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.

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.

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.

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'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.