Knowing Animals

This episode's guest is Dr Meera Inglis of the Department of International Relations, Politics and History at Loughborough University in the UK. Meera's research concerns animal and environmental ethics, including conservation, climate change, and environmental justice. We discuss her 2020 article 'Wildlife Ethics and Practice: Why We Need to Change the Way We Talk About "Invasive Species"', which was published open access in the Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics series at Sydney University Press. During the conversation, Meera mentions: Banu Subramaniam's 'The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions' https://www.jstor.org/stable/40338794  Ken Thompson's book Where Do Camels Belong? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_Do_Camels_Belong%3F   Peter Singer's widely anthologized paper 'All Animals are Equal' https://soar.suny.edu/entities/publication/09c33aea-21ab-47f1-949d-3a820b42f93c Gerald Durrell's semi-autobiographical book My Family and Other Animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Family_and_Other_Animals Her own popular piece 'Chimps and gorillas desperately need Ebola vaccine too' https://theconversation.com/chimps-and-gorillas-desperately-need-ebola-vaccine-too-virus-has-wiped-out-a-third-of-them-35503 The work of James Rachels, especially his Created from Animals https://global.oup.com/academic/product/created-from-animals-9780192861290

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 'Intersections' volume Environmental Change and Human Experience, edited by Georgina Endfield and Poul Holm.  The people/works that Nicolai mentioned in his answers to the regular questions are: 'Conspiratorial storytelling and environmental crisis', which Nicolai co-wrote iwth Magnus Andersen and published in the journal Green Letters in 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14688417.2024.241625 Derek Bousé's 2000 book Wildlife Film, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhgg4 Randy Malamud's 2010 paper 'Animals on film: The ethics of the human gaze', in the journal Spring. There is a PDF accessible here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220106002120/https://english.gsu.edu/files/2015/06/Spring.pdf Philip Armstrong, from the University of Cantebury in New Zealand https://philiparmstrong.org/ Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series from Sydney University Press. Please note that this episode uses a modified version of the poster of Milked for its 'cover' because Milked is the subject of Nicolai's research project; there's no link between Milked and 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. Rosenberg. Feed the People was published by Basic Books in 2026. This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press. In his answers to the regular questions, Jan mentioned Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and the work of Dinesh Wadiwel. Jan's website is here: https://www.jandutkiewicz.com/

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 Knowing Animals, as it is a tie-in with the Journal of the British Academy, with a written version of the interview appearing in the journal. In answer to the regular questions, Marcy mentioned: J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Animals Her chapter 'Animal', in Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7560/753099 Her chapter 'Going to the Birds' (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351055741-4/going-birds-marcy-norton) in the book Early Modern Things. Cora Diamond's paper 'Eating Meat and Eating People' (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3749876) And here is Marcy's Penn profile: https://live-sas-www-history.pantheon.sas.upenn.edu/people/faculty/marcy-norton

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 forest frogs', which was published in the Journal of Rural Studies and co-authored with Annah Zhu, Arjen Buijs, and Simon Bush. The paper we discuss is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016726001749 If you want an overview of Jin's research area, see https://www.cell.com/one-earth/abstract/S2590-3322(25)00102-2  Jin's podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%E6%9C%89%E7%82%B9%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90-slightly-tofu/id1794418651. It's also available on Spotify, YouTube, etc. It has two special series; Tofu International (with international guests, in English) and Tofu Across the Strait (with Taiwanese animal activists and podcasters) Jin's 'Lettuce Know' directory is here: https://lettuce-know.pages.dev/ The works she mentioned in her regular questions were Garner and Francione's The Animal Rights Debate (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fran14954), Wadiwel's 'Do fish resist?' (https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363), and Wadiwel's Animals and Capital (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.9941275). Jin is happy to talk to people interested in her research area: jin.qian[at]wur.nl The cover image is a photo Jin took of a free-living forest frog