The Animal Turn

Claudia talks to political philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka about their latest book Animals and the Right to Politics. They discuss the differences between societal and placed based politics, unpacking why both are necessary to enable animals’ political engagement.  Date Recorded: 30 January 2026 Featured:  Animals and The Right to Politics by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka  Animal ag...

In this episode Claudia talks Teddy Duncan Jr. who departs from the Marxian consideration of the meat-commodity to think about how psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, might be useful in understanding human relations with meat. They discuss the interconnections of language, disavowal, symbolism, jouissance, and ‘the Real’ in this discussion.  Date Recorded: 12 November 2025 Teddy Du...

A scientific abstract can tell you a species is declining. A story can make you feel what that loss means and why it should change how you live. In this episode Claudia talks to Lucy Spelman, Susan Tacent, and Christopher Kondrich, the co-editors behind Creature Needs, a striking book that juxtaposes conservation science with poems, essays, and fiction written in response. They discuss the book, w...

We explore how Stranger Things signals a new monstrous moment, moving from unknowable creatures to human-made villains, and what that shift says about power, identity, and culture. Along the way, we ask how animals get coded as monsters and when their agency is reclaimed or removed in film and TV. Date Recorded: 22 April 2025   Featured:  Tolerance Discourse and Young Adult Holocaust Literature by...

Gina Song Lopez, researching vegan movements in Taiwan and China through the lens of local culture and social media, and Taylor Jobling, a law lecturer unpacking how Australia’s legislation categorises animals, come on to the show to discuss the main themes and tensions to emerge in Season 8, Animals and Media    Date Recorded: 8 December 2025 Featured:   What Comes After Entanglement by Eva Girau...

In this episode we bring together a photojournalist from India, a Canadian columnist, and a political scientist/reporter to discuss animals and the news. We discuss different types of news as well as some of the challenges that come with creating news content that focuses on animals.      Date Recorded: 4 June 2025   Featured:  How to Spot Misinformation and Bias About Climate and Food in the News...

In this episode Ankita Rathour and Lynda Korimboccus join Claudia to discuss the interconnections of film, tv, and animals. Together they touch on everything from the Peppa Pig paradox in children’s media to the shifting role of animals in Hindi cinema, nationalism and caste politics.  Date Recorded: 2 May 2025    Featured:  The Subaltern Gazes: Commentary on Amit Masurkar's Sherni by Ankita...

Guests Laura Fernández, Amanda Weiss, and Siobhan Speiran join Claudia to discuss case studies as wide ranging as Japanese animal cafes, Spanish bull fighting, and Costa Rican sanctuaries to unfurl the complex relations of social media and animals. Together they probe how social media packages animals as content, why that changes real lives, and where activism, policy, and platform design can push...

We celebrate 100 episodes by asking how podcasting can teach, build community, and improve animal welfare across languages, disciplines, and daily routines. Guests Maria Carreras and Kate Acton share concrete changes, strategic insights, and challenges that reshape how we listen to animals and to each other. Date Recorded: 11 April 2025 Featured:  When Animals Speak by Eva Meijer The Sexual Politi...

Gaming is one of the most consumed forms of media globally making it an important space from to explore human-animal relations. In this episode, media scholars Michael Rübsamen, Osvaldo Cleger, and Keung Yoon Bae discuss the interconnections of gaming, representation, and identity and what the significance of this might be for considerations of animals.    Date Recorded: 3 February 2025  Featured:...

In this episode we animals, power, and popular media. Emily Major, Debra Merskin, and Lu Liu help to think through how animals are manufactured as “pests” and “icons” in media and how those labels shape empathy, policy, and everyday cruelty towards animals.  Date Recorded: 15 January 2025  Featured:  Animals and Media Mass Media and Society edited by Debra Merskin  Seeing Species by Debra Merskin ...

In this episode we discuss how rhetorical constructions of animality, and humanity are mobilized to serve specific power structures, including white supremacy and colonialism. Lauren Corman, David Rooney, and S. Marek Muller come on the show to talk about some of the complex networks of media influence and consumption that shape such thought.    Date Recorded: 19 February 2025 Mentioned:  “Pageant...

