In the this bonus episode celebrating the end of Season 2, Juliana is joined by two students studying Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter: Natasha Townley and Natasha Matsaert, who in addition to their studies are organizing an event in Bristol as part of National Animal Rights Day. They discuss the ethics of pet ownership, making animal storytelling more open, intersectionality in justice, and what it takes to organize international advocacy campaigns.
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Conversations with Animals is a monthly podcast hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with nonhuman animal lives. Expect interviews with ecological writers, filmmakers, vegan chefs, animal-related spaces, artists, and more! Each month, a fresh companion newsletter is published. Subscribe: www.julianaroth.com/drawinganimals
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Natasha Townley is a master's student, currently studying Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter. This course is designed to consider the ways humans and non-humans think about and relate to one another. As part of this course, she has covered varied topics such as compassionate conservation, nonhuman thanatology, nonhuman culture, and animal criminology. Many of her essays have focussed on farming environments, including a literature-based review of suffering in pig-farms and first-hand research into how we might find alternatives to slaughter for ex-dairy cows.
Townley has always had a great love of animals, growing up in a vegetarian household and becoming vegan nearly six years ago. She has since spent several years working in animal rescue shelters as a care assistant, looking after the day-to-day needs of the animals, before deciding to study Anthrozoology with the hope she could help to improve the lives of animals more widely.
Anthrozoology has led Townley to meet many interesting and inspiring people, and she is now helping to organise Bristol's first National Animal Rights Day event with Our Planet. Theirs Too. She is excited to be a part of this and looks forward to seeing where else Anthrozoology might take her.
Natasha Matsaert is a Masters student studying Anthrozoology at the University of Exeter, where she is currently carrying out research on the breastfeeding experiences of ‘mothers against dairy’ and the memorialisation of wildlife road fatalities. She is passionate about drawing attention to ‘ungrievable’ nonhuman lives through an ecofeminist and intersectional lens and communicating her research through (visual) storytelling. As an ethical vegan, her work is situated in the context of scholarly activism. Upon graduating from her masters, she hopes to utilise her skills in research and communication within an animal rights organisation.
Matsaert is currently organising Bristol’s National Animal Rights Day (NARD) event, which is a memorial ceremony for the billions of animals killed at human hands each year. Drawing from her research on ‘roadkill’ memorials, Natasha has been planning a creative writing workshop to story the lives of the animals being remembered at the NARD event. She hopes that this event will make these lives visible as worthy of mourning and thus encourage positive action from viewers.
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Juliana is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. She teaches writing at NYU and is an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction.
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