Knowing Animals

This episode's guest is Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History. She's a historian of the early modern Atlantic interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She's the author of the beautifully named 2008 book  Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic...

On the 250th episode of Knowing Animals, the guest is Jin Qian, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She researches China's environmental governance and its global implications, with a focus on the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. Her multidisciplinary PhD project focuses on wildlife in Chinese food systems. She's also involved in the animal...

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation , the 2023 collection Expanding the Crit...

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation , the 2023 collection Expanding the Crit...

This episode features two guests. Dr Eze Paez is a returning guest; he first appeared on the podcast back in 2018. Eze is Tenure-Track Professor in Jurisprudence and Bioethics of Pompeu Fabra Universityin Barcelona. He works on questions in moral and political philosophy, and is perhaps best known for his work on wild animal suffering and animals in republican political theory. Dr Pablo Magaña, ho...

This episode's returning guest is Professor Claire Parkinson, Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies at Edge Hill University in the UK. She's also the Co-Director of the university's Centre for Human Animal Studies, which she established in 2014. Her books include 2011's Popular Media and Animals and 2020's Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters . Today, however, we're g...

Today's guest is Zara-Louise Stubbs. Zara is a researcher at the University of York, where she is reading for a PhD in Contemporary Literature. Her thesis is entitled  Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Women's Literature . As that title suggests, she's interested in questions around food, the uncanny, and gender across a range of literary genres. Those are e...

Dr Walter Veit is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His research concerns the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and applied ethics, and his books include Modelling Evolution and What Are Zoos For? , the latter co-authored with Heather Browning. On this episode, we discuss his 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness , which was publ...

Dr Dustin Crummet is an Affiliate Instructor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and the Executive Director of the Insect Institute, a non-profit organization that critically explores insects in the food system. Dustin's academic background is in philosophy, but he today writes more broadly than this, contributing to research around various a...

Today's guest is Dr Doris Schneeberger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Doris's academic background is in animal ethics and animal organizational studies. We're discuss her 2024 Palgrave Macmillan book  Envisioning a Better Future for Nonhuman Animals: Towards Future Animal Rights Declarations . This is one of the three books shortlisted for the Australasian Animal Studies Assoc...

This episode's guest is Dr Jack Waverley, a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Marketing in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester in the UK. His academic background is in marketing and consumer research, and he's interested in exploring how these disciplines can promote the interests of all animals, and not just humans. In this episode, we discuss his article 'Organs or bodies? Towar...

This episode's guest is Dr Rimona Afana. Rimona is a Romanian-Palestinian academic, as well as an activist and multimedia artist. Her research addresses war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, and crimes against nonhuman animals. Her work has taken her to various institutions, including Emory University School of Law and Kennesaw State University in the US, where she was an Ass...

Dr Matti Wilks is a social and developmental psychologist who is a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores people's moral motivation and actions. This includes lots of work that will be of interest to listeners, including research addressing the psychology of moral concern for animals and research addressing attitudes towards cultivated meat. In this episode, we talk...

This episode's guest is Dr Stanislav Roudavski, who is a designer and academic. He leads Deep Design Lab, a research and creative collective that focuses on design for and with nonhuman beings. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. His research develops theories and practices that engage with nonhumans, including animals, plants, and ecosystem...

Today's guest is Thom van Dooren. Thom is a Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. He summarizes his own interdisciplinary work as being about understanding and caring for the dead and the dying, including humans and animals, and including individuals, populations, and kinds. He will be known to lots of listene...

Today's guest is Dr Juliette Waterman. Juliette is a zooarchaeologist with a particular interest in the archaeology of wild animals in Britain, and especially in birds. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading in the UK, where she co-coordinates the International Council for Archaeozoology Stable Isotope Workin...

On this episode, we speak to Dr Pablo P. Castello, currently a Research Fellow of the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School. Pablo is an interdisciplinary political theorist whose work has appeared in such diverse locations as the  American Political Science Review ,  Biological Conservation , and the feminist philosophy journal  Hypatia . On this episode, however, we focus on his re...

This week's guest is Dr Charlotte Wrigley, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger in Norway. She has a mixed academic background, but her PhD (at Queen Mary University in London) was in human geography. Her research expertise concerns the arctic, extinction, and climate change. We talk about mammoths, and especially Cha...

This episode's guest is Professor Chloë Taylor, a scholar of gender studies and critical animal studies at the University of Alberta, as well as one of the editors of the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press, who are sponsors of Knowing Animals. We explore the 2024 Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals , which Chloë edited.

This episode features a returning guest: someone who first appeared on Knowing Animals nearly nine years ago, in February 2016. Dr Richard Twine is a Reader in Sociology at Edge Hill University in the UK. He'll be well-known to lots of regular listeners of this podcast for the work he's done championing the discipline of critical animal studies. His books include 2010's Animals as Biotechnology ,...

Dr Liza Bauer is the scientific manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking project at the University of Giessen in Germany, having recently completed a PhD on literary animal studies at the same institution. In this episode, we discuss her book  Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species , which was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their series Palgrave Studies in...

This episode features Professor Jonathan Birch of the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jonathan is a philosopher of science who will be best known to an animal studies audience for his work on the science of sentience. This includes his 2021 report  Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod...

Knowing Animals is back! This episode features Professor Samantha Vice, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. Samantha is probably best known for her work in the philosophy of race, including her paper 'How Do I Live in This Strange Place?', which explores white privilege, and has been widely discussed. In this episode, however, explore her 2023...

Dr Steve Cooke is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester. His work addresses animal rights, and how we (individually and collectively) should act given that our political communities are not friendly to animals. On this episode, we talk about Steve's new book  What Are Animal Rights For? , which was...

This episode features the independent activist and academic Kim Stallwood. After becoming involved in animal rights campaigning in the 1970s, Stallwood began archiving material relating to the movement. Much of this media is now available to researchers as part of the Kim Stallwood Archive at the British Library. In this episode, we discuss his archive and a series of blogposts about animal rights...