Episode 28: Kate Stewart and Matthew Cole discuss how nonhuman animals are depicted in popular films and stories for children

Matthew and Kate's book, with cover art
by vegan illustrator Hayley Wells

This week on Always for Animal Rights, I am pleased to present my recent interview with the vegan sociologists Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart. Kate and Matthew are the authors of the 2014 book, Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. They have also written many academic articles about human-nonhuman relations, such as "The Conceptual Separation of Food and Animals in Childhood", published in 2009.

In this interview, Kate and Matthew discuss the following topics:

• their conceptual map that illustrates how humans categorize nonhuman animals, not according to the animals' innate characteristics, but according to how humans want to exploit them;
• how popular films and stories for children reinforce (and occasionally challenge) speciesism;
• how the animal toys provided to children by fast-food companies are designed in a way that prevents children from "making the connection" between the dead animals in the fast-food bag and the living animals who the child might care about; and
• how vegan children's books challenge dominant speciesist narratives in society.

This is such an interesting topic. I highly recommend that you read their article (linked above), after you've listened to this episode!

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/553/48042.html.
2. Listen to or download the podcast from Archive.org at https://archive.org/details/afar-june-10-2020.

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Thanks for listening!