The annual Furry Studies academic conference is a multi-field brain-food buffet. Their first event launched in October 2024 as part of a furry arts festival in the Netherlands. It featured scholarship, presentations, and celebration for international authors, researchers, and fans. The second Furry Studies conference happened on Halloween 2025 in Tacoma, WA, and was also virtual to join from wherever you are. They will soon start planning for the 2026 conference. To get future info about how to attend, participate or collaborate, follow them here: https://furrystudies.org/
Here’s an interview about what the conference offers. Many presenters give academic talks about a variety of furry-centric topics. For Dogpatch Press, Patch and Zeldstarro discussed the event with key organizers Spaxe and Jack Newhorse, as well as Hazel, who is the director of gender, sexuality, and race studies at the 2025 host venue, Pacific Lutheran University.
Zeld: What IS Furry Studies? Is this similar to what they do at https://furscience.com, using a scientific approach to collecting surveys from and about furry fandom and interpreting what the data means?
Jack: Furscience are pioneering (IMHO) furry studies researchers. They presented at the 2024 event and this year’s! Their topic was “Furry and Anthropomorphizing Animals as a Response to a Hostile World.”
Spaxe: FurScience is awesome. The biggest difference between Furry Studies and FurScience is that we are a conference organisation and a publication venue. FurScience is a research team, who also happens to have published with us. We are trying to open more doors for furry researchers, and researchers working with furries, to have a home to publish and talk about their work. This includes publishing in journals, like the Journal of Popular Communication that we are doing a special issue on from the 2024 conference.
Zeld: Why study furries in an academic lens? Are we studying the furries themselves, and does it have to involve furry art, or…
Spaxe: FurScience has made a lot of grounds in social psychology on furries. Nuka and his team is following intersectional demographic identities and orientations, attitudes, perceptions, and many trends including neurodivergence and autism spectrum and so on. Social psychology is interested in understanding who we are, and why we are, and conducting experiments to test hypotheses around why furry people are the way they are. They have one-decade-plus data from US furcons, and they started doing work in Eurofurence and Japan Meeting of Furries. It’s important research but not the only way to research furry.
Academic study can produce a lot of things, and one of them is words around describing a phenomenon like being, and feeling furry. I’ve been furry for 18 years and I’m sure most furs have the experience of trying to explain to normies, and having trouble finding words. Furry Studies aims to advance research and knowledge around furry art and community, and we hope that it will also produce language to describe what furry is and can be about. And if I may speak personally, I hope that people who study furries will produce findings that benefit the community in some way. It might not be providing jobs, but it will provide a new voice.
Patch: We announced the first conference in 2024, how did it go?
Jack: I think it went great! All the sessions went as planned and reviews were good. 15 people paid to attend in person with 31 online. Our 2024 page has links to the list of talks given (with their abstracts); and a six-hour video of the whole thing.
Spaxe: Here’s a gallery of photos from the 2024 event. I’m really thankful for Jack to give us the opportunity and space to run Furry Studies. It’s not everyday you’d have a furry conference followed by a furry arts event.
Patch: Does location affect what it does? It moved from the Netherlands to Tacoma for the second event. Is it meant to move each year or is it seeking a permanent venue?
Jack: This was the idea from the beginning. Partly because that’s fairly standard for conferences of this sort; and partly to prevent it from being “owned” by any geography or population. I see that as one of Furry Studies’ big strengths: Like academia itself, it’s truly an international group. That’s reflected not only in the organizers — Spaxe in Australia, Vanguard in England, Hazel in the US, me in the Netherlands — but in the topics covered.
Of course the US is strongly represented, which makes sense given the US-centric history of the fandom. But at the 2024 conference there were talks about being furry in Japan and China; this year there were talks about furry in Europe and Iran. [*The speaker from Iran was unable to make it due to an emergency, so a stand-alone article about them is being planned.]
I think that we all, as individual furries, tend to see only a small slice of the furry world, both in terms of geography and interest. Through Furry Studies we get a much broader view.
Spaxe: For the first year, we invited historian Joe Strike (author of Furry Nation/Furry Planet) to be our keynote and open the day. The lineup was fully peer reviewed. It included furry scholars in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, China, and it was very global in terms of the voices that were at the conference. In 2025 we had a keynote from Rod O’Riley and heard from places like Portugal, and and it was incredible to be able to host them over zoom for their presentations.
Being an academic conference, moving it from place to place is pretty typical. This of course makes attending really hard, but at the same time you could say it gives people a chance to be in person. So there are benefits and tradeoffs. I think we’re doing something really special, being able to bridge academic conversations with community voices. That’s how research really shines.
Patch: Global fandom opens interesting access, but this has a different emphasis than general fandom events. What made you start it? Could it cross over outside fandom?
Spaxe: I’d really love to know how to do that, and I think that will require growing the team and partnering up! I should mention, I’ve been a student volunteer at academic conferences since 2010, and I’ve run my fair share of academic conferences. This is like my 5th time running one. But I’ve never run a furmeet or fur con of course. For that I go to Jack for help 🙂
Jack: I don’t think of it like a con that does what most people go to cons for, like how only a small percentage of people who speak languages are linguists.
As for me, I like producing, and it was really an honor to be able to be a part of the first one. It was a fortuitous combination of circumstances that made the first one happen. Vanguard and I were in a chat group together about collecting and curating furry history. One of us started talking about a Furry Studies conference, and I was planning the Otterdam Furry Arts Festival at the time as a two-day event, but plans for the first day just weren’t gelling. So it seemed like a perfect match… and it was.
