In this ‘Grad Review’ Claudia talks to Virginia Thomas and Darren Chang, two early career researchers interested in animals and politics. Together they unpack synergies, tensions, and omissions that emerged in the 6th Season of The Animal Turn podcast. They discuss the multiple scales at which politics is practiced and can be considered, the crisis of imagination that potentially exists among the animal advocacy movement as well as some of the conceptual development being done by scholars that can create space for more just, multispecies futures.

Date Recorded: 15 December 2023. 

Darren Chang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Criminology, and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute, at the University of Sydney. His research interests broadly include interspecies relations under colonialism and global capitalism, practices of solidarity, kinship, and mutual aid across species in challenging oppressive powers, social movement theories, and multispecies justice.Through political (and politicised) ethnography at animal sanctuaries, Darren's PhD research project explores potential alignments and tensions between animal and other social and environmental justice movements. The multispecies dimension of this project also considers the place, positions, and subjectivities of nonhuman animals in relation to anthropogenic social movements.

Virginia Thomas is an environmental social scientist with a PhD in Sociology. She is interested in people’s interactions with their environment and with other animals. Virginia’s work explores the social and ethical questions in human-animal relationships. She is currently a research fellow on the Wellcome Trust funded project ‘From Feed the Birds to Do Not Feed the Animals’ which examines the drivers and consequences of animal feeding. This leads on from her previous research which examined human-animal relations in the media (as part of zoonotic disease framing) and in rewilding projects (in relation to biopolitics and human-animal coexistence). You can connect with Virginia via Twitter (@ArbitrioHumano). 

 

Featured: 

• The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod by Henry Beston
• Animals and Capital by Dinesh Wadiwel

 

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

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

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

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Claudia talks to Andrea Schapper about animals and international relations with an explicit focus on the United Nations. They discuss how animal rights are absent in the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the promise of the rights of nature framework being employed in Latin America. 

 

Date Recorded: 5 December 2023 

 

Andrea Schapper is a Professor in International Politics at the University of Stirling. In September and October 2022, she was a Guest Scholar at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights & Humanitarian Law in Lund, Sweden. She also held a Senior Fellowship at the Berlin-Potsdam Research Group 'The International Rule of Law - Rise or Decline' in October 2020 and was Fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany for several months in 2016 and 2017. Prior to joining the University of Stirling in 2015, she was a Lecturer in International Relations at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany (2012-2015). Her PhD is from the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (Universität Bremen, 2011) and she has previously studied at Cornell University (USA), Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany) and the United Nations Office at Geneva (United Nations Graduate Study Program, Switzerland). Andrea has worked for international organizations, like the International Labour Organization (ILO in Geneva, Switzerland), and non-governmental organizations, such as the National Domestic Workers' Movement (India) or the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (Zambia). She has conducted field research in Bangladesh, India, Ethiopia and Zambia. Andrea’s research focuses on environmental justice and on new developments at the intersection of human rights and the environment, including new forms of institutional interactions and actor constellations fostering links between the two policy fields. She also has a strong interest in rights of nature and animal rights. Connect with Andrea via email ([email protected]). 

 

Featured: 

• Transforming our world? Strengthening animal rights and animal welfare at the United Nations by Andrea Schapper and Cebuan Bliss
• The 18th Sustainable Development Goal by Ingrid J. Visseren-Hamakers
• Universal Declaration of Mother Earth by the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN)

 

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on

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

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.

Krithika Srinivasan joins Claudia on the show to talk about re-animalization, a concept that challenges the dominant ways in which human wellbeing are framed. Re-Animalization compels one to think about how development is predicated on logics of protection and sacrifice, expanding notions of longevity, and a reduction of risk. Re-Animalization offers an opportunity to shift our gaze to the most privileged and to consider how risks might be more evenly distributed. 

 

Date Recorded: 23 November 2023. 

 

Krithika Srinivasan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)

 

Featured: 

Re-animalising wellbeing: Multispecies justice after development by Krithika Srinivasan
The Eye of the Crocodile by Val Plumwood
Pluriversal politics: The real and the possible by Arturo Escobar 
Bed bugs are back by Heather Lynch
Respecting Nature’s Autonomy in Relationship with Humanity by Ned Hettinger

 

The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found on A.P.P.L.E, Twitter, 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, Virginia Thomas for the Animal

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

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.

Claudia talks to renowned photographer Jo-Anne McArthur about the power of images in political change for animals. They unpack what animal photojournalism is, some of the challenges photographers encounter in recording the lives of animals, and the political implications of such photos. 

 

Date Recorded: 17 October 2023. 

