Gaming is one of the most consumed forms of media globally making it an omportant space from to explore human-animal relations. In this episode, media scholars Michael Rübsamen, Osvaldo Cleger, and Keung Yoon Bae discuss the interconnections of gaming, representation, and identity and what the significance of this might be for considerations of animals. 

 

Date Recorded: 3 February 2025 

Featured: 

• The Witcher 
• Thoughts towards an Ontology of Play by Eugene Fink 
• Homo Ludens: A Study of Play Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga
• Why Animals can’t get enough of touch screen technology by Jason Goldman
• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Westworld
• Grand Theft Auto
• Assassin’s Creed
• Disco Elysium
• Death Stranding 
• Borderlands
• The Lend of Zelda
• Unravel
• Dungeons and Dragons

 

Remember to Leave a Review on  Podchaser and to check out The Animal Turn Merch. You can also support the show financially via Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

Pollination Project
The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

In this episode we animals, power, and popular media. Emily Major, Debra Merskin, and Lu Liu help to think through how animals are manufactured as “pests” and “icons” in media and how those labels shape empathy, policy, and everyday cruelty towards animals. 

Date Recorded: 15 January 2025 

Featured: 

• Animals and Media
• Mass Media and Society edited by Debra Merskin 
• Seeing Species by Debra Merskin 
• Media, Minorities and Meaning by Debra Merskin 
• Communicating Nature by Julia B. Corbett. 
• Projecting on Predators by Debra Merskin
• Brushtail possums and species-inclusive social work in Aotearoa New Zealand by Emily Major 
• Slayers, rippers, and blitzes: dark humor and the justification of cruelty to possums in online media in New Zealand by Emily Major 
• Playful Killing: Animals and Socialist Childhood in 1950s People's Republic of China by Lu Liu
• Animals in Media on The Animal Turn 
• Panda Politics by Rosemary-Claire Collard
• Animals and Tourism with Carol Kline and Jes Hooper on The Animal Turn 
• We Animals
• Sentie

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

Pollination Project
The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

In this episode we discuss how rhetorical constructions of animality, and humanity are mobilized to serve specific power structures, including white supremacy and colonialism. Lauren Corman, David Rooney, and S. Marek Muller come on the show to talk about some of the complex networks of media influence and consumption that shape such thought. 

 Date Recorded: 19 February 2025

Mentioned: 

• “Pageantry of aggression”: QAnon, animality, and the violent pursuit of whiteness by Lauren Corman
• Long live the Liver King: right-wing carnivorism and the digital dissemination of primal rhetoric by Marek Muller, David Rooney, and Cecilia Cerja
• Interspecies Subjectivity with Lauren Corman on The Animal Turn
• Dangerous Crossings by Claire Jean Kim
• Decolonization is not a Metaphor by Eve tuck and K. Wayne Yang
• Nature's Wild by Andil Gosine
• Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol Adams
• Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire by Cara Daggett
• The Animal ThereforeI I am by Jacques Derrida
• Animals and Capital by Dinesh Wadiwel
• Multispecies Disposability: Taxonomies of Power in a Global Pandemic by Darren Chang and Lauren Corman
• Becoming Hum

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

Pollination Project
The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

Carrie Freeman and Christopher Eubanks join Claudia on the show to explore animal (mis)representation in media. They examine some of the ways in which animals are represented in activist messaging and the interconnections of animal rights with other social justice movements.

 

Date Recorded: 29 February 2025 

 

Featured: 

• The Human Animal Earthling by Carrie Freeman
• Critical Animal and Media Studies by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole, Carrie P. Freeman
• Framing Farming by Carrie Freeman
• What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe 
• Animals in Media on The Animal Turn. 
• Animal Activism Starter Guide Advocacy Guide for BIPOC Activists – by APEX Advocacy 
• In Tune to Nature with Carrie Freeman
• Animals and Media Style Guidelines by Carrie Freeman and Debra Merskin
• Human supremacism: why are animal rights activists still the “orphans of the left”? by Will Kymlicka
• Crossings by Ben Goldfarb 
• Social Movement Mobilization and Feminism with Corey Lee Wrenn on The Animal Turn

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

Pollination Project
The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

The Animal Turn podcast launches Season 8 with a dive into the intersections of media, racism, and speciesism. Tobias Linné, Ellen Gorsevski, and Natalie Khazaal join Claudia on the show to discuss how race and species intersect each other in animated film and the development of their Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism (MARS) test to evaluate the ways in which they do. 

