Knowing Animals

Josh Milburn
  • 4.8 (58)
  • SOCIETY & CULTURE
  • UPDATED TWICE MONTHLY
Knowing Animals

Knowing Animals is a regular 20 minutes podcast about all things related to animals and ethics; animals and the law; animals and politics; and animal advocacy. It features interviews with academic and animal advocates. It is available free so enjoy!

  1. 2 DAYS AGO

    Episode 239: More-than-human design with Stanislav Roudavski

    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 collection Mutual Aid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution) His own 2016 presentation 'Building Like Animals: Using Autonomous Robots to Search, Evaluate and Build' (https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/presentation/building-like-animals-using-autonomous-robots-to-search-evaluate-and-build/) John Odling-Smee's open access 2024 book Niche Construction (https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5822/Niche-ConstructionHow-Life-Contributes-to-Its-Own) His own Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4J_lRh4AAAAJ&hl=en His own Academia.edu profile: https://unimelb.academia.edu/StanislavRoudavski And the Deep Design Lab wiki: https://wiki.deepdesignlab.online/.

    27 min

  2. 2 JUNE

    Episode 238: Snail stories with Thom Van Dooren

    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.

    28 min

  3. 5 MAY

    Episode 237: The history of red kites in Britain with Juliette Waterman

    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.

    27 min

  4. 7 APR

    Episode 236: The Fabric of Zoodemocracy with Pablo Castello

    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.

    42 min

  5. 3 MAR

    Episode 235: Mammoth Blood with Charlotte Wrigley

    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.

    35 min

  6. 3 FEB

    Episode 234: Gender and animals with Chloë Taylor

    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.

    34 min

  7. 6 JAN

    Episode 233: Animals and the climate crisis with Richard Twine

    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.

    36 min

  8. 02/12/2024

    Episode 232: Postanimal companion species with Liza Bauer

    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.

    37 min
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4.8
out of 5
58 Ratings

About

Knowing Animals is a regular 20 minutes podcast about all things related to animals and ethics; animals and the law; animals and politics; and animal advocacy. It features interviews with academic and animal advocates. It is available free so enjoy!

Information

  • Creator
    Josh Milburn
  • Years Active
    2015 - 2025
  • Episodes
    296
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Knowing Animals

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