregrounding the Cow: Emily Morgan’s Interdisciplinary Symposium Reimagines Animal-Human Relationships
When Emily Morgan, Associate Professor of Art History, received a 2024 Symposium Grant from Iowa State’s Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH), she used it to support Portable Cow—a collaborative, interdisciplinary event series that asked participants to reconsider how we see and understand cows.
Held in February 2025, the Portable Cow event series included an exhibition, a hybrid symposium, and a pair of public workshops. The event series originated in an artwork, Portable Cow, created by Camille Bellet and Liz Hingley, with sponsorship from the Wellcome Institute (UK). Camille Bellet (DVM, MPH, Ph.D.) is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester (UK), and co-founder of the Non-human Animals in the Medical Humanities Network (NAMHN). Liz Hingley is an artist, anthropologist, Honorary Artist at Migration Mobilities Bristol, and Doctoral Candidate at the University of Southampton (UK).
Morgan collaborated with Bellet and Hingley to bring Portable Cow to the United States for the first time and to organize the event series, making Portable Cow a transdisciplinary collaboration across France, the UK, and Iowa. Through their work together, the collaborators have sought to employ posthumanist perspectives to deepen understandings of the lived experiences of non-human animals, especially cows; and to reexamine human-animal relationships in farming contexts, incorporating approaches from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. The symposium aimed to engage the Iowa State community, and local Iowa communities more broadly, in conversation around topics related to human-animal relationships and the experiences of non-human animals.
Though Iowa State canceled classes on the morning of the symposium due to extreme cold, Morgan and her collaborators decided to proceed in a hybrid format—and were glad they did.
“It was really gratifying to see that there were so many people who attended… and that there were still people, in addition to the three of us, who were physically in the space with us,” Morgan said.
The symposium sparked discussion among attendees from a range of disciplines, including agriculture, design, and the humanities. Many questions focused on the use of surveillance technologies on dairy farms and the differences between American and European farming operations.
“People really picked up right away on issues of scale that came through in the talks,” Morgan said. “There were really interesting questions and some thought-provoking discussion… about the idea of foregrounding the animal perspective. The idea that the cow would have wishes and desires and be an agent was pretty consistent through all of the events.”
Morgan emphasized that the location—both Iowa and Iowa State—made the conversation particularly exigent.
“It’s important to think about these ideas in this region, because it is so immediate and because it’s what we do here, right? Iowa State is a land-grant institution, and to fulfill the land-grant mission is to serve the people of the state and of the region. And this is what the people of the state and the region do; it’s what they’re interested in. This is what drives our economy,” she said. “The landscape is so overwhelmingly dedicated to the production of food at large scale… It’s ever-present, but it’s also somewhat invisible in people’s everyday lives.”
While the exhibition invited reflection through photography, maps, and artifacts from Bellet and Hingley’s research, the hands-on workshops prompted participants to draw, trace, and create using cow-derived materials—inviting critical engagement with everyday relationships to farmed animals. Bellet and Hingley were also able to conduct new fieldwork on an Iowa farm, producing new images for the Portable Cow series and making the project truly intercontinental.
Following the event, Morgan, Bellet, and Hingley plan to continue collaboration through a forthcoming visual essay based on the symposium. Using feedback from the symposium, they hope that the visual essay will allow the Portable Cow symposium to live on in a published, digital form.
“We’re hoping to do a publication in which images are not just illustrative, but are core carriers of the meaning,” Morgan explained. “We can kind of do a better job than a traditional publication of conveying how the visual is this real core site of meaning in farming—especially in contemporary farms where surveillance technologies… are so prevalent.”
Morgan noted that the symposium would not have been possible without the support of the CEAH.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do the symposium and the exhibition and the workshops without the CEAH,” she said. “To bring international collaborators here, it really required a week. And I was really glad to know about the model [of a CEAH-funded exhibition and symposium] from the prior year (from colleagues Ingrid Lilligren and Johnny Diblasi’s symposium entitled “Beauty Investigated: Dilemmas, Projects and Promises”)... knowing that we were going to be able to bring the collaborators here and… that the CEAH was going to help us to facilitate these things—it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
Having received previous CEAH support for a 2016 research trip that helped shape her book (published in 2024 and entitled Imaging Animal Industry), Morgan is a strong advocate for faculty seeking research support.
“Absolutely go for it,” she said. “Don’t be afraid to think big. CEAH really supports ambitious, interdisciplinary work—and it’s been hugely important for me as a scholar.”
Morgan sees the CEAH as a valuable support system for bringing research opportunities to life but also a tool for faculty to collaborate and learn on campus through other events.
“Having the symposium grant was amazing because I’ve been engaged in this international collaboration, and I talk about it with my colleagues. Actually bringing them [her international collaborators] here helped me to make that real. But I’ve taken advantage of a lot of other opportunities. I love going to events and lectures when and if I can because my own work sits in this intersection of art and technology. I’m always really glad to see that being facilitated and developed. The CEAH is a real feature of Iowa State.”
The Portable Cow symposium and event series brought together international perspectives, creative inquiry, and critical reflection to challenge how we see and engage with farmed animals. Supported by the CEAH, Morgan and her collaborators transformed a global conversation into a local dialogue—one that will continue to shape how technology, art, and agriculture intersect at Iowa State.