Date Recorded: 31 March 2025 

Featured: 

• Media, Racism, Speciesism: Issues and Solutions for Creaturely Racism in the Anthropocene edited by Natalie Khazaal, Ellen Gorsevski and Tobias Linné
• Monsters, Heroes, and Others: Unpacking Power in Media and Politics through Race or Speciesa symposium at Georgia Tech 
• Many meats and many milks? by Tobias Linné
• Intersectionality, Identity Politics and Violence Against Women of Color by Kimberlé Crenshaw
• Critical Animal and Media Studies edited by Núria Almiron, Matthew Cole, Carrie P. Freeman
• Connecting racial and species justice: Towards an Afrocentric animal advocacy by Luis Cordeiro-Rodrigues
• Afro-Dog by Bénédicte Boisseron
• The dreaded comparison: human and animal slavery by Marjorie Spiegel

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Pollination Project
The Pollination Project empowers volunteers across by providing the funding they need.

Georgia Institute of Technology
School of Modern Language, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media, & Commun

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

Death permeates our relationships with animals, yet we rarely confront the complex ethical questions it raises. In this conversation with Katja Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan, editors of "When Animals Die," we delve into the emerging field of animal death studies - an interdisciplinary approach examining how animals experience and humans justify animal death. 

Date Recorded: 21 April 2025

 Katja M. Guenther is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where her research and teaching focus on gender, feminist activism and social movements, human-animal relationships, and the state. Her work centers on improving our understanding of how and why inequalities of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and species reproduce so reliably, and what we can do to challenge these inequalities. Most recently, she is co-editor of When Animals Die: Examining Justifications and Envisioning Justice (New York University Press, 2024). She is the author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals (Stanford University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Section on Animals and Society Distinguished Book Award, Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2010), and numerous journal articles. Learn more: www.katjamguenther.com.

Julian Paul Keenan is a Professor of Biology and Psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, USA. His focus on animals has centered around consciousness and cognition attempting to understand how vastly different nervous systems have evolved. Dr. Keenan is the founder of the journal Social Neuroscience and he is the first to identify the neural substrates of self-awareness. 

 

 Featured: 

• When Animals Die by Katja M. Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan
• The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals by Katja M. Guenther
• Animals and urban gentrification: Displacement and injustice in the trans-species city by Phil Hubbard and Andrew Brooks
• Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by ben Goldfarb
• Killer Cities by Nigel Thrift
• Living Car-Fr

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

Thom Norman joins Claudia on the show to discuss the work of FarmKind and the tenets of effective altruism. They talk about FarmKind’s compassion calculator and how it strategically doesn’t include vegan messaging. They discuss the organizations FarmKind supports and some of the critiques levelled against effective altruism.  

Date Recorded: 20 March 2025

 

Thom Norman is the co-founder of FarmKind, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating the end of factory farming by expanding the coalition of people working to protect farmed animals. After a career as a nuclear energy lawyer, Thom launched FarmKind to create new pathways for compassionate people to make a meaningful difference for animals suffering in factory farms. Working with expert evaluators and grant-makers, FarmKind identifies and promotes highly effective charities that are creating tangible improvements in farm animal welfare while building a more sustainable food system. Their innovative Compassion Calculator offers an alternative to the traditional "go vegan" message, helping people understand how strategic donations can create substantial impact regardless of their dietary choices.

 

Featured: 

• FarmKind
• What’s Effective Altruism and what are some alternatives? With Alice Crary and Lori Gruen on Think Like a Vegan
• Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer
• Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman
• S6E5: Abolition with Gary Francione on The Animal Turn
• S6E6: Social Movement Mobilization and Feminism with Corey Lee Wrenn on The Animal Turn
• What’s Effective Altruism and what are some alternatives? on the Think Like a Vegan Podcast. 
• Plant Based Treaty
• Good Food Institute

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

In this crossover episode from The Deal With Animals Podcast, Marika S. Bell talks to two experts about the impacts of sensory pollution on animals. Sensory pollution from artificial light and noise has profound effects on wildlife behavior, reproduction, and survival. Brett Seymour and Jennifer Phillips share insights about how everyday choices impact everything from insect flight patterns to bird nesting success.

