Knowing Animals

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.

This episode's guest is Dr Paul Dobraszczyk, a Manchester-based writer, photographer and artist who is also a Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. Paul writes about a range of topics in architecture, including architectural theory, architectural history, and the links between architecture and ecology. He’s an author or editor of 11 books, and in this episode we talk about his most recent: Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us was published by Reaktion Books in 2023.

On this episode of Knowing Animals (which is an episode of our intermittent Protecting Animals series) we are joined by Erik Marcus, the animal activist behind Vegan.com, as well as the author of books including Meat Market, The Ultimate Vegan Guide, A Vegan History, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, and Self-Care for Activists. We discuss vegan activism in the early days of the internet, communication gaps between activists and academics, and the challenge of uninformed activists. This episode is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can join today. It is also brought to you by the Animal Publics book series from Sydney University Press.

Today's guest is Dr Rachel Robison-Green, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Utah State University. She works in metaethics, ethics, and epistemology. Rachel does lots of really interesting work challenging stereotypes about what philosophers do and who philosophy is for. For example, she has edited or co-edited no fewer than twelve books in the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, including American Horror Story and Philosophy. Today, however, we talk about cultivated meat, because Rachel is the author of Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations, which was released in 2023 by Lexington Books. This episode is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today, and the Animal Publics series at Sydney University Press, which has just published a new book called Decolonising Animals.