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.

Dr Dustin Crummet is an Affiliate Instructor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and the Executive Director of the Insect Institute, a non-profit organization that critically explores insects in the food system. Dustin's academic background is in philosophy, but he today writes more broadly than this, contributing to research around various aspects of insect farming, as well as questions concerning animals in ethics and the philosophy of religion. In this episode, we talk about his recent paper 'Have the environmental benefits of insect farming been overstated? A critical review', which was published open access in Biological Reviews in 2025. Dustin was one of six authors on the piece. The others were Corentin Biteau, Tom Bry-Chevalier, Katrina Loewy, Ren Ryba, and Michael St. Jules.

This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.

Today's guest is Dr Doris Schneeberger of the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Doris's academic background is in animal ethics and animal organizational studies. We're discuss her 2024 Palgrave Macmillan book Envisioning a Better Future for Nonhuman Animals: Towards Future Animal Rights Declarations. This is one of the three books shortlisted for the Australasian Animal Studies Association's inaugural Siobhan O'Sullivan Book Prize. (The others are Josh Milburn's Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully and Yamini Narayanan's Mother Cow, Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India.) The winner will be announced this month.

In her answers to her quick questions, Doris mentioned Peter Singer, Pablo Castelló, Claudia Hirtenfelder, and Nico Dario Müller.

This episode's guest is Dr Jack Waverley, a Senior Lecturer in Fashion Marketing in the Department of Materials at the University of Manchester in the UK. His academic background is in marketing and consumer research, and he's interested in exploring how these disciplines can promote the interests of all animals, and not just humans. In this episode, we discuss his article 'Organs or bodies? Toward an equitable, embodied, and animal-inclusive diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda', which appeared open access in the journal Consumption Markets & Culture in 2024.

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

In his answers to the quick questions, Jack mentioned Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and Tom Regan's Case for Animal Rights, as well as the 2008 article 'Figuring companion-species consumption: A multi-site ethnography of the post-canine Afghan hound', by Shona Bettany and Rory Daly.

This episode's guest is Dr Rimona Afana. Rimona is a Romanian-Palestinian academic, as well as an activist and multimedia artist. Her research addresses war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, and crimes against nonhuman animals. Her work has taken her to various institutions, including Emory University School of Law and Kennesaw State University in the US, where she was an Assistant Professor of Peace Studies. Among her other research projects, she is working on a book with the working title Ecocide/Speciesism: Rethinking Interdependence in the Anthropocene. In this episode, however, we discuss her forthcoming paper 'The Invisible Victims of Israel's Genocide/Ecocide on Gaza: Crimes Against Nature and Nonhuman Animals', which is an invited contribution to the De Gruyter Handbook of Conflict Resolution and Peace.

Listeners interested in reading the paper are invited to email Rimona for a copy. This will also allow them to check the sources for the facts and figures that Rimona mentions during the interview.

The cover image is by Rimona, and features a homeless kitten in Rafah, Gaza.

In response to the quick questions, Rimona mentioned:

• The work of Richard Falk (https://doi.org/10.1177/096701067300400105) and Polly Higgins (https://shepheardwalwyn.com/product/eradicating-ecocide-second-edition/) on ecocide.
• The work of Richard Ryder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder), Steve Sapontzis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_F._Sapontzis), Steven Wise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Wise), and Piers Beirne (https://usm.maine.edu/directories/people/piers-beirne/) on animals.
• Her own work on ecocide (https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-981-15-3877-3_33-1) and theriocide (https://vernonpress.com/book/1852).

You can find Rimona/Rimona's work on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/rimonaafana/), ORCID (https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0871-3530), X (https://x.com/rimona_afana), and BSky (https://bsky.app/profile/rimona-afana.bsky.social). You can follow her Ecocide/Speciesism project on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ecocide.speciesism.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. For more information about the series, see https://sydneyuniversitypress.com/collections/series-animal-politics.

Dr Matti Wilks is a social and developmental psychologist who is a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores people's moral motivation and actions. This includes lots of work that will be of interest to listeners, including research addressing the psychology of moral concern for animals and research addressing attitudes towards cultivated meat. In this episode, we talk about her 2025 paper 'When development constricts our moral circle', which was co-authored with Julia Marshall, Lucius Caviola, and Karri Neldner, and published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. And thanks to Brenda de Groot, who designed the moral circle image used as part of this episode's cover.

In her answers to the regular questions, Matti mentioned The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (https://archive.org/details/ethicsofwhatweea00pete), her paper on attitudes to cultivated meat (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171904), and the work of Steve Loughnan and Brock Bastian on the meat paradox (e.g., https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721414525781).

This episode's guest is Dr Stanislav Roudavski, who is a designer and academic. He leads Deep Design Lab, a research and creative collective that focuses on design for and with nonhuman beings. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. His research develops theories and practices that engage with nonhumans, including animals, plants, and ecosystems, but also artificial agents such as AI. In this episode, he talks about his recent article 'From Dingoes to AI: Who Makes Decisions in More-than-Human Worlds?', which was published in the open access journal TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies in 2025 and was co-authored with Douglas Brock.

In his answers to the regular questions, Stanislav mentions the following works:

• "Kholstomer", a short story by Leo Tolstoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kholstomer)
• Vladimir Vernadsky's 1926 book The Biosphere (1998 English translation: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1750-3)
• Peter Kropotkin's 1902 collection Mutual Aid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution)
• His own 2016 presentation 'Building Like Animals: Using Autonomous Robots to Search, Evaluate and Build' (https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/presentation/building-like-animals-using-autonomous-robots-to-search-evaluate-and-build/)
• John Odling-Smee's open access 2024 book Niche Construction (https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5822/Niche-ConstructionHow-Life-Contributes-to-Its-Own)
• His own Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4J_lRh4AAAAJ&hl=en
• His own Academia.edu profile: https://unimelb.academia.edu/StanislavRoudavski
• And the Deep Design Lab wiki: https://wiki.deepdesignlab.online/.

Today's guest is Thom van Dooren. Thom is a Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. He summarizes his own interdisciplinary work as being about understanding and caring for the dead and the dying, including humans and animals, and including individuals, populations, and kinds. He will be known to lots of listeners for his contributions to 'extinction studies'. His publications include the 2014 book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction and the 2019 book The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds, both from Columbia University Press. In this episode, we talk about his 2022 MIT Press book A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions.

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