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 '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.

This episode's guest is Dr Rimona Afana. Rimona is a Romanian-Palestinian academic, as well as an activist and multimedia artist. Her research addresses war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, and crimes against nonhuman animals. Her work has taken her to various institutions, including Emory University School of Law and Kennesaw State University in the US, where she was an Assistant Professor of Peace Studies. Among her other research projects, she is working on a book with the working title Ecocide/Speciesism: Rethinking Interdependence in the Anthropocene. In this episode, however, we discuss her forthcoming paper 'The Invisible Victims of Israel's Genocide/Ecocide on Gaza: Crimes Against Nature and Nonhuman Animals', which is an invited contribution to the De Gruyter Handbook of Conflict Resolution and Peace. Listeners interested in reading the paper are invited to email Rimona for a copy. This will also allow them to check the sources for the facts and figures that Rimona mentions during the interview. The cover image is by Rimona, and features a homeless kitten in Rafah, Gaza. In response to the quick questions, Rimona mentioned: The work of Richard Falk (https://doi.org/10.1177/096701067300400105) and Polly Higgins (https://shepheardwalwyn.com/product/eradicating-ecocide-second-edition/) on ecocide. The work of Richard Ryder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_D._Ryder), Steve Sapontzis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_F._Sapontzis), Steven Wise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Wise), and Piers Beirne (https://usm.maine.edu/directories/people/piers-beirne/) on animals. Her own work on ecocide (https://link.springer.com/rwe/10.1007/978-981-15-3877-3_33-1) and theriocide (https://vernonpress.com/book/1852). You can find Rimona/Rimona's work on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/rimonaafana/), ORCID (https://orcid.org/0009-0007-0871-3530), X (https://x.com/rimona_afana), and BSky (https://bsky.app/profile/rimona-afana.bsky.social). You can follow her Ecocide/Speciesism project on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/ecocide.speciesism. Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. For more information about the series, see https://sydneyuniversitypress.com/collections/series-animal-politics.

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/.

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.

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.

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.

This episode features Professor Jonathan Birch of the Department of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Jonathan is a philosopher of science who will be best known to an animal studies audience for his work on the science of sentience. This includes his 2021 report Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans, which led to cephalopods and decapods being recognized as sentient beings in UK law. He was also one of the lead signatories of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness. In this episode, we talk about his 2024 Oxford University Press book The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. This is an open access book, meaning that all listeners can read and download it for free entirely legally. This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. This is a collection of scholarly books about animal studies. As well as recently changing names, the series also has new editors: Danielle Celermajer, Rick De Vos, Chloë Taylor, and Katie Woolaston. If you're currently working on a book about animal studies, you should consider reaching out to them to see if the series would be a good fit – and we'll get a chance to ask some of these new editors about the Animal Politics series in upcoming episodes of Knowing Animals.