Publications

Alasdair Cochrane

Solidarity with Animals: Promises, Potential and Pitfalls (Oxford University Press, 2024) edited with Mara-Daria Cojocaru.


'Solidarity' has received considerable scholarly attention and is central in many social justice movements. It is striking, then, that solidarity's relevance, meaning and practical implications in the context of animal protection have not been systematically explored.


This is particularly surprising given the recent so-called 'political turn' in animal ethics. Work in the political turn accepts claims about the moral status of animals and people's personal obligations towards them, but advances the field in at least two ways. First, thinkers emphasize that mutually beneficial human-animal relations cannot rely solely on personal transformation, but also require institutional transformation. Secondly, scholars claim that to meaningfully improve the lives of animals, we must not only change our political systems, but better understand various animals' own perspectives and political agency to feed into 'more-than-human politics'.


But while much work in this political turn has been done on concepts like 'justice', 'agency', 'representation', etc., only very few animal scholars have talked about 'solidarity'. And those that have, have done so only in very specific contexts and frameworks. This lack of attention is also mirrored also within animal activism, where those few campaigners who have employed the term have done so only in a very loose way.


This edited collection brings together the leading thinkers in the fields of animal ethics, politics, social philosophy, world religions, and the law to explore this lacuna and thus provide the first book length treatment of solidarity between the species.


Available at Oxford University Press

Should Animals Have Political Rights? (Polity 2020)

All political communities must make decisions about how to regulate the treatment of animals. Most states currently protect animals through outlawing the infliction of ‘unnecessary suffering’. But do animals’ rights end there?

In this book, Alasdair Cochrane argues that states must go much further. Animals have rights to be protected not only from the cruelty of individuals, but also from those structures and institutions which routinely (and, in some cases, necessarily) cause them harm, such as industrialised animal agriculture.  But even that isn’t adequate. In order to ensure that their interests are taken seriously, it is imperative that we represent their interests throughout the political process – they require not only rights to protection, but also to democratic membership. 

Cochrane’s important intervention in this controversial debate will be essential reading for anyone interested in the intersection of political theory and animal rights.

Available here

Sentientist Politics: A Theory of Global Inter-Species Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018)

There is now widespread understanding that many non-human animals are sentient, and that this fact has important moral and political implications. Indeed, most are in agreement that animal sentience ought to constrain the actions of political institutions, limiting the harms that can be perpetrated against animals.

The primary aim of this book is to show that the political implications of animal sentience go even further than this. For this book argues that sentience establishes a moral equality and a shared set of rights amongst those creatures who possess it. Crucially, this worth and these rights create a duty on moral agents to establish and maintain a political order dedicated to their interests.

This book is devoted to sketching what this ‘sentientist politics’ might look like. It argues in favour of a ‘sentientist cosmopolitan democracy’: a global political system made up of overlapping local, national, regional and global communities comprised of human and non-human members who exist within shared ‘communities of fate’. Furthermore, the institutions of those communities should be democratic - that is to say, participative, deliberative and representative.

Finally, those institutions should include dedicated representatives of non-human animals whose job should be to translate the interests of animals into deliberations over what is in the public good for their communities.

Available at Oxford University Press

Animal Rights Without Liberation: Applied Ethics and Human Obligations (Columbia University Press, 2012)

Alasdair Cochrane introduces an entirely new theory of animal rights grounded in their interests as sentient beings. He then applies this theory to different and underexplored policy areas, such as genetic engineering, pet-keeping, indigenous hunting, and religious slaughter.

In contrast to other proponents of animal rights, Cochrane claims that because most sentient animals are not autonomous agents, they have no intrinsic interest in liberty. As such, he argues that our obligations to animals lie in ending practices that cause their suffering and death and do not require the liberation of animals.

Cochrane’s “interest-based rights approach” weighs the interests of animals to determine which is sufficient to impose strict duties on humans. In so doing, Cochrane acknowledges that sentient animals have a clear and discernable right not to be made to suffer and not to be killed, but he argues that they do not have a prima facie right to liberty. Because most animals possess no interest in leading freely chosen lives, humans have no moral obligation to liberate them.

