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We are Sentientists

Where are sentientists around the world?

Here’s our wall of sentientists. If, like them, you’re committed to evidence and reason and have compassion for all sentient beings, why not join them and add your tile here.

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Thom Norman

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Thom Norman is the co-founder of FarmKind (www.farmkind.giving), a new non-profit focused on raising money for some of the best farmed animal charities. FarmKind is designed to help donors both have a big impact for animals and donate to the organisations they care about most. It allows users to split donations between an expert-recommended super-effective charity and their favourite charity, then provides a bonus on both.

FarmKind was founded through the Charity Entrepreneurship incubation program (www.charityentrepreneurship.com) earlier this year. FarmKind aims to help close the funding chasm for farmed animal charities: there is estimated to be just $200m per year to cover 100 billion farmed animals.

Doing good has always been a driving ambition for Thom, something that might trace back to his upbringing in a strongly religious household. He has followed a fairly classic route to effective altruism, through veganism and Peter Singer. However, his own philosophy and values are less EA-typical, as much motivated by John Rawls as utilitarianism. Thom also has a strong interest in politics as a force for change, having been active in politics for over a decade and worked in the UK civil service.

Thom has a broadly naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

FarmKind
@FarmKindThom
Thom on LinkedIn

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Richard Twine

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism podcast here.

Richard is Reader in Sociology at Edge Hill University in the UK, working at the nexus of critical animal studies, environmental sociology, the sociology of climate change and gender studies. He is co-director of The Centre for Human Animal Studies, an interdisciplinary forum for research and activities that engage with the complex material, ethical and symbolic relationships between humans, other animals, and their environments. Richard is the author of many articles, papers and books for both academic audiences and the wider public, including “The Climate Crisis and Other Animals“.

Richard has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope.

RichardTwine.com
@RichardTwine
The Centre for Human Animal Studies at Edge Hill University
@CfHAS

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Jesse Tandler

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism podcast here.

Jesse is Managing Director of the New Roots Institute. He oversees programming, people operations, and implementation of New Roots Institute’s strategy. Jesse is a writer, academic, and has been an educator for nearly two decades. He earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2002 and an MFA from the New School in 2007. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching high school students about the ethics of our food culture. Later, during his PhD work, Jesse continued to include environmental and animal ethics on the syllabi of his undergraduate classes at the City University of New York, where for five years he taught philosophy, literature, writing, and rhetoric. In 2017, he moved to Los Angeles to apply his years of research and educational experience in the non-profit sphere. Outside of New Roots Institute, you may find him practicing yoga, appreciating beauty in its myriad forms, reading in one of his preferred languages, or teaching food politics at UCLA.

Jesse has a broadly naturalistic epistemology. He has at least a sentiocentric moral scope and is vegan.

Jesse at the New Roots Institute
Jesse on LinkedIn
@jmtandler

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Arran Stibbe

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Arran Stibbe is Professor in Ecological Linguistics at the University of Gloucestershire. In his teaching and research he focuses on how language makes us who we are as people, and the role of language in building the kind of society we live in, using discourse analysis and ecolinguistics. Ecolinguistics examines how language encodes the stories we live by, and shapes how we see ourselves and our relationship with other animals and the earth. This involves linguistic analysis of a wide range of discourses, from advertising which encourages people to buy unnecessary and ecologically damaging products, to the inspirational language of nature writing. He is founder of the International Ecolinguistics Association.

Arran has a naturalistic epistemology. He is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope.

Arran at the University of Gloucestershire
The Stories We Live By free online course
International Ecolinguistics Association
Stibbe, Arran (2024) Econarrative: ethics, ecology and the search for new narratives to live by. London: Bloomsbury
Stibbe, Arran (2021) Ecolinguistics: language, ecology and the stories we live by (second edition). London: Routledge

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Maneesha Deckha

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Maneesha Deckha is a law professor at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her work initially spanned human rights, injustice, feminist theory, post-colonial & decolonial theory and later, inter-species justice and its links and intersectionality with human social justice. Maneesha founded and directs the Animals & Society Research Initiative at Victoria University. She is the author of the book “Animals as Legal Beings”.

Maneesha is Hindu, an atheist and has a naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has at least a sentiocentric moral scope.

