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.