Episode 250: China’s forest frogs with Jin Qian

On the 250th episode of Knowing Animals, the guest is Jin Qian, a PhD candidate at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands. She researches China’s environmental governance and its global implications, with a focus on the intersection of food, animals, and the environment. Her multidisciplinary PhD project focuses on wildlife in Chinese food systems. She’s also involved in the animal movement in China, including hosting a podcast called Slightly Tofu. In the episode, we focus on her open access 2026 paper ‘More-than-human practices in wild animal farming: The case of China’s forest frogs’, which was published in the Journal of Rural Studies and co-authored with Annah Zhu, Arjen Buijs, and Simon Bush.

• The paper we discuss is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0743016726001749
• If you want an overview of Jin’s research area, see https://www.cell.com/one-earth/abstract/S2590-3322(25)00102-2
• Jin’s podcast is here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/%E6%9C%89%E7%82%B9%E8%B1%86%E8%85%90-slightly-tofu/id1794418651. It’s also available on Spotify, YouTube, etc. It has two special series; Tofu International (with international guests, in English) and Tofu Across the Strait (with Taiwanese animal activists and podcasters)
• Jin’s ‘Lettuce Know’ directory is here: https://lettuce-know.pages.dev/
• The works she mentioned in her regular questions were Garner and Francione’s The Animal Rights Debate (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/fran14954), Wadiwel’s ‘Do fish resist?’ (https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363), and Wadiwel’s Animals and Capital (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/jj.9941275).
• Jin is happy to talk to people interested in her research area: jin.qian[at]wur.nl
• The cover image is a photo Jin took of a free-living forest frog

Knowing Animals is a fortnightly podcast hosted by Dr Josh Milburn who discusses all things related to animals and ethics; animals and the law; animals and politics; and animal advocacy. The show features interviews with Animal Studies scholars and animal advocates.

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