Knowing Animals

This episode features Andrew Lopez. Andrew is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Queen's University in Canada, where he works on critical animal studies, political philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of biology. Regular listeners to Knowing Animals will have heard his name before – he was the co-author of the excellent 'Gendering animals', which we discussed with Letitia Meynell a few months ago. In this episode, we discuss Andrew's paper 'Nonhuman animals and epistemic injustice'. This was published open access (meaning it's free to read and download) in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy in 2023.

Devon Docherty is a recent graduate of the master's programme in Human-Animal Interactions at the University of Stirling in Scotland and a tutor in Stirling's Division of Psychology. She is also a media assistant with the British animal activist organization Surge. In this episode, we talk about her paper 'The cheese paradox: How do vegetarians justify consuming non-meat animal products?' This was coauthored with Dr Carol Jasper and published open access – meaning it is free to read online from anywhere in the world – in the journal Appetite.

This episode features Dr Benjamín Schultz-Figueroa. Ben is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Seattle University. He works in critical animal studies, the history of science, documentary studies, and science fiction studies. In this episode, we talk about his 2023 book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life, which was published by the University of California Press. By the way, this is an open access book – released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license – which means that anyone can read or download the book for free from anywhere in the world.

This episode features not one but two guests. Rhys Borchert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona in the United States and Dr Aliya Dewey is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. We talk discuss Rhys and Aliya's paper 'In Praise of Animals', which was the winner of the inaugural essay prize competition of The Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Association. 'In Praise of Animals' was published in the journal Biology & Philosophy in 2023.

The guest on this episode is Dr Virginia Thomas, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Rural Policy Research at the University of Exeter in the UK. She has a background in literature, science communication, and sociology, and was previously a veterinary nurse. We talk about her paper 'Categorisation of cats: managing boundary felids in Aotearoa New Zealand and Britain'. The paper was co-written with Dr Alexandra Palmer of the University of Auckland. The paper is due to be published OPEN ACCESS in the journal People and Nature on the same day this episode is released.

This episode features Professor Letitia Meynell, of the Department of Philosophy and the Gender and Women's Studies Program at Dalhousie University in Canada. Her work addresses the philosophy of science, epistemology, and feminist philosophy, which all feed into questions about our relationships with animals. Scholars of animal studies might know her as one of the co-authors of the 2019 Routledge book Chimpanzee Rights: The Philosophers' Brief. In this episode, we focus on her 2021 paper "Gendering animals", co-authored with Andrew Lopez, which was published in the journal Synthese.

This episode features Dr Stacy Banwell. Stacy is an Associate Professor of Criminology in the School of Law at the University of Greenwich in London. Much of her research concerns gender and warfare. She's the author of Gender and the Violence(s) of War and Armed Conflict, which was published open access by Emerald in 2020, and co-editor of The Emerald International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women's Acts of Violence. In this episode, however, we discuss her 2023 Palgrave Macmillan monograph The War Against Nonhuman Animals: A Non-Speciesist Understanding of Gendered Reproductive Violence.

This episode remembers the life and work of Siobhan O'Sullivan, who founded Knowing Animals in 2015, and died in 2023. The episode features a short introduction from Josh Milburn, and then an interview of Siobhan conducted by Clare McCausland. This interview addresses Siobhan's published research on being an animal studies scholar, coauthored with Yvette Watt and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey. This interview was originally released as an episode of Knowing Animals in 2019, and has become one of our most-downloaded episodes.

On this episode, we speak to Dr Andrew Fenton, an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University in Canada. Among other topics, Andrew's work addresses animal ethics, the philosophy of animal behaviour, and the philosophy of animal cognition. We discuss his chapter 'Re-Seeing Animal Research Ethics in Light of COVID-19', which was published in the 2023 Routledge collection Contagion Narratives: The Society, Culture and Ecology of the Global South, edited by R. Sreejith Varma and Ajanta Sircar. This episode is brought to you by AASA (the Australasian Animal Studies Association) and the Animal Publics book series from Sydney University Press.

On this episode of Knowing Animals, we speak to Brian Kateman. Brian teaches environmental science, sustainability, and environmental communication at Kean University in New Jersey and Fordham University in New York. However, he is probably best known for his activism and journalism. He is the founder of the Reducetarian Foundation, and the author of several books about food and food systems. In this episode, we discuss his 2022 book Meat Me Halfway, and his 2021 documentary of the same name. The episode is brought to you by AASA (the Australasian Animal Studies Association) and the Animal Publics book series from Sydney University Press.