 

Jo-Anne McArthur is an award-winning photojournalist, sought-after speaker, photo editor, and the founder of We Animals Media. She has visited over sixty countries to document our complex relationship with animals. She is the author of three books: We Animals (2014), Captive (2017), and HIDDEN: Animals in the Anthropocene (2020), and is the subject of Canadian filmmaker Liz Marshall’s acclaimed Canadian documentary, The Ghosts in Our Machine. Jo-Anne’s photographs have received accolades from Wildlife Photographer of the Year, Nature Photographer of the Year, Big Picture, Picture of the Year International, the Global Peace Award, and others. Jo-Anne has been a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia and Denver University, and in 2020, Jo-Anne was a jury member for World Press Photo. She hails from Toronto, Canada. Find out more about Jo-Anne on her website or connect with her on Twitter (@WeAnimals). 

  

Featured: 

• Hidden, Animals in the Anthropocene by We Animals Media
• It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War by Lindsey Addario                                
• Every Twelve seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat. 
• Maximum tolerated dose by Decipher Films
• Zebra Eye by Frans Lanting
• Jo-Anne’s striking images of minks.
• We Animals Media
• Aaron Gekoski 
• 
  

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

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

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 Claudia talks to Corey Lee Wrenn about two concepts that are central to her work in animal studies: social movement mobilization and feminism. They discuss veganism as a social movement as well as some of the ways in which feminism has been sidelined in animal rights’ debates. 

 

Date Recorded: 13 October 2023. 

 

Corey Lee Wrenn is Lecturer of Sociology with the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research (SSPSSR) and Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Social and Political Movements at the University of Kent.  In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis. She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), Animals in Irish Society (SUNY Press 2021), Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (forthcoming, Routledge) and Vegan Feminism: History, Theory, Activism (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). 

  

Featured: 

• A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory by Corey Lee Wrenn.
• Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits by Corey Lee Wrenn.
•  “Orphans of the left”?  by Will Kymlicka.
• Racism as Zoological Witchcraft by Aph Ko.
• Are Women Human? by Catharine MacKinnon.
• Ecofeminism, Second Edition by Carol Adams and Lori Gruen.
• The Revolution will not be funded by Incite. 
• International Association of Vegan Sociologists. 
• Vegan Feminist Network.
• Plant Based University Campaign.

 

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

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

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.

Claudia talks to lawyer and philosopher Gary Francione about abolition. Gary provides an overview of how ideas related to animals have emerged and changed since the 19th century. This includes the emergence of animal welfare, animal rights, and abolitionism. Throughout the interview Gary asserts that animal welfare and animal rights will not achieve anything until there is a paradigm shift whereby animals are no longer understood as property, food, or things to use. 

 

Date Recorded: 5 October 2023. 

 

Gary Francione is a is a published author and frequent guest on radio and television shows for his theory of animal rights, criticism of animal welfare law and the property status of nonhuman animals. He has degrees in philosophy and clerked for U.S. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal rights theory and animals and the law. His most recent book is the 2020 publication Why Veganism matters: The Moral Value of Animalsand other titles include The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? (Columbia University Press, 2010) and Animals, Property, and the Law (Temple University Press, 1995). He is also the editor of Critical Perspectives on Animals: Theory, Culture, Science and Law, a series published by Columbia University Press. Gary has been teaching animal rights for more than 25 years and, together with Professor Ana Charlton, started and operated the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic from 1990-2000, making Rutgers the first university in the U.S. to have animal rights law as part of the regular academic curriculum and to award students academic credit, not only for classroom work, but also for work on actual cases involving animal issues. 
 

Featured: 

• Animals, Property, and Law by Gary Francione.
• Reflections on Tom Regan and the Animal Rights Movement That Once Was by Gary Francione.
• Are you a vegan or are you an extremist?  by Gary Francione. 
• Why Veganism matters: The Moral Value of Animals by Gary Francione.
• Animal Liberation  by Peter Singer.
• Abolitionist Approach

 

 Animal Highlight: Honeybees

 
The Animal Turn is part of the  iROAR, an Animals Podcasting Network and can also be found o

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

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 Dinesh Wadiwel discusses how violence is an important concept in political theory. He outlines how violence can be intersubjective, structural, or epistemic. He delves into how violence and coercion are tools used to try and achieve domination and that there is a political imperative to call violence what it is. 

 

Date Recorded: 25 September 2023. 

 

Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel is Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies at University of Sydney. He is author of Animals and Capital (Ediburgh UP, 2023), The War against Animals (Brill, 2015) and is co-editor, with Matthew Chrulew of Foucault and Animals (Brill 2017). He is also co-editor of Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures (Sydney UP). He is a member of the Multispecies Justice research group at the University of Sydney, and Chair of the Australasian Animal Studies Association. In addition, Dinesh is a disability rights researcher, and has recently been part of a team of researchers who have produced two reports for the Australian Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. Learn more about Dinesh here. 

