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!

Today's guest is Zara-Louise Stubbs. Zara is a researcher at the University of York, where she is reading for a PhD in Contemporary Literature. Her thesis is entitled Eating Bodies, Assembling Selves: The Uncanny Gastronomic in Contemporary Women's Literature. As that title suggests, she's interested in questions around food, the uncanny, and gender across a range of literary genres. Those are exactly the kind of topics we talk about in this episode, where we look at Zara's anthology The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird, which gathers a range of short stories and other works – some famous, some comparatively obscure – about the 'uncanny gastronomic', along with introductions to the texts from Zara. The book was published in 2023 British Library Publishing, part of their British Library Tales of the Weird series.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press

Dr Walter Veit is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reading in the UK. His research concerns the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and applied ethics, and his books include Modelling Evolution and What Are Zoos For?, the latter co-authored with Heather Browning. On this episode, we discuss his 2023 book A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, which was published by Routledge.

This episode is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.

Dr Dustin Crummet is an Affiliate Instructor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma and the Executive Director of the Insect Institute, a non-profit organization that critically explores insects in the food system. Dustin's academic background is in philosophy, but he today writes more broadly than this, contributing to research around various aspects of insect farming, as well as questions concerning animals in ethics and the philosophy of religion. In this episode, we talk about his recent paper 'Have the environmental benefits of insect farming been overstated? A critical review', which was published open access in Biological Reviews in 2025. Dustin was one of six authors on the piece. The others were Corentin Biteau, Tom Bry-Chevalier, Katrina Loewy, Ren Ryba, and Michael St. Jules.

This episode is brought to you by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press.