Contributors

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Claudia Hirtenfelder

Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder began the Animal Turn in February 2020 as a culmination of her interests in animals, ethics, and media. 

 

In 2023, Claudia completed her PhD in Geography at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. She examined the historical problematization of cows in Kingston, Ontario and has broad interests in how animal histories and geographies are told. Her scholarly interests sit in the intersection of geography, urban studies, animal studies, history and power relations. 

In terms of the airwaves: Claudia was a host on the campus radio station, UJFM. She was also a news reporter intern for Classic FM and the founder and former host of Beyond Canada: International Thought and Scholarship.

Claudia's favourite past times are enjoying her husband's vegan cooking, getting into complex conversations, walking her doggo Linus, cycle-touring, travelling, reading, and watching crappy movies. ​


Guests

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Alexandra Horowitz

Alexandra Horowitz heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College, where she also teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know and four other books, most recently The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. She lives with her family of Homo sapiens, Canis familiaris, and Felis catus in New York City.

https://alexandrahorowitz.net/

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Amanda Bunten-Walberg

Amanda (Mandy) Bunten-Walberg was a PhD Candidate at Queen's University's School of Environmental Studies. Her research explores more-than-human ethics in contagious contexts through the case study of bats and COVID-19. In particular, Mandy is interested in how more-than-human ethics, critical race theory, queer theory, and biopolitical theory might guide humans towards developing more ethical relationships with bats and other (human and more-than-human) persons who are dominantly understood as diseased. 

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Anindita Bhadra

Anindita Bhadra is a behavioural biologist, working on free-ranging dogs in India. She founded The Dog Lab at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata in June 2009. She has written about dogs in leading journals such as PloS One, Animal Cognition, Ethology, Ecology and Evolution. Connect with Anindita Bhadra on X (@Abhadra7). 

https://www.iiserkol.ac.in/~abhadra/Anindita.html

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Bill Wasik

Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. Their previous book, Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. They live in Brooklyn, New York. 

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Claire Parkinson

Claire Parkinson is Professor of Culture, Communication and Screen Studies and Co-director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University. Her publications include the books Popular Media and Animals (2011), Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012), Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (2019) and Animal Activism On and Off Screen (2024). Connect with Claire on Twitter (@molloy_claire).

https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/person/claire-parkinson/staff/

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Guillem Rubio-Ramon

Guillem Rubio-Ramon is a Research Associate in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. His research integrates more-than-human geographies and political ecologies to study the reciprocal influence of animals and humans on each other's socio-cultural, economic and political lives. He is currently involved in the Remaking One Health – Indies project, which explores everyday interactions between people and free-living dogs in India. His PhD research examined how nonhuman animals, particularly those involved in pig farming in Catalonia and salmon aquaculture in Scotland, can be understood as essential actors in the nation-making projects of these regions. 

https://www.guillemrubio.com/

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Gwendolyn Blue

Gwendolyn Blue is a critical interpretive social scientist who conducts research on environmental governance, public science, and participatory practice. Her focus is primarily on symbolic and epistemic politics (e.g. how issues are represented, whose expertise counts, which values matter), and how these politics influence participatory engagement across issues such as climate change, genomics, and zoonotic disease. She is particularly interested in identifying the assumptions, values, and contexts that ‘open up’ and ‘close down’ inclusive engagement. Gwendolyn’s research traverses science, politics, and communication and her research goals are oriented toward promoting inclusive engagement with public issues that involve science and technology, including efforts to extend the 'demos' of liberal democracy beyond human-centered approaches.

https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/gwendolyn-blue

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Krithika Srinivasan

Krithika Srinivasan is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Edinburgh. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of political ecology, post-development politics, animal studies, and nature geographies. Her work draws on research in South Asia to rethink globally established concepts and practices about nature-society relations and reconfigure approaches to multispecies justice. Krithika is the principal investor of the project Remaking One Health Indies. She has published widely, including in journals such as the Sociological Review, Geoforum, and Environment and Planning. Learn more about the ROHIndies project on their website and connect with Krithika on Twitter (@KritCrit)

https://rohindies.org/the-team/krithika-srinivasan

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Mariam Motamedi Fraser

Mariam Motamedi Fraser is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the interdisciplinary research group UCL Anthropocene, Department of Geography. Her research is located in the field of animal studies. She is interested in the implications, for animals, of the concepts and theories that are deployed to ‘explain’ them in both science and non-science research. Mariam is the author of three monographs and two co-edited collections, and has published in a wide range of journals. Her most recent book, Dog Politics: Species Stories and the Animal Sciences is a critical analysis of the idea that relationality-with-humans somehow constitutes dogs’ evolutionary destiny. The book is partly informed by her experience of volunteering at The Dog Hub, a dog training and behavioural centre in London. She is strongly committed to teaching animal studies, and to the transformative experience that learning about animals in a structured setting offers students. 

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Melanie Rock

Melanie Rock is a professor at the University of Calgary is in the Department of Community Health Sciences. Since joining the University of Calgary’s medical school in 2003, Melanie has drawn on her training in anthropology, health promotion, and social work in a series of projects centered on multi-species research. These projects have spanned community services, family dynamics, and social policy. The funders have included the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. To date, Melanie has led or co-authored more than 100 scholarly publications. 

https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/melanie-rock

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Monica Murphy

Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. Together with Bill Wasik she wrote Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus, was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. They live in Brooklyn, New York. 

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Sandra Bartlett

Sandra Bartlett is an award-winning journalist based in Toronto.  She worked as a producer and reporter in NPR's Investigative Unit based in Washington. In 20 plus years at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she worked around the world – from Guantanamo Bay to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Uganda, and Israel. She now produces investigative podcast series. The Poison Detectives follows how a firefighter’s wife and a corporate lawyer in different parts of the U.S. get pulled into solving separate mysteries, cows and deer haemorrhage to death in West Virginia and something that could be giving firefighters cancer. The Salmon People, the focus of this episode, tells the story of government malfeasance and industry collaboration to farm salmon on the Pacific Ocean waterways in British Columbia.  Verified: Dust Up is about the dangers of Johnson & Johnson baby powder and the risk of ovarian cancer.  

https://www.nationalobserver.com/u/sandra-bartlett

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Susan McHugh

Susan McHugh, Professor of English at the University of New England, USA, researches and teaches literary, visual, and scientific narratives of cross-species relations.  She is the author of three monographs, most recently Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (2019), and coeditor of six edited collections, including Animal Satire (2023). McHugh serves as co-editor of two book series, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature and Plants and Animals: Interdisciplinary Approaches, as well as Editor-in-Chief of Society & Animals.

https://www.une.edu/testimonial/susan-mchugh

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Tobias Linné

Tobias Linné is an assistant professor at the Department of Communication and Media. His research explores veganism and how animals are made accessible for human consumption. In 2012, Tobias launched the course Critical Animals Studies. Animals in Society, Culture and the Media and he was later the coordinator for the project “Exploring ‘the Animal Turn’: Changing perspectives on human-animal relations in science, society and culture.” In 2016, Tobias co-founded the Critical Animal Studies Network.

https://www.kom.lu.se/en/person/TobiasLinne/

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