I’m not an academic, but as a furry producer I’m interested in doing things that aren’t already being done in the community — reaching new audiences, exploring new types of venues, seeing This Thing Of Ours™ from a different angle. Furry Studies scratches this itch in two different ways. First, because it hadn’t been done before; second, because it’s *about* seeing furry from new perspectives! A look through the abstracts for 2025 and last year shows how rich our culture is, and how much there still is to examine.
Spaxe: We know there is furry research out there. Juniper runs this Academic Animals telegram group for years now, and when I joined, there were ~24 critters in research (now there are 36), from PhD students to established professors. So I thought there was already an audience from an academic conference perspective, and we’ve been running it as such.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to broaden our audience (we have been talking about social events and connecting with local communities), but we haven’t gotten to that stage yet. We’ve begun getting folks reaching out to us who are interested in running more events around Furry Studies, so that might help us reach to a broader audience, furries who aren’t already in research!
I know that sounds like we don’t really know how to market but we are a very very small team. We will need more people to help us to make things happen.
Patch: The 2025 programming had categories like, popular culture, counterculture, queer and gender identity politics. They look suitable for mainstream academic conferences, but the furry nature needs no introduction at this one. Could furry-centric talks fit at other conferences? Can those be competitive to get in, and how selective was this one?
Hazel: When it comes to academic conferences, many of these papers/presentations may be viable for various disciplinarily conferences (sociology, American studies, family studies, psychology, cultural studies, etc.). Therefore, a lot of the submissions we received were written by scholars (graduate students and those who hold PhDs), however, they are framed with the audience in mind which is, furries who are also studying furries from a scholarly background. Either way, furry scholary would see this conference as an academic affair, where they could put their presentation on their resume/CV, and have it be seen as professional scholarship/development.
Not everyone who submitted got in. We had a range of submissions, but a few could not make it in due to our schedule. As we are only a one day conference and quite new, we have a limited number of slots where the submission process is peer reviewed by our committee of furries, who are also scholars or are involved in academics in some way.
The theme for this year came from various areas of discourse within the furry community, along with the current public perceptions of furry not only in the United States, but globally.
Not only did we want to attend to the rise of conservative targeting of furry behaviors and expressions (as seen in the FURRIES Act – Texas House Bill 54), but also general attacks on furry expression in a time of queer and trans violence. We also wanted to gain larger perspectives from outside of a Western lens where often many studies on furry have neglected.
I think due to what is happening socially and politically, there has been more interest in this conference not only from furries themselves, but also (in my experience) from various health professional fields such as Social Work, MFT – Marriage and Family Therapy, Nursing, etc. I am an assistant professor of social work, and professional practitioners are more and more curious about furries, due to a desire to want to address their clients in healthy and supportive ways in the face of continued false narratives.
Overall, there seems to be an interest in broadly queer and trans healthcare/wellbeing, and attached to that is the art and expressions of queer and trans people where furry falls into. Various fields are also interested in what furries have to say, as furries have become more popular than ever before.
Also here is my website if you need anything about me: https://hzaman.net
Zeld: Would academic discussion of furries in this official of a capacity make the fandom more “mainstream”, and would you consider that a potential problem?
Spaxe: I remember a meme with a kid (labeled “the furry community”) being shielded from a rain of arrows by a soldier in a camouflage uniform (labeled “weird furry porn”). Furry has always been, and always will be, anti-capitalist and anti-fascism.
I look at where furry is now today that we have more than a dozen clothing brands, many breweries, and even dedicated logistics companies doing furry merchandise fulfilment and storage. We have fursuit makers who charge the same amount of money (or more) than commercial sports mascot makers. And we have many furry artists who are able to make a living thanks to all of the above. Somehow, furry is able to co-exist with mainstream commercial art and artmaking, and every step of the way we are balancing being seen and being “mainstream”. So I think we should all be thinking about that every time someone starts a furry venture or event. Furry Studies is no different.
Knowledge is like technology. The reason to create it may be noble, but it can be misused or abused. For us to be a research venue, peer review is our first line of defense from poorly conducted research or written work. The organising committee is made up of professors and lecturers from many universities and community organisations, and we are all furries ourselves. We want to make sure that each publication has merit, and will contribute new knowledge, and it’s on us if a publication ends up being misinterpreted for the wrong reasons. We know that we can’t account for everything, but we know we will have many good reasons to debunk misinformation and stop bad actors.
Jack: My own personal view on mainstreaming: If *any* community has something of value, people “outside” the community will want a piece of that value. That’s what mainstreaming is. I also believe the furry community has a lot that the larger world will find to be of value. Therefore, mainstreaming is inevitable — and, in fact, a sign that we have something *worth* mainstreaming.
Those who fear mainstreaming are mourning the loss of a clique, an “in-group”. Which is understandable, as unusually close bonds form in such groups. Cliques are small enough that individuals can influence how they develop communication shorthands, moral guidelines, enforcement practices, etc.. But trying to keep a growing group small and insular is bound for failure.
Celebrities show up at furry cons. Parents in Walmart ears and tails bring their kids to fursuit parades. As for mainstreaming, we’re well on our way.
Furry studies is one way to both record and influence that mainstreaming. It represents a kind of “community memory” so that whatever “furry” is tomorrow, it’ll be informed by furry up until today.
I was involved in “the bi community” in the late ’80s and somewhat in the ’90s. Very similar feeling. And I don’t take the disappearance of “the bi community” as a tragedy. Being bi has become less notable, IMHO to the benefit of society.
Patch: How can readers find out more, submit work, or attend in 2026?
Jack: This was the schedule of talks for the 2025 conference. There’s a video of the entirety of last year’s conference, or you can look up individual talks here. Check them out for what you might want to see or share. More information about furry studies generally can also be found on the website. Follow us for updates, and when 2026 event comes up, if you’re unable to travel, you can also attend online.
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