The Animal Turn
Claudia Hirtenfelder
Recent Episodes
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 Instagram
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Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.
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, Twitter, and Instagram
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.
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 Highlight, and Christiaan Mentz for his audio editing. This episode was produced by the host Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder.
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.
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, 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 log
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.
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, Twitter, and Instagram
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics 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 t
A.P.P.L.EAnimals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E)
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of iROAR Network. Find out more on our website.