Date Released: 7 May 2024

Dr. Jennifer Phillips is an assistant professor at Washington State University. Jenny's research focuses on animal behavior communication and the effects of human activity on wildlife, especially passerine birds, specifically, she's interested in how functional traits are affected by landscapes and sensory pollution, and whether changes in these traits lead to population and community level ecological consequences.

Dr. Brett Seymour,an associate professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, his research interests include how animals interact with their visual environment and how light pollution disrupts natural behaviors, physiology and ecosystem services in arthropods and their predators!

The Deal With Animals Podcastis about the interactions and connections between humans and non-human animals. The mission of the show is to make research more accessible to the public while sharing the voices and lived experience of human connection with animals. The show is hosted by Marika S. Bell. 

Featured: 

• The Darkness Manifesto by Johan Eklöf
• Wildscape by Nancy Lawson

 

Thank you to Marika S. Bell for sharing this content with The Animal Turn Podcast.  

The Deal With Animals
The Deal With Animals Podcast is about the interactions and connections between humans and animals.

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

The global big cat trade encompasses both legal and illegal networks, with South Africa standing as the world's largest exporter of big cats including both live animals and parts. Vanessa Amoroso from Four Paws International explains how captive breeding facilities create a "conveyor belt of cubs" that fuels tourism attractions while obscuring the darker reality of what happens to these animals. Together Claudia and Vanessa discuss how loopholes in CITES allows for the large-scale legal breeding and trade of big cats, which also has numerous slippages into the illegal trade of the animals and exacerbates their exploitation. 

 

Date Recorded: 5 August 2024

 

Vanessa Amoroso has been employed at FOUR PAWS / VIER PFOTEN International since September 2021 and has worked within the animal welfare sector for thirteen years. She holds a BSc in Environmental Biology and a PGCert in International Animal Welfare, Ethics and Law. Vanessa currently oversees the design and delivery of the commercial big cat trade campaign in South Africa and European trade of Tigers. She also heads up the wildlife trade component of the Pandemics and Animal Welfare campaign. 

 

Featured: 

• Dethroned directed by Will Foster-Grundy
• Help for Big Cats by Four Paws
• Big Cat Reporting Tool by Four Paws
• CITES – Convention on the International Trade of Endangered Species. 

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, and Instagram

 

Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was edited and produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder. 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.

 Rashmi Singh Rana and Priyanshu Thapliyal join Claudia on the show to discuss some of the key themes to emerge in Season 7, Animals and Multispecies Health. These include thinking beyond anthropocentric understandings of health; considering how geography and context shape health relations; and the importance of discourse in both imaginative and material impacts.

Date Recorded: 29 January 2025 

Priyanshu Thapliyal is a PhD Researcher based in the school of GeoSciences at University of Edinburgh. In his project, he is thinking with and for people and street dogs living in an Indian Himalayan village to explore the everyday ethics and politics of sharing life and space on a more-than-human planet. He has an interest in cultural geography, environmental anthropology, and multispecies studies. Connect with Priya via Twitter (@priathaplial). 

Rashmi Singh Rana is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Compassionate Conservation of the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney. Her conservation research explores how the dynamic socio-ecological realities shape coexistence dynamics in the multispecies spaces of the Indian trans-Himalaya. Presently, her research interests lie in tracing the contemporary relationships between humans and dogs, and its influence on the future of safe multispecies cohabitation in agro-pastoral landscapes. Connect with her via Twitter (@RashmiSinghRana). 

Featured: 

• Dogopolis by Chris Pearson 
• Conservation Beyond Biopolitics by Krithika Srinivasan 

Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics for sponsoring this podcast; Remaking One Health Indies for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke for the bed music, Jeremy John for the logo, Rebecca Shen for her design work. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder. 

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Remaking One Health (ROH) Indies
This project investigates people-dog interactions, dog ecology, and rabies prevention efforts in urb

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Support the show

The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.

• Leave a Review on Podchaser
• Check out The Animal Turn Merch.
• Support us on Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, and Buzzsprout.