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.

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.

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.

This is an episode of our intermittent Protecting Animals series, featuring interviews with activists about the work they do for animals. This episode features AJ Albrecht. AJ is the Managing Director of Mercy For Animals, U.S. & Canada, an organisation she joined in 2019. She is lawyer, and formerly chaired both the American Bar Association’s Animal Law Committee and the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Animal Law Committee. She is also founder of the East Orange Animal Alliance.

This episode is brought to you by the Australiasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today, and the Animal Publics book series, from Sydney University Press, where you can find your next animal-related read.

On this episode, we speak to Professor Emerita Carol Gigliotti. Before retirement, Carol was Professor of Dynamic Media and Critical and Cultural Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. She will be known to many listeners for her work on critical animal studies, animals and technology, and animals in art and design. This includes her 2009 book Leonardo’s Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals, which was published by Springer. On this episode, however, we talk about her new book, which is called The Creative Lives of Animals. It was published in 2022 by New York University Press as part of their exciting Animals in Context series.

This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, and the Animal Publics series at Sydney University Press.

Dr Jeff Sebo is a Clinical Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University, where he is also an affiliated professor in Bioethics, Medical Ethics, Philosophy, and Law, as well as the director of the Animal Studies MA Program and the Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program. He’s also co-director of the university’s Wild Animal Welfare Program. He sits on the executive committee of the New York University Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, and is part of the advisory board for the Animals in Context book series at New York University Press. He is also the author or co-author of a number of books about animals; today, we discuss his most recent book, which is Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and other Catastrophes. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

This episode is brought to you by the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press and the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can (and should!) join today.

Today's guest is Liza Bauer, a PhD candidate in literature at the University of Giessen in Germany, as well as the manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking project at Giessen. Her dissertation, Livestock in the Laboratory of Literature, explores literary visions of human-animal relationships as thought experiments for novel political futures. She’s published widely on human-animal studies in both English and German.

We talk about her work on animal studies pedagogy. Liza’s paper “Reading the Stretch the Imagination: Exploring Representations of 'Livestock' in Literary Thought Experiments” was published in the open access book Multispecies Futures: New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies, edited by Andreas Hübner, Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich, and Maria Moss, and published by Neofelis in 2022. The paper was based on an earlier German-language paper by Liza in Simone Horstmann’s Interspezies Lernen, which was published by Transcript in 2021.

This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can join today, and the Animal Publics book series at Syndey University Press. For more information about our sponsors, take a look at their websites!

Today's guest is Professor Helen Cowie, a Professor of Early Modern History in the Department of History at the University of York. Her work has a particular focus on the history of animals. Her books include the 2011 Manchester University Press monograph Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire, 1750-1850; the 2014 Palgrave Macmillan monograph Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain; and the 2017 book Llama, part of the Reaktion Books Animal series. Today, we’re going to talk about her book Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain, which was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.

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 series at Sydney University Press.