Zipporah Weisberg is an adjunct professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and the Interdisciplinary Program in the Arts at the University of Ottawa. From 2023-2024, Zipporah held a limited-term appointment at the rank of Assistant Professor of Critical Animal Studies in the Department of Sociology at Brock University. In March 2021, Zipporah was awarded a Culture and Animals Foundation grant for her project on animal agency in animal sanctuaries. Zipporah completed her PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in 2013, and was the inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University from 2013-2015. Her areas of specialization include critical animal studies, the critical theory of the early Frankfurt School, and existentialism and phenomenology. Zipporah has published on a wide range of topics, including climate justice and animal justice, the ethics and politics of cultured meat, the benefits and harms of animal assisted therapy, the ethical and ontological implications of biotechnology, and the psychopathology of speciesism. She is currently working on a book project on sanctuaries as a form of political refusal.

Dr. Siobhan Speiran joined EUC in January as a postdoctoral visitor, continuing her collaboration with Professor Alice Hovorka (The Lives of Animals Research Group) who served as her Ph.D. supervisor at Queen's University. A wild animal welfare scholar and animal geographer, Siobhan conducts transdisciplinary research at the intersection of primate welfare, conservation, and sustainable tourism in Costa Rican wildlife sanctuaries. Her Ph.D. research focused on the lives of monkeys in Costa Rica; generously funded by a SSHRC Bombardier Doctoral Scholarship. Additionally, she founded the Costa Rican Monkey Interest Group to connect wildlife researchers, caregivers, and professionals around the improvement of monkey lives. Siobhan has published on primate rehabilitation, animal labour, tourism ethics, and the phenomenon of ‘wildlife selfies.’ She also participates in scientific activism and communication through teaching, and the website theanimalwelfarist.ca, to disseminate her research. She has contributed as a wildlife expert to multiple podcasts and journalistic news outlets, including National Geographic and the Queen’s Alumni Review.

Ryan Wilcox is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Philosophy under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. His research is motivated by a desire to develop a truly interspecies approach to political philosophy. The dominant trend in political philosophy is to treat animals as problems of extension, or as entities to be considered after-the-fact. Indeed, this is almost always the case where animals are afforded consideration. In opposition to this, Ryan joins a growing number of philosophers demanding that we re-orient ourselves to understand problems in political philosophy as always already interspecies in nature. In his doctoral project, Ryan is expanding upon the growing literature related to the social-membership model of animal rights, which argues that domesticated animals should be recognized as members of society. His research explores a number of conceptual and substantive challenges that arise when we rethink our ideas of membership and society in interspecies terms. Additionally, Ryan works with other members of the Kingston Interspecies Community (KISC) research group exploring the lives of animals at farmed animal sanctuaries. 

Agnes Tam earned her Ph.D. from Queen’s (Philosophy) in 2020. She is a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow with the Research Group on Constitutional Studies at McGill University in 2021-22, and has been appointed Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Calgary (beginning 2022). She is also a recipient of Hong Kong’s Sir Edward Youde Memorial Overseas Honorary Fellowship. Her doctoral research works at the intersection between political philosophy and social epistemology. It explores how humans collectively achieve moral learning in a non-ideal world where rationality is constrained by cognitive bias and relations of domination. While it applauds the “epistemic egalitarian model” of moral learning in correcting moral bias arising out of relations of domination, it argues that it is insufficient in correcting social bias arising out of our peer relations governed by social norms. Unlike moral bias, it argues that social bias can be morally benign, socially rational and practically valuable. Hence it need not and ought not be purged indiscriminately. The challenge is to overcome only those problematic social biases embedding moral bias. To that end, Agnes develops an “epistemic inegalitarian model” of social learning and reconciles its tensions with moral egalitarianism. The goal of the research is in part to enable moral learning of human-animal relations beyond the uses of hypothetical reason and democratic reason, and understand and defend the rationality and morality in non-deliberative and non-democratic means of activism. Prior coming to Queen’s, Agnes completed her LL.B. at University of Hong Kong and M.Sc. in political theory at London School of Economics and engaged in international animal advocacy.

