Episode 23: Zipporah Weisberg discusses Critical Animal Studies, feminism, animal liberation, and the harms of biotechnology

This week on Always for Animal Rights, I am excited to share my recent interview with the independent scholar and animal liberation activist Zippporah Weisberg.

Zipporah, who currently lives in Spain, completed her PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University in Toronto in 2013. Over the following two years, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship in animal ethics at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In addition to having written academic journal articles and book chapters on animal ethics,  she has recently started a blog called Animal Unbound to share her observations about, as she says on her website, "the plight of nonhuman animals in our human-centred and technologically mediated world." She is also a contemporary dancer.

In this interview, Zipporah tells me about Critical Animal Studies and some of the theories of how the animal industrial complex was created. We also discuss the following topics:

• why animal liberation is a feminist issue (you can read Zipporah’s article about this here)
• why advocating for legal personhood for certain “human-like” animals, such as great apes and elephants, might be problematic
• how biotechnology harms nonhuman animals and distorts their experience of life
• why the concepts of ontology and phenomenology are important when we’re thinking about animal ethics
• where the animal rights movement is headed, and what we can do to continue advocating for nonhuman animals

Zipporah is also a contemporary dancer. In this photo,
she is dancing at an animal rights protest in Granada

It’s a really interesting interview. If you would like to read Zipporah’s academic journal articles about the topics she spoke about in this episode, you can download them for free after signing up for an account on Academia.edu (which is also free).

Due to time constraints, I was only able to broadcast the first half of this interview on the airwaves this week. However, the podcast version of this episode, which you can find at either of the links below, contains the entire interview.

How to listen to this episode

There are two ways you can listen to this episode.

1. Listen to the episode on CKCU FM's website at https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/553/47631.html.
2. Listen to or download the podcast from Archive.org at https://archive.org/details/afar-april-22-2020.

You can also find Always for Animal Rights on Facebook and Instagram.

Until next week!