Knowing Animals

Today's guest is Dr Nicolai Skiveren. Nicolai is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he is working on a project called The Afterlives of Stories: Exploring the Long-term Impact of Environmental Narrative. His research addresses media studies, environmental communication, and audience reception. And that's exactly what we discuss in the episode; in particular, we explore Nicolai's recent paper 'Persuasion or Polarization? Investigating the Reception of Vegan Advocacy Film', which was published in 2026 in the Oxford University Press 'Intersections' volume Environmental Change and Human Experience, edited by Georgina Endfield and Poul Holm.

The people/works that Nicolai mentioned in his answers to the regular questions are:

• 'Conspiratorial storytelling and environmental crisis', which Nicolai co-wrote iwth Magnus Andersen and published in the journal Green Letters in 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2024.241625
• Derek Bousé's 2000 book Wildlife Film, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhgg4
• Randy Malamud's 2010 paper 'Animals on film: The ethics of the human gaze', in the journal Spring. There is a PDF accessible here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220106002120/https://english.gsu.edu/files/2015/06/Spring.pdf
• Philip Armstrong, from the University of Cantebury in New Zealand https://philiparmstrong.org/

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series from Sydney University Press.

Please note that this episode uses a modified version of the poster of Milked for its 'cover' because Milked is the subject of Nicolai's research project; there's no link between Milked and Knowing Animals.

Dr Jan Dutkiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in New York. Much of his research focuses on the political economy of food; in addition to publishing research on this topic in academic journals, he's the author of many popular pieces in publications like The New York Times, Vox, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. In this episode, we talk about his book Feed The People! Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make it Even Better, which was co-authored with Gabriel N. Rosenberg. Feed the People was published by Basic Books in 2026.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press.

In his answers to the regular questions, Jan mentioned Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and the work of Dinesh Wadiwel. Jan's website is here: https://www.jandutkiewicz.com/

This episode's guest is Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History. She's a historian of the early modern Atlantic interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She's the author of the beautifully named 2008 book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, but we're going to talk primarily about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492.

This is a particularly special episode of Knowing Animals, as it is a tie-in with the Journal of the British Academy, with a written version of the interview appearing in the journal.

In answer to the regular questions, Marcy mentioned:

• J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Animals
• Her chapter 'Animal', in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/753099
• Her chapter 'Going to the Birds' (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351055741-4/going-birds-marcy-norton) in the book Early Modern Things.
• Cora Diamond's paper 'Eating Meat and Eating People' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876)
• And here is Marcy's Penn profile: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/marcy-norton

On the 250th episode of Knowing Animals, the guest is Jin Qian, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She researches China's environmental governance and its global implications, with a focus on the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. Her multidisciplinary PhD project focuses on wildlife in Chinese food systems. She's also involved in the animal movement in China, including hosting a podcast called Slightly Tofu. In the episode, we focus on her open access 2026 paper 'More-than-human practices in wild animal farming: The case of China's forest frogs', which was published in the Journal of Rural Studies and co-authored with Annah Zhu, Arjen Buijs, and Simon Bush.

• The paper we discuss is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016726001749
• If you want an overview of Jin's research area, see https://www.cell.com/one-earth/abstract/S2590-3322(25)00102-2
• Jin's podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%E6%9C%89%E7%82%B9%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90-slightly-tofu/id1794418651. It's also available on Spotify, YouTube, etc. It has two special series; Tofu International (with international guests, in English) and Tofu Across the Strait (with Taiwanese animal activists and podcasters)
• Jin's 'Lettuce Know' directory is here: https://lettuce-know.pages.dev/
• The works she mentioned in her regular questions were Garner and Francione's The Animal Rights Debate (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fran14954), Wadiwel's 'Do fish resist?' (https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363), and Wadiwel's Animals and Capital (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.9941275).
• Jin is happy to talk to people interested in her research area: jin.qian[at]wur.nl
• The cover image is a photo Jin took of a free-living forest frog

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?'

In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned;

• Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html
• His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/
• John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529)
• His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/

On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He's the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?'

In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned;

• Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html
• His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/
• John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529)
• His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/

This episode features two guests. Dr Eze Paez is a returning guest; he first appeared on the podcast back in 2018. Eze is Tenure-Track Professor in Jurisprudence and Bioethics of Pompeu Fabra Universityin Barcelona. He works on questions in moral and political philosophy, and is perhaps best known for his work on wild animal suffering and animals in republican political theory. Dr Pablo Magaña, however, is a new guest. Pablo is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He's a political philosopher, with particular interests in questions about animals in democratic theory. We discuss a paper that Eze and Pablo co-authored: 'Sentientist political liberalism'. This paper was published open access in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 2026.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press.

In answer to the regular questions, Pablo mentioned:

• Jesús Mosterín's book El triunfo de la compasión: Nuestra relación con los otros animales [or, in English: Triumph of Compassion: Our Relation with the other Animals]; learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Moster%C3%ADn
• His early work on animals and the all-affected interests principle; for his published work on this topic, see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2022.2100962.
• Various forthcoming work, including a collaboration with Adrià Moret (https://www.adriamoret.com/)

This episode's returning guest is Professor Claire Parkinson, Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies at Edge Hill University in the UK. She's also the Co-Director of the university's Centre for Human Animal Studies, which she established in 2014. Her books include 2011's Popular Media and Animals and 2020's Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. Today, however, we're going to talk about her 2024 Sydney University Press collection Animal Activism On and Off Screen, which she co-edited with Lara Herring. In particular, we're going to look at Claire's chapter 'Anti-capitalism, animal rights and advocacy in Okja'.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics series at Sydney University Press, the publishers of Animal Activism On and Off Screen!

Today's guest is Zara-Louise Stubbs. Zara is a researcher at the University of York, where she is reading for a PhD in Contemporary Literature. Her thesis is entitled Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Women's Literature. As that title suggests, she's interested in questions around food, the uncanny, and gender across a range of literary genres. Those are exactly the kind of topics we talk about in this episode, where we look at Zara's anthology The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird, which gathers a range of short stories and other works – some famous, some comparatively obscure – about the 'uncanny gastronomic', along with introductions to the texts from Zara. The book was published in 2023 British Library Publishing, part of their British Library Tales of the Weird series.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press

Dr Walter Veit is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His research concerns the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and applied ethics, and his books include Modelling Evolution and What Are Zoos For?, the latter co-authored with Heather Browning. On this episode, we discuss his 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, which was published by Routledge.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.