Description
How should we treat animals? The long-held belief that other animals exist solely for human use has undergone
radical challenges in the past half-century. How much further do we need to go to minimise, and even eliminate,
animal suffering? The field of animal rights raises big questions about how humans treat the other animals with which we share the planet. These questions are becoming more pressing as livestock farming exerts an ever-greater toll on the planet and the animals themselves, and we learn more about their capacity to think and experience pain. This book
shows why animals ought to have greater rights and what the world might look like if they did.
This event is part of University Press Week 2023, which this year celebrates the many ways that university presses help authors to Speak UP and share ideas that shape conversations around the world. Bookhaus is proud to partner with Bristol University Press and other university presses to amplify voices like Steve Cooke and Catherine Oliver this week and year round.
Steve Cooke is Associate Professor of Political Theory at the University of Leicester. Previously, he held positions on animal rights theory and environmental politics at the University of Sheffield and Keele University and was the Society for Applied Philosophy’s 30th Anniversary Postdoctoral Fellow for a project on animal rights and environmental terrorism.
Catherine Oliver is a lecturer in the Sociology of Climate Change at Lancaster University. Her book What is Veganism For? will be published by Bristol University Press in June 2024. Previously she was a research associate in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. A geographer interested in research beyond the human, she works on historical and contemporary veganism, the ethics and politics of interspecies friendship through human-chicken relationships, and multispecies ethnographic research, most recently with seabirds. She has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, written for Tribune, and had her work cited in The Guardian and The Independent. She is the author of Veganism, Archives, and Animals: Geographies of a Multispecies World (Routledge, 2022) which won the Runners’ Up Prize in the Social and Cultural Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society’s Book Prize in 2022 and was a finalist for the prestigious AHRC/BBC’s New Generation Thinkers.
George Miller has worked in publishing for over 30 years. At Oxford University Press he set up the Very short Introduction series in the early 1990s publishing short, affordable books that are intelligent and thought-provoking.
The What is it For? series seeks to be an agent for positive change, asking tough questions about purpose and fitness for purpose: what has to change for the future to be better? It publishes books from authors who are experts in their field and passionate about communicating to a wide readership.
Steve will be in conversation with Catherine at bookhaus. Tickets cost £6 and include a glass of wine or soft drink and £2 off the book.