  

Featured: 

• Australasian Animal Studies Association
• The War against Animals by Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
• Animals and Capital by Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
• The Beast and the Sovereign by Jacques Derrida
• Justice and the Politics of Difference by Iris Marion Young
• Foucault and Animals edited by Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel 

 
Animal Highlight: European Wild Cat

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

Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponso

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

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 Steve Cooke discusses the significance of philosophy in helping to foster moral imagination. Such imagination allows for conceptual development, making moral progress and political change possible. With this backdrop, Steve unpacks how the development of habitat rights for animals would be an important step in ensuring animal vital interests are protected. 

 

Date Recorded: 7 September 2023. 

 

Steve Cooke is an Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Leicester. He works on justice and nonhuman animals, and in the ethics of protest and activism. His main interests are in what a just society for human and nonhuman animal might look like, and the ethics of different ways of achieving it. He recently published What are Animal Rights For?, published by Bristol University Press. Learn more about Steve on his university profile page or connect with him on Mastodon. 
 

Claudia (Towne) Hirtenfelder is the founder and host of The Animal Turn. She has a PhD in Geography from Queen’s University, and her research is focused on the significance of the problematization of urban animals. She was awarded the AASA Award for Popular Communication for her work on the podcast. Contact Claudia via email ([email protected]) or follow her on Twitter (@ClaudiaFTowne).

 

Featured: 

• What are Animal Rights For?  by Steve Cooke. 
• Imagined Utopias: Animals Rights and the Moral Imagination by Steve Cooke
• A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
• The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Fellow Creatures: Kantian Ethics and Our Duties to Animals by Christine M. Korsgaard.

 

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

T

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

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, Claudia talks to Angie Pepper about cosmopolitanism. Angie explains how despite cosmopolitans having an expansive view of justice, animals are rarely accounted for. They discuss the challenges of including animals in cosmopolitan thought and mull over what animals might be entitled to.

 

Date Recorded: 24 August 2023. 

 

Angie Pepper is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton in London. Angie's philosophical background is in contemporary political philosophy, applied ethics, normative ethics, and feminist philosophy, and her recent research focuses on what we owe to other animals. She has published papers on the place of nonhuman animals in our theorising about global justice, and on what we owe to them as a matter of climate justice. She has also defended the following claims (among others): that sentient nonhuman animals have a right to privacy, that few nonhuman animals are political agents, that sentient nonhuman animals have a right to self-determination, that non-euthanasia killing in animal shelters is sometimes morally permitted, and that we shouldn't support zoos. Angie's latest projects focus on the normative significance of nonhuman animal agency; in other words, what other animals do and why it matters morally, socially, and politically. She is especially interested in whether domestication is compatible with animals' interests in self-determination and the demands of justice. Angie is a regular contributor to Justice Everywhere. You can learn more about Angie’s work on Research Gate. 

  

Featured: 

• Beyond Anthropocentricism: Cosmopolitanism and Nonhuman Animals by Angie Pepper
• What comes after entanglement by Eva Haifa Giraud
• Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets by Yi-Fu Tuan
• Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation by Gary Francione

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, and Jeremy John for the logo; Virginia Thomas for the Animal Highlight. This episode was edited by Christiaan Mentz 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.

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.

Claudia launches Season 6 by talking to Will Kymlicka about politics. They discuss how animals remain largely sidelined in political philosophical thought, as compared to other areas of ethics and social theory. Will delves into three different models for how to bring animals into politics: politics “on behalf of” animals, where humans represent animals; politics “by” animals, where wild animals exercise self-government; and politics “with” animals, where humans and animals do politics together and co-author decisions. As examples of joint politics, they discuss recent efforts to share power with domesticated animals in farmed animal sanctuaries, in the family and in the workplace.

 

Date Recorded: 30 September 2023. 

 

Will Kymlicka is the Canada Research Chair in Political Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, where he has taught since 1998. He is the co-author with Sue Donaldson of Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights, published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and now translated into German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Korean, and Polish. Zoopolis argues that animals belong at the heart of democratic political theory - defending rights of citizenship for domesticated animals and sovereignty rights for wild animals – and its ideas have helped launch the recent `political turn’ in animal ethics. Will and Sue have continued developing their model of a zoopolis, and its implications for animal advocacy, legal reform, and alliances with other social justice movements. Their recent work has appeared in Politics and Animals; The Philosophy and Politics of Animal Liberation;  Journal of Animal Ethics; Canadian Perspectives on Animals and the Law; the Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies. Will co-directs the Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics research group at Queen’s University, including its postdoctoral fellowship program, and teaches courses in animals and political theory and in animals and the law. 

  

Featured: 

• Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rightsby Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka
• Doing Politics with Animals by Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka, forthcoming in Social Research
• Locating animals in political philosophy by Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson 

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

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.