This episode features Professor Jonathan Birch of the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jonathan is a philosopher of science who will be best known to an animal studies audience for his work on the science of sentience. This includes his 2021 report Review of the Evidence…

Knowing Animals is back! This episode features Professor Samantha Vice, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. Samantha is probably best known for her work in the philosophy of race, including her paper ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’, which explores white privilege, and has been widely disc…

Dr Steve Cooke is an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester. His work addresses animal rights, and how we (individually and collectively) should act given that our political communities are not friendly to animals. On this episode, we talk about Steve's …

This episode features the independent activist and academic Kim Stallwood. After becoming involved in animal rights campaigning in the 1970s, Stallwood began archiving material relating to the movement. Much of this media is now available to researchers as part of the Kim Stallwood Archive at the British Library. In this episode, we discuss his arc…

Dr Angie Pepper in a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton in the UK. She works in moral and political philosophy, and has published papers on, among other topics, animals’ right to privacy, animals’ political agency, and what we owe to animals in light of climate change. In this episode, we discuss the collection The Ethics of Ani…

On this episode of Knowing Animals, we are joined by Dr Christopher Bobier. Chris is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Saint Mary's University of Minnesota and the Associate Director of the Hendrickson Institute for Ethical Leadership. Among other things, his research concerns ethics, including lots of work on animal and food ethics. Today, w…

This episode features Professor Delcianna J. Winders. Delci is an associate professor of law and the Director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law & Graduate School in the United States. Her published work addresses the law around farmed animals, slaughterhouse workers, captive wild animals, animal advocacy, animal testing, and rel…

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 anim…

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 jus…

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…

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…

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 A…

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 …

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 Eme…

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 …

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 publis…

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 …

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 a…

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 act…

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 t…

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 Anim…

Today's guest, Dr Troy Vettese, is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. He’s an environmental historian who, in addition to animal studies, has expertise in energy history and environmental economics. We discuss his book Half-Earth Socialism, which was co-authored with Drew Pendergrass and published by Verso in 2022. This episod…

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.…

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 P…

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…