Moving beyond theory to the practical aspects of applied ethics, this pragmatic volume provides much-needed perspective on the realities and responsibilities of the human-animal relationship

Available at Columbia University Press

An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

How should political communities govern their relations with animals? Are animals owed justice? What might justice for animals involve? Alasdair Cochrane introduces the most prominent schools in contemporary political theory - utilitarianism, liberalism, communitarianism, Marxism and feminism - and examines their implications for issues such as meat-eating, intensive agriculture, animal experimentation, religious slaughter and hunting.

An Introduction to Animals and Political Theory explores the debates and discusses controversies over what makes an entity worthy of justice: is it rationality, the ability to contribute to society, sentience, or something else? It also introduces and engages with debates about what our political obligations to animals might entail: is it simply not to cause them unnecessary suffering, or do we have much more demanding obligations not to kill, own, or even use non-human animals?

Available at Springer Link

Robert McKay

Animal Satire. With Susan McHugh (Springer International Publishing, 2023)

Animal Satire presents a cultural history of animal satire, a critically neglected but persistent presence in the history of cultural production, in which animals expose human folly while the strategies of satire expose the folly of human-animal relations. Highlighting the teeming animal presences across the history of satirical expression from Aristophanes to Twitter, with chapters on key works of literature, drama, film, and a plethora of satirical media, Animal Satire reveals the rich rhetorical significance of animality in powering the politics of satire from ancient and medieval through modern and contemporary times. More pressingly, the book makes the case for the significance of satire for understanding the real-world implications of rhetoric about animals in ongoing struggles for justice. By gathering both critical and creative examples from representative media forms, historical periods, and continents, this volume aims to enrich scholarship on the history of satire as well as empower creative practitioners with ideas about its practical applications today. 

Available at Springer Link

Animal remains. With Sarah Bezan (London: Routledge, 2021) 


The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal remains are everywhere and so animals remain everywhere. Animal remains are food, medicine, and clothing; extractive resources and traces of animals’ lifeworlds and ecologies; they are sites of political conflict and ontological fear, fetishized visual signs and objects of trade, veneration, and memory; they are biotechnological innovations and spill-over viruses.


To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.


Available at Routledge Publishing 

Werewolves, Wolves and the Gothic. With John Miller (University of Wales Press, 2017)


Wolves lope across Gothic imagination. Signs of a pure animality opposed to humanity, in the figure of the werewolf they become liminal creatures that move between the human and the animal. Werewolves function as a site for exploring complex anxieties of difference – of gender, class, race, space, nation or sexuality – but the imaginative and ideological uses of wolves also reflect back on the lives of material animals, long persecuted in their declining habitats across the world. Werewolves therefore raise unsettling questions about the intersection of the real and the imaginary, the instability of human identities and the worldliness and political weight of the Gothic.

This is the first volume concerned with the appearance of werewolves and wolves in literary and cultural texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawing on representations of werewolves and wolves in literature, film, television and visual culture, the essays investigate the key texts of the lycanthropic canon alongside lesser-known works from the 1890s to the present. The result is an innovative study that is both theoretically aware and historically nuanced, featuring an international list of established and emerging scholars based in Britain, Europe, North America and Australia.

Available at University of Wales Press

Killing Animals. With the Animal Studies Group (University of Illinois Press, 2006)

Though not often acknowledged openly, killing represents by far the most common form of human interaction with animals. Humans kill animals for food, for pleasure, to wear, and even as religious acts, yet despite the ubiquity of this killing, analysing the practice has generally remained the exclusive purview of animal rights advocates.

Killing Animals offers a corrective to this narrow focus by bringing together the insights of scholars from diverse backgrounds in the humanities, including art history, anthropology, intellectual history, philosophy, literary studies, and geography.

With killing representing the ultimate expression of human power over animals, the essays reveal the complexity of the phenomenon by exploring the extraordinary diversity in killing practices and the wide variety of meanings attached to them. They examine aspects of the role of animals in human societies, from the seventeenth century to the present day: their cultural manifestations, and how they have been represented.

Topics include hunting and baiting; slaughter practices and the treatment of feral and stray animals; animal death in art, literature and philosophy; and even animals that themselves become killers of humans.

