Knowing Animals

Dr Matti Wilks is a social and developmental psychologist who is a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores people’s moral motivation and actions. This includes lots of work that will be of interest to listeners, including research addressing the psychology of moral concern for animals and research addressing attitudes towards cultivated meat. In this episode, we talk about her 2025 paper ‘When development constricts our moral circle’, which was co-authored with Julia Marshall, Lucius Caviola, and Karri Neldner, and published in Nature Human Behaviour. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. And thanks to Brenda de Groot, who designed the moral circle image used as part of this episode's cover. In her answers to the regular questions, Matti mentioned The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (https://archive.org/details/ethicsofwhatweea00pete), her paper on attitudes to cultivated meat (https://journals.

This episode's guest is Dr Stanislav Roudavski, who is a designer and academic. He leads Deep Design Lab, a research and creative collective that focuses on design for and with nonhuman beings. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. His research develops theories and practices that engage with nonhumans, including animals, plants, and ecosystems, but also artificial agents such as AI. In this episode, he talks about his recent article ‘From Dingoes to AI: Who Makes Decisions in More-than-Human Worlds?’, which was published in the open access journal TRACE ∴ Journal for Human-Animal Studies in 2025 and was co-authored with Douglas Brock. In his answers to the regular questions, Stanislav mentions the following works: "Kholstomer", a short story by Leo Tolstoy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kholstomer) Vladimir Vernadsky's 1926 book The Biosphere (1998 English translation: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-1750-3) Peter Kropotkin's 1902 co

Today’s guest is Thom van Dooren. Thom is a Professor of Environmental Humanities and the Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. He summarizes his own interdisciplinary work as being about understanding and caring for the dead and the dying, including humans and animals, and including individuals, populations, and kinds. He will be known to lots of listeners for his contributions to ‘extinction studies’. His publications include the 2014 book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the End of Extinction and the 2019 book The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds, both from Columbia University Press. In this episode, we talk about his 2022 MIT Press book A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press.

Today's guest is Dr Juliette Waterman. Juliette is a zooarchaeologist with a particular interest in the archaeology of wild animals in Britain, and especially in birds. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Reading in the UK, where she co-coordinates the International Council for Archaeozoology Stable Isotope Working Group. Today, we’re going to talk about her paper ‘Human-raptor relationships in urban spaces: the history of red kites (Milvus milvus) and human food in Britian’. This paper was published in The Hand That Feeds: The Complex Relations of Human-Animal Feeding from UCL Press in 2025. Juliette co-edited the volume with Alexander Mullan, Riley Smallman, and Herre de Bondt. The volume is open access, so you can freely and legally download the book wherever you are in the world, from 13 May. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series from Sydney University Press.

On this episode, we speak to Dr Pablo P. Castello, currently a Research Fellow of the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School. Pablo is an interdisciplinary political theorist whose work has appeared in such diverse locations as the American Political Science Review, Biological Conservation, and the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. On this episode, however, we focus on his recent article 'The fabric of zoodemocracy: a systemic approach to deliberative zoodemocracy', which was published in the Critical Review in International Social and Political Philosophy, or CRISPP. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, published by Sydney University Press.

This week's guest is Dr Charlotte Wrigley, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Greenhouse Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Stavanger in Norway. She has a mixed academic background, but her PhD (at Queen Mary University in London) was in human geography. Her research expertise concerns the arctic, extinction, and climate change. We talk about mammoths, and especially Charlotte’s beautifully named book Earth, Ice, Bone, Blood: Permafrost and Extinction in the Russian Arctic, which was released in 2023 by University of Minnesota Press. This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.

This episode's guest is Professor Chloë Taylor, a scholar of gender studies and critical animal studies at the University of Alberta, as well as one of the editors of the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press, who are sponsors of Knowing Animals. We explore the 2024 Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, which Chloë edited.

This episode features a returning guest: someone who first appeared on Knowing Animals nearly nine years ago, in February 2016. Dr Richard Twine is a Reader in Sociology at Edge Hill University in the UK. He’ll be well-known to lots of regular listeners of this podcast for the work he’s done championing the discipline of critical animal studies. His books include 2010’s Animals as Biotechnology, which I’ve seen described as the first book entirely devoted to critical animal studies, and the 2014 collection The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, co-edited with Nik Taylor. On this episode, however, we talk about his 2024 Sydney University Press book The Climate Crisis and Other Animals, published as part of the Animal Politics book series. We're particularly pleased to feature this book as the Animal Politics series at Sydney University Press is a sponsor of this podcast.

Dr Liza Bauer is the scientific manager of the Panel on Planetary Thinking project at the University of Giessen in Germany, having recently completed a PhD on literary animal studies at the same institution. In this episode, we discuss her book Livestock and Literature: Reimagining Postanimal Companion Species, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature in 2024. This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press.

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 c

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.

This episode features not one but two guests. Rhys Borchert is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona in the United States and Dr Aliya Dewey is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. We talk discuss Rhys and Aliya’s paper ‘In Praise of Animals’, which was the winner of the inaugural essay prize competition of The Philosophy of Animal Minds and Behavior Association. ‘In Praise of Animals’ was published in the journal Biology & Philosophy in 2023.