Pig Out – Hogs and Humans in Global and Historical Context

This international conference, held October 16-18, 2015 at Yale University was an inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural endeavor to understand how pigs have worked their way into human communities, urban and rural. Organized collaboratively by the Yale Program in Agrarian Studies, the Duke University Women Studies’ Program and the Yale Sustainable Food Program, it aimed to examine the full biological, ecological, historical, and symbolic complexity of a single species, pigs, in multiple socio-historical contexts. The conference was facilitated by external sponsors, the Animal Welfare Trust and the Agricultural History Society along with on-campus partners, including the MacMillan Center and various area studies councils at Yale.