Available at University of Illinois Press

John Miller

The Heart of the Forest: Why Woods Matter (British Library Publishing, 2022) 


Looking at threats to forest life across the globe, John Miller draws on literature, film and art to explore why woods matter to us, building on the ecological case for saving trees to raise the compelling question of their cultural value.


The Heart of the Forest explores four enduring ways in which we connect to the woods – through Refuge, Sacredness, Horror and Hope – making fascinating links between emotion and genre. For Henry David Thoreau, the woods are places beyond civilisation; for Ursula LeGuin and C S Lewis, they are loaded with otherworldly potential; and for those fleeing captivity, they can provide a welcome sanctuary. Woods can strike fear, they can inspire wonder, they can be lovely, dark and deep.


With full-colour illustration throughout, this book branches out into the British Library to find both the haunting and the hopeful in an unparalleled collection of books, manuscripts and photography. It tells a global story of how we understand trees, and its beautifully illustrated pages present a moving argument for conservation and renewal. 

Available at British Library Publishing 

Animals in Detective Fiction. With Ruth Hawthorn (Palgrave, 2022)

This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), then detective fiction's very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form. 

Available at Springer Link

Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends. (British Library Publishing,

2022)

“As I moved with stiff legs along the reefs I slipped into the water. It was cold beyond belief – the very quintessence of deathly Arctic ice, so cold that it seemed to sear and bleach the skin.”


Inspired by ground-breaking expeditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds lay waiting. From lurid Arctic narratives of life amongst polar bears to tales of ghostly visitations within the wind-blown wilds of the southern continent, this new collection uncovers a wealth of neglected material from this niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.


Featuring tales rife with aliens, twisted science and madness spanning from 1837–1946, this anthology also includes a gem of twenty-first century Arctic horror to trace the enduring lure of these sublime and uncanny spaces at the ends of the Earth.

Available at British Library Publishing 

Literature and Meat Since 1900. With Seán McCorry (Palgrave, 2019).


This collection of essays centers on literary representations of meat-eating, bringing aesthetic questions into dialogue with more established research on the ethics and politics of meat. From the decline of traditional animal husbandry to the emergence of intensive agriculture and the biotechnological innovation of in vitro meat, the last hundred years have seen dramatic changes in meat production. Meat consumption has risen substantially, inciting the emergence of new forms of political subjectivity, such as the radical rejection of meat production in veganism. Featuring essays on both canonical and lesser-known authors, Literature and Meat Since 1900 illustrates the ways in which our meat regime is shaped, reproduced and challenged as much by cultural and imaginative factors as by political contestation and moral reasoning.


Available at Springer Link

Walrus. With Louis Miller (Reaktion Press, 2014)

Known for its prominent tusks and distinctive whiskers, the walrus has often cropped up in contemporary culture: from the grandiloquent protagonist of Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, to The Beatles’ enigmatic pronouncement ‘I am the Walrus’. Walruses have also played a significant role in Arctic indigenous communities, where they have held a central place in traditional mythologies.

Walrus explores the intriguing and affecting history of an animal that remains on the frontline of contemporary conservation debates. Commercial walrus hunting was banned in the 1930s, and today only subsistence hunting is permitted, yet the mammal still faces an uncertain future. Shrinking pack-ice caused by global warming is causing serious problems for walrus herds, while the exploitation of arctic oil and gas resources puts further pressure on the animals.

This important book combines natural, cultural and environmental histories to offer a refreshing and wonderfully illustrated account of the much-loved mammal. Walrus foregrounds the ethical dilemmas they embody, such as the continuing and intensifying conflict between the developed world and indigenous interests, and the impact of global warming on arctic animals.

Available at Reaktion Press

Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Identity and Ecology in Victorian Adventure Fiction (Anthem Press, 2012)

Empire and the Animal Body explores representations of exotic animals in Victorian adventure fiction, mainly in works by R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty, G. M. Fenn, Paul du Chaillu, H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan. These primary texts are concerned with Southern and West Africa, India and what is now Indonesia in the period 1860-1910, an era which comprises imperial expansion, consolidation and the beginnings of imperial decline. 