Carrie Freeman and Christopher Eubanks join Claudia on the show to explore animal (mis)representation in media. They examine some of the ways in which animals are represented in activist messaging and the interconnections of animal rights with other social justice movements.   Date Recorded: 29 February 2025    Featured:  The Human Animal Earthling by Carrie Freeman Critical Animal and Media Studi...

The Animal Turn podcast launches Season 8 with a dive into the intersections of media, racism, and speciesism. Tobias Linné, Ellen Gorsevski, and Natalie Khazaal join Claudia on the show to discuss how race and species intersect each other in animated film and the development of their Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test to evaluate the ways in which they do.  Date Recorded: 31 Marc...

Death permeates our relationships with animals, yet we rarely confront the complex ethical questions it raises. In this conversation with Katja Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan, editors of "When Animals Die," we delve into the emerging field of animal death studies - an interdisciplinary approach examining how animals experience and humans justify animal death.  Date Recorded: 21 April 20...

Thom Norman joins Claudia on the show to discuss the work of FarmKind and the tenets of effective altruism. They talk about FarmKind’s compassion calculator and how it strategically doesn’t include vegan messaging. They discuss the organizations FarmKind supports and some of the critiques levelled against effective altruism.   Date Recorded: 20 March 2025   Thom Norman is the co-founder of FarmKin...

In this crossover episode from The Deal With Animals Podcast, Marika S. Bell talks to two experts about the impacts of sensory pollution on animals. Sensory pollution from artificial light and noise has profound effects on wildlife behavior, reproduction, and survival. Brett Seymour and Jennifer Phillips share insights about how everyday choices impact everything from insect flight patterns to bir...

The global big cat trade encompasses both legal and illegal networks, with South Africa standing as the world's largest exporter of big cats including both live animals and parts. Vanessa Amoroso from Four Paws International explains how captive breeding facilities create a "conveyor belt of cubs" that fuels tourism attractions while obscuring the darker reality of what happens to t...

 Rashmi Singh Rana and Priyanshu Thapliyal join Claudia on the show to discuss some of the key themes to emerge in Season 7, Animals and Multispecies Health. These include thinking beyond anthropocentric understandings of health; considering how geography and context shape health relations; and the importance of discourse in both imaginative and material impacts. Date Recorded: 29 January 2025  Pr...

In this episode Jessica Pierce joins Claudia to explicitly discuss dogs’ health. They discuss everything from end-of-life care for dogs, to breeding practices, and discourses about dogs’ purpose in society. They unfurl some of the overlapping and similar health needs of street- versus pet-dogs and surmise that in general dogs are facing a range of both physical and psychological challenges.   Date...

Matthew Adams joins Claudia on the show to talk about the dogs who were used by Ivan Pavlov in his extensive laboratory operations in St Petersburg. They discuss the importance of psychology and psychological experimentation in debates about multispecies health, also pointing to the importance of art-based research that challenges anthropocentricism.  Recorded: 10 September 2024.  Matthew Adams is...

In this episode we delve into how urban health histories can help us to understand changing multispecies health. Heeral Chhabra tells us how the welfare of free-roaming dogs in India was caught up with the colonial history of the country and how rabies saw drastic changes in human-dog relations.  Date Recorded: 27 September 2024.    Heeral Chhabra is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Rem...

This episode dives into the principles of compassionate conservation, emphasizing the importance of recognizing individual lives and experiences in conservation efforts. Daniel Ramp outlines how traditional conservation often overlooks the welfare of specific animals, leading to harmful outcomes, and presents compelling arguments for integrating compassion into conservation policies and practices....

Join us for a conversation with Oswaldo Santos Baquero about marginalized multispecies collectives. He explains the complexities of biological taxonomy and challenges traditional definitions of species to instead think about how collectives operate. By critically analyzing health practices through the lens of multispecies marginalization, Oswaldo challenges us to reconsider the economic interests...

Anindita Bhadra joins Claudia on the show to explain what behavioural ecology is and how it has been applied to understanding the free-roaming dogs in India. They discuss the interconnections between domestication and evolution, the social organization of free roaming dogs, and dogs relationships with urban ecologies.  Date Recorded: 16 August 2024.  Anindita Bhadra is a behavioural biologist, wor...