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 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

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 Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?' In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned; Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/ John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529) His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/

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 Publishing collection Exploring Topics in Non/Human Coexistence: Passion, Praxis, and Presence, which Nathan co-edited with Sarah Tomasello, Erin Jones, and Mark Suchyta. In particular, we dig into one of Nathan's chapters: 'Veganism as an overlooked component of anarchafeminism?' In the quick questions, Nathan mentioned; Ignoring Nature No More, edited by Marc Bekoff. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo14398472.html His paper (with Sarah Tomasello) 'Polar Similar': https://animaliajournal.wordpress.com/2017/03/25/polar-similar-intersections-of-anthropology-and-conservation/ John Tallent, author of How to Unite the Left on Animals (see an interview with Kim Stallwood here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/how-to-unite-on-101030529) His 'A6' Against Cultured Meat, co-authored with Richard Giles: https://www.activedistributionshop.org/product/against-cultured-meat-a6/

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 democratic theory. We discuss a paper that Eze and Pablo co-authored: 'Sentientist political liberalism'. This paper was published open access in the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly in 2026. This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series at Sydney University Press. In answer to the regular questions, Pablo mentioned: Jesús Mosterín's book El triunfo de la compasión: Nuestra relación con los otros animales [or, in English: Triumph of Compassion: Our Relation with the other Animals]; learn more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Moster%C3%ADn His early work on animals and the all-affected interests principle; for his published work on this topic, see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230.2022.2100962. Various forthcoming work, including a collaboration with Adrià Moret (https://www.adriamoret.com/)

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 chapter 'Anti-capitalism, animal rights and advocacy in Okja'. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics series at Sydney University Press, the publishers of Animal Activism On and Off Screen!