Representations of exotic animals in such literary works generally revolve around portrayals of violence, either in big-game hunting or in the collection of scientific specimens, and draw on a range of literary sources, most notably romance, natural history writing and ‘penny dreadful’ fiction.

This study investigates how these texts’ depictions of forms of violence complicate the seemingly fundamental distinction of humans from animals, and undermine the ideological structures of imperial rule. Rather than an innate and hierarchical opposition, the relationship of humans with their animal others emerges in this context as a complex interplay of kinship and difference.

This argument both continues the postcolonial dismantling of empire’s logic of domination and develops the recentering of the nonhuman in environmentally focused criticism. Most vitally, it also signals the relation between these fields: the necessary interdependence of human and nonhuman interests, environmental activism and global social justice.

Available at Anthem Press

Eva Giraud

Digital Ecologies: Mediating more-than-human worlds. With Turnbull J, Searle A, Anderson-Elliott H ( Manchester University Press, 2024) 


Digital ecologies draws together leading social science and humanities scholars to examine how digital media are reshaping the futures of conservation, environmentalism, and ecological politics. The book offers an overview of the emerging field of interdisciplinary digital ecologies research by mapping key debates and issues in the field, with original empirical chapters exploring how livestreams, sensors, mobile technologies, social media platforms, and software are reconfiguring life in profound ways. The collection traverses contexts ranging from animal exercise apps, to surveillance systems on the high seas, and is organised around the themes of encounters, governance, and assemblages. Digital ecologies also includes an agenda-setting intervention by the book's editors, and three closing chapter-length provocations by leading scholars in digital geographies, the environmental humanities, and media theory that set out trajectories for future research.

Available at Manchester University Press

Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory (London: Bloomsbury Academic 2021)


What exactly do vegans believe? Why has veganism become such a critical and criticized social movement, and how does veganism correspond to wider debates about sustainability, animal studies, and the media? Eva Haifa Giraud offers an accessible route into the debates that surround vegan politics, which feed into broader issues surrounding food activism and social justice.


Giraud engages with arguments in favour of veganism, as well as the criticisms levelled at vegan politics. She interrogates debates and topics that are central to conversations around veganism, including identity, intersectional politics, and activism, with research drawn from literary animal studies, animal geographies, ecofeminism, posthumanism, critical race theory, and new materialism.

Giraud makes an original theoretical intervention into these often fraught debates, and argues that veganism holds radical political potential to act as “more than a diet” by disrupting commonplace norms and assumptions about how humans relate to animals. Drawing on a range of examples, from recipe books with punk aesthetics to social media campaigns, Giraud shows how veganism's radical potential is being complicated by its commercialization, and elucidates new conceptual frameworks for reclaiming veganism as a radical social movement.


Available at Bloomsbury Publishing 

What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, anthropocentrism, and an

ethics of exclusion (Duke University Press, 2019)


By foregrounding the ways that human existence is bound together with the lives of other entities, contemporary cultural theorists have sought to move beyond an anthropocentric worldview. Yet as Eva Haifa Giraud contends in What Comes after Entanglement?, for all their conceptual power in implicating humans in ecologically damaging practices, these theories can undermine scope for political action. Drawing inspiration from activist projects between the 1980s and the present that range from anticapitalist media experiments and vegan food activism to social media campaigns against animal research, Giraud explores possibilities for action while fleshing out the tensions between theory and practice. Rather than an activist ethics based solely on relationality and entanglement, Giraud calls for what she describes as an ethics of exclusion, which would attend to the entities, practices, and ways of being that are foreclosed when other entangled realities are realized. Such an ethics of exclusion emphasizes foreclosures in the context of human entanglement in order to foster the conditions for people to create meaningful political change.


Available at Duke University Press

Rosaleen Duffy

Security and Conservation: The Politics of the Illegal Wildlife Trade (Yale University Press, 2022) 


Debates regarding environmental security risks have generally focused on climate change and geopolitical water conflicts. Biodiversity conservation, however, is increasingly identified as a critical contributor to national and global security. The illegal wildlife trade is often articulated as a driver of biodiversity losses, and as a source of finance for organized crime networks, armed groups, and even terrorist networks. Conservationists, international organizations, and national governments have raised concerns about “convergence” of wildlife trafficking with other serious offenses, including theft, fraud, corruption, drugs and human trafficking, counterfeiting, firearms smuggling, and money laundering.

