Knowing Animals

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 new book What Are Animal Rights Fo

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 archive and a series of blogposts abo

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 Animal Shelters, which Angie co-e

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, we’re going to talk about his col

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 related subjects in animal and admini

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 w

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 ani

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 publ

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 p

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