Knowing Animals

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 of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans, which led to cephalopods and decapods being recognized as sentient beings in UK law. He was also one of the lead signatories of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. In this episode, we talk about his 2024 Oxford University Press book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. This is an open access book, meaning that all listeners can read and download it for free entirely legally.

This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. This is a collection of scholarly books about animal studies. As well as recently changing names, the series also has new editors: Danielle Celermajer, Rick De Vos, Chloë Taylor, and Katie Woolaston. If you’re currently working on a book about animal studies, you should consider reaching out to them to see if the series would be a good fit – and we'll get a chance to ask some of these new editors about the Animal Politics series in upcoming episodes of Knowing Animals.

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 discussed. In this episode, however, explore her 2023 book The Ethics of Animal Beauty, which was published by Lexington.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by Sydney University Press. Their Animal Publics book series has been renamed to the Animal Politics book series. Earlier this year, they published Richard Twine’s book The Climate Crisis and Other Animals, which is available in both paperback and hardback. The paperback edition, in particular, is very reasonably priced – academic books are often very expensive, but Sydney University Press bucks that trend.

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 For?, which was published in 2023 by Bristol University Press.

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 about animal rights he produced for the British Library.

This episode is sponsored by the newly renamed Animal Politics series at Sydney University Press. To learn more about the series, visit the Sydney University Press website.

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-edited with Valery Giroux and Kristin Voigt, including both the guidelines and recommendations in Part I of the book, and Angie’s chapter ‘Caring in Non-Ideal Conditions: Animal Rescue Organizations and Morally Justified Killing’ in part II of the book. The Ethics of Animal Shelters was published in 2023 by Oxford University Press.

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 collection New Omnivorism and Strict Veganism: Critical Perspectives, especially his chapter 'New omnivore policy: Friend or foe of veganism?'. The book, which Chris co-edited with Dr Cheryl Abbate, was released in 2023 by Routledge.

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 administrative law. We talk about her 2022 paper ‘Treating Humans Worse Than Animals? Exposing a False Solitary Confinement Narrative’. This appeared in the Cambridge University Press book Carceral Logics: Human Incarceration and Animal Captivity, edited by Lori Gruen and Justin Marceau. This book is open access, meaning that you can read and download Delci’s chapter, and the rest of the book, free of charge from anywhere in the world.

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 with Letitia Meynell a few months ago. In this episode, we discuss Andrew's paper ‘Nonhuman animals and epistemic injustice’. This was published open access (meaning it’s free to read and download) in the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy in 2023.

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.