 

In Security and Conservation, Rosaleen Duffy examines the scale, practical reality, and future implications of the growing integration of biodiversity conservation with global security concerns. Duffy takes a political ecology approach to develop a deeper understanding of how and why wildlife conservation turned toward security‑oriented approaches to tackle the illegal wildlife trade. 

Available at Yale University Press London

Rachel Murray

The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form (Edinburgh University Press, 2020)

Argues for the importance of insects to modernism’s formal innovations.

Focusing on the writing of Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, H. D. and Samuel Beckett, this book uncovers a shared fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the insect body - its adaptive powers, distinct stages of growth and swarming formations.

Through a series of close readings, it proposes that the figure of the exoskeleton, which functions both as a protective outer layer and as a site of encounter, can enhance our understanding of modernism’s engagement with nonhuman life, as well as its questioning of the boundaries of the human.

Available at Edinburgh University Press

Josh Milburn

Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023)


How would we eat if animals had rights? A standard assumption is that our food systems would be plant-based. But maybe we should reject this assumption. Indeed, this book argues that a future non-vegan food system would be permissible on an animal rights view. It might even be desirable.


In Food, Justice, and Animals: Feeding the World Respectfully, Josh Milburn questions if the vegan food system risks cutting off many people's pursuit of the 'good life', risks exacerbating food injustices, and risks negative outcomes for animals. If so, then maybe non-vegan food systems would be preferable to vegan food systems, if they could respect animal rights.


Could they? The author provides a rigorous analysis of the ethics of farming invertebrates, producing plant-based meats, developing cultivated animal products, and co-working with animals on genuinely humane farms, arguing that these possibilities offer the chance for a food system that is non-vegan, but nonetheless respects animals' rights. He argues that there is a way for us to have our cake, and eat it too, because we can have our cow, and eat her too. 

Just Fodder: The Ethics of Feeding Animals (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press 2022)


Animal lovers who feed meat to other animals are faced with a paradox: perhaps fewer animals would be harmed if they stopped feeding the ones they love. Animal diets do not raise problems merely for individuals. To address environmental crises, health threats, and harm to animals, we must change our food systems and practices. And in these systems, animals, too, are eaters.


beyond what humans should eat and whether to count animals as food, Just Fodder answers ethical and political questions arising from thinking about animals as eaters. Josh Milburn begins with practical dilemmas about feeding the animals closest to us, our pets or animal companions. The questions grow more complicated as he considers relationships with more distance - questions about whether and how to feed garden birds, farmland animals who would eat our crops, and wild animals. Milburn evaluates the nature and circumstances of our relationships with animals to generate a novel theory of animal rights.


Looking past arguments about what we can and cannot do to other beings, Just Fodder asks what we can, should, and must do for them, laying out a fuller range of our ethical obligations to other animals. 

Dominic O'key 

Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals (Bloomsbury, 2022) 


We are living through a period of planetary crisis, a time in which the mass production and consumption of some animals is made possible by the mass extinction of many others. What is the role of literature in responding to this war against animals? How might literary criticism read for animals?


In Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, Dominic O'Key develops the bold argument that deep attention to literary form enables us to rethink human-animal relations. Through chapters on W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee and Mahasweta Devi, as well as close readings of works by Arundhati Roy and Richard Powers, O'Key reveals how literary forms can unsettle the fictions of human supremacy and craft alternative, creaturely forms of relation.


An intervention into both the humanism of literary theory and the representational focus of animal studies, this provocative work makes the case for a new formalism in light of our obligation to fellow creatures. 

Available at Bloomsbury Publishing 

Animal and Literature series

The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Edited by Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller (Springer International Publishing Publishing 2021)

Together with their colleague Susan McHugh (University of New England), Robert McKay and John Miller from the Sheffield Animals Research Colloquium are co-series editors of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

The series is currently seeking submissions, and interested scholars are encouraged to contact the series editors for more information.

Full details of the series are available on Springer Link.