Lauren Van Patter was a PhD student in Geography at Queen’s, working with Dr. Alice Hovorka and The Lives of Animals Research Group. Her SSHRC CGS funded research examines human-coyote relations in urban areas of southern Ontario. It draws on the more-than-human/animal geographies and multispecies studies scholarship and is grounded in a feminist-posthumanist approach. Her research engages interdisciplinary methods to explore the experiences of coyotes and humans dwelling in multispecies communities, and opportunities for enhanced coexistence. Lauren is also working with members of the Kingston Interspecies Community (KISC) research group on a project investigating the lives of animals at farmed animal sanctuaries.

Katherine Wayne completed her PhD in September 2013; her dissertation is titled “Toward a Virtue-Centred Ethics of Reproduction” and she was supervised by Christine Overall, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University. She then completed a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship with Will Kymlicka in the area of animal ethics. Specifically, Katherine’s work examines the morality of bringing domesticated animals into existence, either with human intervention or through animals’ own volition. Animal rights scholars often assume that domestic animals have inviolable rights and that humans have a duty of care towards them as dependents. Yet it remains a legitimate question as to whether domestic animals can be incorporated into the community in a way that ensures their living good lives. Equally pressing is the question of whether domestic animals introduced into the community will impede the well-being of others. Thus the morality of domestic animal reproduction in a mixed and interdependent community is open to scrutiny. The following questions inform Katherine’s research: What are the conditions of permissibility and desirability of bringing domestic animals into existence? And how does the dependence of animals on humans shape our obligations to them and the nature of their rights, in regard to reproductive behaviours? She also considers policy-guiding implications that these theoretical conclusions may have in terms of the way Canada manages (some subset of) its domestic animal population. 

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar was the 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow in Animal Studies at Queen’s University and was appointed Assistant Professor in Political Science at Butler University in 2021. His research examines the intertwined development of the concepts of race and species and the intersections between critical race and animal studies. Jishnu received his Ph.D. in Political Theory from Johns Hopkins University’s Political Science Department. Jishnu is working on a book manuscript, An Infinite Scream Passing Through Nature: Race, Animality, and Vulnerability, that contests the dominance of "voice" and "speech" as grammars for political inclusion and develops alternative figures of the cry and the scream to account for human and nonhuman vulnerability. He obtained a B.A. in History from the University of Texas-Austin in 2013. Jishnu’s publications have addressed topics like critical race theory and literature, animals in political theory, the relationship between black studies and animal studies, and the politics of veganism.

Frédéric Côté-Boudreau was a Ph.D. student in Philosophy at Queen’s University (2013-2019). His thesis “Inclusive Autonomy: A Theory of Freedom for Everyone” argued for a right to autonomy for nonhuman animals and persons with cognitive disabilities and touched upon adaptive preferences, domination and paternalism, relational theories of autonomy and the social model of disability. Frédéric has published, among other things, the entry “Capacitisme” in the encyclopedia La pensée végane. 50 regards sur la condition animale edited by Renan Larue (PUF, 2020) and regularly writes about animal issues for a nonacademic audience. Formerly active in the Festival végane de Montréal and Queen’s Animal Defence and co-founder of the Estivales de la question animale edition Québec, he now teaches philosophy at Collège Montmorency. Frédéric is a consultant to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE) on various projects, including the Animal Liberation/Rights Movement Archive Project.

Daphne Brouwer has a PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University. Daily inspired by encounters with the (sub)urban wildlife around her, Daphne analyzes how liminal animals are perceived in different societies and cultures. She is interested in particular in why certain animals are excluded through stigmatizing perceptions such as “pests”, how these stigmatizing perceptions can be challenged, and how we can learn from the diverse traditions of co-existence in other cultures. Daphne is also part of the research group on animal cruelty investigations — led by Kendra Coulter and Amy Fitzgerald — as the main researcher on animal cruelty investigations in the Netherlands. 

Rachel Fredericks is an independent scholar and activist living in Chicago, where she is involved in both mutual aid efforts to cultivate food sovereignty and collaborative attempts to mitigate the climate crisis. Previously, she was an assistant professor of philosophy, after earning degrees from Reed College and the University of Washington. Most of her research has been about moral responsibility for and evaluation of things other than actions (including attitudes, desires, character traits, and concepts). Concerns about social justice, fascination with living beings, and engagement with empirical literature are themes connecting her disparate works. More recently, her attention has been directed to animal ethics where it intersects with climate ethics, food ethics, and the ethics of caregiving for human children.