Maneesha at the University of Victoria
A Deeper Kindness documentary series
Human Children, Nonhuman Animals, and a Plant-Based Vegan Future

 

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Mark Humanity

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Mark Humanity is a long-time vegan activist. He currently lives on the edge of a rainforest in New Zealand and is on the Board of the Vegan Society of Aotearoa, New Zealand. Mark has been involved in animal rights since a teenager, initially in Ireland’s embryonic movement and later in the much more developed UK movement. A hunt saboteur for many years, Mark has been vegan since 1989 and got involved with the NZ Vegan Society via his vegan outreach Initiative called “Vegan Living Auckland”. He is currently helping raise two plant-based children and has a background in mental health nursing. Mark is the author of “The Humanity Trigger“.

Mark has a naturalistic worldview (ex-Catholic). He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

Mark at Earth Island Books
The Humanity Trigger
The Humanity Trigger Book

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Robert Grillo

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism podcast here.

Robert Grillo is an activist, author and speaker for all species. He is also the founder and director of Free from Harm, a non profit dedicated to helping end animal exploitation. He founded Slaughter Free Chicago in 2018 which has now grown into the Slaughter Free Network. As a communications professional for over 25 years, Robert once worked on large food industry accounts where he acquired a behind-the-scenes perspective on food branding and marketing. His book, Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture, explores the powerful narratives driving our culture of mass animal consumption. Robert’s other published works include contributions to The Humane Hoax, Caged: Top Activists Share Their Wisdom on Effective Animal Advocacy and Circles of Compassion: Connecting Issues of Justice.

Robert is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

RobertGrillo.com
@robert_grillo
@free_from_harm
Free from Harm

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Valerie Jack

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation here.

Valerie is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Her book “Living With Death Without God” explores how non-religious people think about and cope with death and grieving.

She is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@valeriejack
@Valeriejackwrites on Instagram
Valeriejackwrites on Facebook
Valerie on the Humanism Now podcast
Valerie on the Mortal Atheist

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Leigh Claire La Berge

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism podcast here.

Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor in City University of New York‘s English Department. Her work focuses on aesthetics and political economy. Her first book, “Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s”, tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, “Wages Against Artwork:  Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art” explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called “decommodified labor,” or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire is the co-editor of the collection, “Reading Capitalist Realism”. She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled “Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary”. She is working on a new book called “Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect that Capitalism is a Joke” about her experience with corporate labor, Y2K, and management consultants.

Leigh Claire has a non-religious, naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

Leigh Claire at CUNY on Academica.edu
@MarxForCats
Marx For Cats Video Series

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John Barry

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

John is an activist academic, a green political economist and former Green Party politician in Northern Ireland. He is Professor of Green Political Economy in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast. His main research interests span politics, economics, the ethics of sustainability/sustainable development, green moral and political theory, green political economy, vulnerability, resilience, civic republicanism and green politics, Irish/Northern Irish politics, Q Methodology and sustainable energy politics and policy.

John is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope.

@ProfJohnBarry
John on LinkedIn
John’s “Marxist Lentilist” Blog
John on Academia.edu
John at QUB
John on Wikipedia

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Maja Cullen

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Maja has an MSc in Clinical Health Psychology. She is passionate about research and advocacy focused on improving well-being for all human and non-human animals. She is the primary author, along with co-authors Devon Docherty and Carol Jasper, of the paper Out of sight, out of mind: How pescetarians manage dissonance by creating distance. There’s an introduction to the paper here.

Maja has a naturalistic, non-religious worldview. She is vegan and includes a sentiocentric moral scope in her “radical, ecocentrist” perspective.

@maja_cullen_

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Devon Docherty

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Devon is a researcher, writer and animal advocate with Surge and (Earthling) Ed Winters. She has an MA in Human-Animal Interactions from the University of Stirling and is a psychology teaching assistant there. Devon also founded and was president of the University of Stirling Student’s Union Vegan & Rights for Animals (VERA) Society. Devon co-authored “The Cheese Paradox” with Carol Jasper.

Devon has a non-religious, naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@devonmdocherty
Devon on LinkedIn
@earthlinged

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Eli Perez

Sentientist

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Jacob Lloyd

Sentientist

Jacob Lloyd is the Executive Director of Animal Welfare Investigations Project. He has experience in conducting covert investigations on organised animal cruelty. He is a Certified Animal Cruelty Investigator through the University of Missouri Law Enforcement Training Institute (LETI) in the United States. He is one of the only British animal advocates to hold this qualification.

