Episode 193: Animals and business ethics with Natalie Evans
Release Date: 05/30/2022
Episode 253: Animal rights films with Nicolai Skiveren
Knowing Animals
Today's guest is Dr Nicolai Skiveren. Nicolai is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he is working on a project called The Afterlives of Stories: Exploring the Long-term Impact of Environmental Narrative. His research addresses media studies, environmental communication, and audience reception. And that’s exactly what we discuss in the episode; in particular, we explore Nicolai’s recent paper ‘Persuasion or Polarization? Investigating the Reception of Vegan Advocacy Film’, which was published in 2026 in the Oxford University Press...
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Episode 252: Industrial food systems with Jan Dutkiewicz
Knowing Animals
Dr Jan Dutkiewicz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute in New York. Much of his research focuses on the political economy of food; in addition to publishing research on this topic in academic journals, he’s the author of many popular pieces in publications like The New York Times, Vox, and The New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. In this episode, we talk about his book Feed The People! Why Industrial Food is Good and How to Make it Even Better, which was co-authored with Gabriel N....
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Episode 251: Tame and wild with Marcy Norton
Knowing Animals
This episode's guest is Professor Marcy Norton of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of History. She’s a historian of the early modern Atlantic interested in questions about how Europeans shaped the Americas and how Native American peoples shaped Europe. She’s the author of the beautifully named 2008 book Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, but we’re going to talk primarily about her 2024 Harvard University Press book The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492. This is a particularly special episode of...
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Episode 250: China's forest frogs with Jin Qian
Knowing Animals
On the 250th episode of Knowing Animals, the guest is Jin Qian, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She researches China's environmental governance and its global implications, with a focus on the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. Her multidisciplinary PhD project focuses on wildlife in Chinese food systems. She’s also involved in the animal movement in China, including hosting a podcast called Slightly Tofu. In the episode, we focus on her open access 2026 paper ‘More-than-human practices in wild animal farming: The case of China’s...
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Episode 249: Veganarchafeminism with Nathan Poirier
Knowing Animals
On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He’s the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern...
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Episode 249: Veganarchafeminism with Nathan Poirier
Knowing Animals
On this episode, we speak to Nathan Poirier. Nathan is an interdisciplinary critical animal studies scholar with a background in anthrozoology, sociology, and mathematics. He currently teaches at Lansing Community College in Michigan. He’s the co-editor of the 2022 collection Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, the 2023 collection Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation, and of the 2024 collection Veganarchism: Making Veganism and Anarchism Dangerous Again. We talk about the 2025 Lantern...
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Episode 248: Sentientist political liberalism with Eze Paez and Pablo Magaña
Knowing Animals
This episode features two guests. Dr Eze Paez is a returning guest; he first appeared on the podcast back in 2018. Eze is Tenure-Track Professor in Jurisprudence and Bioethics of Pompeu Fabra Universityin Barcelona. He works on questions in moral and political philosophy, and is perhaps best known for his work on wild animal suffering and animals in republican political theory. Dr Pablo Magaña, however, is a new guest. Pablo is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin. He’s a political philosopher, with particular interests in questions about animals in...
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Episode 247: Animal activism on film with Claire Parkinson
Knowing Animals
This episode's returning guest is Professor Claire Parkinson, Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies at Edge Hill University in the UK. She’s also the Co-Director of the university’s Centre for Human Animal Studies, which she established in 2014. Her books include 2011’s Popular Media and Animals and 2020’s Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. Today, however, we’re going to talk about her 2024 Sydney University Press collection Animal Activism On and Off Screen, which she co-edited with Lara Herring. In particular, we’re going to look at Claire's...
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Episode 246: The Uncanny Gastronomic with Zara-Louise Stubbs
Knowing Animals
Today’s guest is Zara-Louise Stubbs. Zara is a researcher at the University of York, where she is reading for a PhD in Contemporary Literature. Her thesis is entitled Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Women’s Literature. As that title suggests, she’s interested in questions around food, the uncanny, and gender across a range of literary genres. Those are exactly the kind of topics we talk about in this episode, where we look at Zara’s anthology The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird, which gathers a range of short...
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Episode 245: Animal consciousness with Walter Veit
Knowing Animals
Dr Walter Veit is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His research concerns the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and applied ethics, and his books include Modelling Evolution and What Are Zoos For?, the latter co-authored with Heather Browning. On this episode, we discuss his 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, which was published by Routledge. This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.
info_outlineThis week’s guest is Dr Natalie Evans. Natalie, who also publishes as Natalie Thomas, is an adjunct faculty member in philosophy at the University of Guelph and in Media Studies at University of Guelph-Humber in Canada. She is the author of 2016’s Animal Ethics and the Autonomous Animal Self, published by Palgrave Macmillan, as well as the editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s new collection Animals and Business Ethics. We talk about her chapter in that volume, which is entitled ‘Gene editing, animal disenhancement and ethical debates: A conundrum for business ethics?’, and was co-authored with Adam Langridge – but we also talk about the book more broadly.
This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by AASA, the Australasian Animal Studies Association, which you should join today. It is also brought to you by the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press. For more, see https://sydneyuniversitypress.com.au/collections/series-animal-publics.