Claudia talks with Kathryn Gillespie about “haunting” as a way to notice how harm and care shape everyday human–animal relationships. They discuss everything, from feeding urban crows to grieving orcas and lab beagles learning what grass feels like. They consider the role of attentiveness in relations with animals and ask what becomes visible when we stop treating violence as background noise.
Date Recorded: 1 April 2026
Kathryn Gillespie, PhD, is a writer, researcher, and educator dedicated to understanding the relationships of harm and care humans have with other animals. Her work invites readers to reflect on their own connections and disconnections with animals and the natural work and imagine a path to gentler futures. She is the author of The Sound of Feathers: Attentive Living in a World Beyond Ourselves and The Cow with Ear Tag #1389. She lives at the end of the world with a wonderful human, three senior rescue horses, and a donkey with a big personality. Learn more about Kathryn via her website.
Featured:
- The Sound of Feathers by Kathryn Gillespie
- The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie
- The afterlives of the lively commodity by Kathryn Gillespie
- Playing Possum by Susana Monsó
- Animals and the Right to Politics by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
- Ghostly Matters by Avery F. Gordon
- The Spectralities Reader edited by Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren
- How to do nothing by Jenny Odell
Other Episodes of The Animal Turn
- S2E5 - Intimate Geography with Kathryn Gillespie
Quote:
“Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security). Haunting is not the same as being exploited, traumatized, or oppressed, although it usually involves these experiences or is produced by them. What's distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely. I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what's been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. The ghost, as I understand it, is not the invisible or some ineffable excess. The whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we are notified that what's been concealed is very much alive and present, interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed toward us. From Ghostly Matters (page xvi).
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.
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