Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization

Dehumanization, the attitude of conceiving of others as less than human creatures, is widely acknowledged as promoting oppression, exploitation, and genocidal violence. But dehumanization is a strange phenomenon. How is it possible to think of other members of our species?  In this presentation, I discuss what I have learned from fifteen years of research into dehumanization, focusing on racialization, hierarchical thinking, essentialist dispositions, the theory of ideology, and the nature of the uncanny.