Death permeates our relationships with animals, yet we rarely confront the complex ethical questions it raises. In this conversation with Katja Guenther and Julian Paul Keenan, editors of “When Animals Die,” we delve into the emerging field of animal death studies – an interdisciplinary approach examining how animals experience and humans justify animal death.
Date Recorded: 21 April 2025
Katja M. Guenther is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where her research and teaching focus on gender, feminist activism and social movements, human-animal relationships, and the state. Her work centers on improving our understanding of how and why inequalities of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and species reproduce so reliably, and what we can do to challenge these inequalities. Most recently, she is co-editor of When Animals Die: Examining Justifications and Envisioning Justice (New York University Press, 2024). She is the author of The Lives and Deaths of Shelter Animals (Stanford University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 American Sociological Association’s Section on Animals and Society Distinguished Book Award, Making Their Place: Feminism After Socialism in Eastern Germany (Stanford University Press, 2010), and numerous journal articles. Learn more: www.katjamguenther.com.
Julian Paul Keenan is a Professor of Biology and Psychology at Montclair State University in New Jersey, USA. His focus on animals has centered around consciousness and cognition attempting to understand how vastly different nervous systems have evolved. Dr. Keenan is the founder of the journal Social Neuroscience and he is the first to identify the neural substrates of self-awareness.
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The Animal Turn is hosted and produced by Claudia Hirtenfelder and is part of the iROAR Network. Learn more on our website.
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