Benjamin Meiches explores the role of animals laboring alongside humans (mine-clearance dogs, milk-producing cows and goats, disease-identifying rats) in humanitarian operations, generating new ethical possibilities of care in humanitarian practice—and opening up new ethical ways to think about being human in terms of how we interact with nonhuman animals. Meiches, author of Nonhuman Humanitarians, is joined here in conversation with Stefanie Fishel.

Benjamin Meiches is associate professor of politics at the Univeristy of Washington-Tacoma. He is author of Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics and The Politics of Annihilation: A Genealogy of Genocide.

Stefanie Fishel is lecturer in politics and international relations at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia. Fishel is author of The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic and contributor to the edited volume The Long 2020.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

-Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (trans. Sean Hand)

-Heifer International (organization)

-J. M. Coetzee / The Lives of Animals

-Brian Massumi / What Animals Teach Us about Politics

-Liisa Malkki / The Need to Help

-Timothy Morton / Dark Ecology

-Timothy Morton / Ecology without Nature

-David Shannon / Duck on a Bike

-Jack Halberstam / Wild Things

-Eugene Thacker / In the Dust of This Planet

Care is more than human—it's creaturely.