Jacob on LinkedIn

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Emilia Leese

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

Emilia is co-author of the book Think Like A Vegan and host of the Think Like a Vegan podcast. She is involved in the Birchfield Highlands re-wilding project in Scotland, edits the quarterly magazine for The Heath & Hampstead Society in London and has developed life skills and ethics workshops for underserved youth. Professionally, she has been a corporate finance lawyer for over 20 years.

Emi is vegan and has at least a sentiocentric moral scope. She has a broadly naturalistic worldivew.

EmiliaLeese.com
@emisgoodeating
Think Like a Vegan Podcast

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Jeremy Gregory

Sentientist

Jeremy Gregory is co-founder of Tindakan (formerly known as Bands for Lands) and current CEO of Tindakan Innovations. He comes from a long line of teachers, eco-conscious farmers, artists, musicians, and philanthropists. The principles of continued growth, conscious benevolence, and equitable life development opportunities are tenets that he values highly. It is his genuine hope to help encourage the merits of taking responsibility for our own growth and actions and for the betterment of our world. Jeremy holds the belief that an educated society creates harmony and prosperity. Jeremy is also co-creator of an award-winning multimedia arts space in Denver that was philanthropic and educational in nature and in 1993 he formed a nationally touring experimental art rock band and three years later used this platform to incorporate his first nonprofit organization. Jeremy served in the Peace Corps teaching Community Based Natural Resource Management, conservation and sustainability issues, and professional-building skills in the communities he served in Malawi Africa. Over the past 20 years in the nonprofit sector, Jeremy has gained invaluable knowledge and experience in NGO development, operations, project management, event production and coordination, and social entrepreneurial enterprise. He also has a wealth of leadership experience with global and multi-site organizations, and projects serving a diverse population and demographic. Jeremy is known for his excellence in coalition-building skills, ability to communicate and work effectively with a variety of internal and external stakeholders. Jeremy is passionate about veganism and humane education principles and has at least a sentiocentric moral scope.

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Laura Chepner

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

Laura is Education Officer at The Vegan Society and Chair of The Vegan Society’s Education Network. She is a qualified primary school teacher and well known for introducing the phrase ‘vegan-inclusive education’ to the education sector. Laura worked for several years as the UK’s only vegan inclusion education specialist under the pseudonym ‘Primary Veducation’ and continues to offer training to school staff on what it means to be vegan and how to appropriately teach and treat vegan learners in their care. Laura also empowers vegan learners and parents/guardians by facilitating the creation of peer-developed and reviewed resources and offering supportive interventions.

Laura has a broadly naturalistic epistemology. She is vegan (of course!) and has at least a sentiocentric moral scope.

Laura at the Vegan Society
@laura_diamondo
Veducated: An Educator’s Guide for Vegan Inclusive Teaching

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Judy Tiberi

Sentientist

Ethical vegan since 1969.

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Tom Harris

Sentientist

Find our Sentientism conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

Tom is an internationally acclaimed artist, published author, and social justice activist. He is an expert and consultant on animal liberation history and strategy, and the global animal rights movement. His first book, Your Neighbour Kills Puppies was released in March 2024. The book is the previously untold story of one of the world’s most powerful social justice campaigns, Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). Tom became involved in the animal liberation movement at the age of fifteen when he attended his first hunt sab. Over the years that followed he devoted his life to helping animals and co-founded one of the UK`s most successful regional animal rights organizations, SARC (The Southern Animal Rights Coalition). Tom is a regular contributor to Forca Vegan magazine, and other periodicals. Under the professional name ‘Tattoo Tom‘, Tom has also achieved a highly successful and acclaimed career as an artist.

Tom is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

TomHarris.me
Shacjustice.com
@Tattoo_tom

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Hayley Gilbert

Sentientist

ALL sentient beings, big or small, deserve equal consideration and respect. Humans aren’t the only ones who are sentient individuals. We should also treat others how they wanted to be treated. People who have beliefs of their own in regards to other sentient beings should NEVER be made fun of or bullied just because they are “different” from others. As the Golden Rule states, “treat others how you want to be treated”. This applies to EVERYONE, not just people, not just me and you.

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Victoria (Vicky) Hailey

Sentientist

Why Sentientism?: first do no harm…

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Craig Cline

Sentientist

I’m the author of the book “GoldenRuleism/Living A GoldenRuleism-Guided Life,” soon to be published in both English and Spanish. I wanted to help people gain awareness of Sentientism, so I included it as a heading. Here are the three paragraphs: “There’s a positive step you can take right away. Look into Sentientism, a worldview which focuses on compassion and justice for all sentient beings. It ties in nicely with GoldenRuleism — because it gives moral consideration to everyone — and seeks to reduce the suffering of anyone. People all over the world can easily connect with each other in Sentientism’s global community.” Here’s to humankind’s embracing the justice and “humane-ity” of Sentientism!

