Joanna Bourke is an historian whose previous work has looked at fear, pain, sexual violence and dismemberment. Her new book is a history and examination of bestiality and zoophilia, tracing our changing understandings from Leviticus, to modern psychiatry, the animal rights movement, and beyond.
Anna Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World was an examination of human interactions with fungi and their environments, and vice versa, in post-industrial landscapes. Her new online project Feral Atlas charts the complex and shifting relationships between humans, animals, plants, bacteria and other natural phenomena.
Loving Animals: On Bestiality, Zoophilia and Post-Human Love by Joanna Bourke is out now. Her lecture series Exploring the Body for Gresham College is available online https://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/exploring-the-body/
Anna Tsing's book The Mushroom at the End of the World is out now. You can find her online project at https://feralatlas.org/ It is made in conjunction with Stanford University curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou
Matthew Sweet hosts a Free Thinking discussion Fungi: An Alien Encounter https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000dr46 and looks at the ideas in Darwin's Descent of Man 1871 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s31z Other discussions about animals include Should We Keep Pets? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09hzj3y Does My Pet Love Me? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004dr9 Animals: Watching Us Watching Them Watching Each Other https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04nqv0n
Producer: Luke Mulhall