Knowing Animals

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 an author or editor of 11 books, and in this episode we talk about his most recent: Animal Architecture: Beasts, Buildings and Us was published by Reaktion Books in 2023.

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 activism in the early days of the internet, communication gaps between activists and academics, and the challenge of uninformed activists.

This episode is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can join today. It is also brought to you by the Animal Publics book series from Sydney University Press.

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 activism in the early days of the internet, communication gaps between activists and academics, and the challenge of uninformed activists.

This episode is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can join today. It is also brought to you by the Animal Publics book series from Sydney University Press.

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 the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series, including American Horror Story and Philosophy. Today, however, we talk about cultivated meat, because Rachel is the author of Edibility and In Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations, which was released in 2023 by Lexington Books.

This episode is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today, and the Animal Publics series at Sydney University Press, which has just published a new book called Decolonising Animals.

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 Animal Law Committee and the New Jersey State Bar Association's Animal Law Committee. She is also founder of the East Orange Animal Alliance.

This episode is brought to you by the Australiasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today, and the Animal Publics book series, from Sydney University Press, where you can find your next animal-related read.

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 episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today. It's also brought to you by the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press. Take a look at their new titles!

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. This includes her 2009 book Leonardo's Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals, which was published by Springer. On this episode, however, we talk about her new book, which is called The Creative Lives of Animals. It was published in 2022 by New York University Press as part of their exciting Animals in Context series.

This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, and the Animal Publics series at Sydney University Press.

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 Program. He sits on the executive committee of the New York University Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, and is part of the advisory board for the Animals in Context book series at New York University Press. He is also the author or co-author of a number of books about animals; today, we discuss his most recent book, which is Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves: Why Animals Matter for Pandemics, Climate Change, and other Catastrophes. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

This episode is brought to you by the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press and the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can (and should!) join today.

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's published widely on human-animal studies in both English and German.

We talk about her work on animal studies pedagogy. Liza's paper "Reading the Stretch the Imagination: Exploring Representations of 'Livestock' in Literary Thought Experiments" was published in the open access book Multispecies Futures: New Approaches to Teaching Human-Animal Studies, edited by Andreas Hübner, Micha Gerrit Philipp Edlich, and Maria Moss, and published by Neofelis in 2022. The paper was based on an earlier German-language paper by Liza in Simone Horstmann's Interspezies Lernen, which was published by Transcript in 2021.

This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you can join today, and the Animal Publics book series at Syndey University Press. For more information about our sponsors, take a look at their websites!

Today's guest is Professor Helen Cowie, a Professor of Early Modern History in the Department of History at the University of York. Her work has a particular focus on the history of animals. Her books include the 2011 Manchester University Press monograph Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire, 1750-1850; the 2014 Palgrave Macmillan monograph Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain; and the 2017 book Llama, part of the Reaktion Books Animal series. Today, we're going to talk about her book Victims of Fashion: Animal Commodities in Victorian Britain, which was published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press.

This episode is brought to you by AASA (the Australasian Animal Studies Association), which you can join today. It is also brought to you by the Animal Publics series at Sydney University Press.