Dr Matti Wilks is a social and developmental psychologist who is a reader in psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Her work explores people’s moral motivation and actions. This includes lots of work that will be of interest to listeners, including research addressing the psychology of moral concern for animals and research addressing attitudes towards cultivated meat. In this episode, we talk about her 2025 paper ‘When development constricts our moral circle’, which was co-authored with Julia Marshall, Lucius Caviola, and Karri Neldner, and published in Nature Human Behaviour.

Knowing Animals is proudly sponsored by the Animal Politics book series, from Sydney University Press. And thanks to Brenda de Groot, who designed the moral circle image used as part of this episode's cover.

In her answers to the regular questions, Matti mentioned The Ethics of What We Eat by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (https://archive.org/details/ethicsofwhatweea00pete), her paper on attitudes to cultivated meat (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0171904), and the work of Steve Loughnan and Brock Bastian on the meat paradox (e.g., https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0963721414525781).

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 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.