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Nathalie Dewalhens

Sentientist

Nathalie Dewalhens is a writer, performer, mentor, and facilitator who is passionate about intimacy, connection and communication. She is very much influenced by individuals such as Trungpa Rinpoche, Henry Miller, Peter Singer, Pema Chodron, Nietzsche, Esther Perel, Darwin, and Frans de Waal. She is also a firm believer that a more compassionate and sensuous worldview is essential to creating a better world.

NathalieDewalhens.com

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jamie

Sentientist

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Jonathan Leighton

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Jonathan is an ethics strategist, writer, social change advocate and public speaker, He is Executive Director of the Organisation for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS), a Swiss-based think-and-do tank that promotes the prevention of human and non-human suffering as our overriding global ethical priority. His book, The Battle for Compassion: Ethics in an Apathetic Universe, explores the question “What matters?”. His new book The Tango of Ethics: Intuition, Rationality and the Prevention of Suffering goes further in proposing a rigorous reassessment of how we think about ethics.

Jonathan is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

JonathanLeighton.org
preventsuffering.org
@jonleighton1

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Chris Bryant

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Chris is the Director of Bryant Research and the Head of Policy at the Alternative Proteins Association. He is a social scientist and an expert on alternative protein markets and marketing. He has published several papers on consumer acceptance, policy, nutritional value, and other social dimensions of cultivated meat, plant-based meat, and fermentation-derived animal product alternatives. He has worked with alternative protein companies and non-profits, including THIS, Formo, Ivy Farm Technologies, Aleph Farms, Wild Type, ProVeg International, Mercy For Animals, and the Good Food Institute.

Chris is an atheist and has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@SirChrisBryant
@Bryant_Research
BryantResearch.co.uk
Bryant Research on LinkedIn

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Tobias Baumann

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Tobias co-founded the Center for Reducing Suffering with Magnus Vinding. CRS is a research center that works to create a future with less suffering, taking all sentient beings into account. More broadly, Tobias is involved in the effective altruism movement which applies evidence and reason to find the most effective ways to help others. In his new book, Avoiding the Worst: How to Prevent a Moral Catastrophe, Tobias lays out the concept of risks of future suffering (s-risks) and outlines ways to steer the world away from s-risks and towards a brighter future. You can get his book for free on Amazon or read the PDF version. Avoiding the Worst is also on the bookshelf of our Sentientism GoodReads group. His many other writings on how to best reduce suffering in the long-term future are collected here.

Previously, Tobias’ research at University College London focused on Cooperative Artificial Intelligence.  The aim of this work is to better understand how artificial learners can achieve higher levels of cooperation in social dilemmas (e.g. through mechanism design). Before that, Tobias graduated in 2016 from Ulm University with a Master’s degree in Mathematics and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Physics. After graduating, he worked as a quantitative trader at Jane Street Capital.

Tobias has a sentiocentric moral scope and a naturalistic worldview.

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Melanie Joy

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation on the Sentientism YouTube here and on the Sentientism Podcast here.

Melanie Joy, PhD, is a Harvard-educated psychologist specializing in relationships, communication, and social transformation. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the new How to End Injustice Everywhere and the bestselling Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work. Melanie is also an internationally recognized speaker and trainer who’s presented her work in fifty countries across six continents.

Melanie is best known for her groundbreaking theories on the psychology of violence and nonviolence and building healthy relationships. Her analyses have helped explain why people engage in “nonrelational” behaviors—behaviors that harm other people, animals, the planet, and themselves—as well as how to change this pattern. Her work has been featured by media outlets around the world, including the New York Times, BBC, NPR, and ABC Australia. She is the eighth recipient of the Ahimsa Award—previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela—for her work on global nonviolence; and she also received both the Peter Singer Prize and the Empty Cages Prize for her work developing strategies to reduce the suffering of non-human animals. Melanie is the founding president of the international organization, Beyond Carnism.

Melanie is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

Melanie on Wikipedia
How to End Injustice Everywhere
Beyond Carnism
Infighting.org
MelanieJoy.org
@DrMelanieJoy

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Dr. Kendra Coulter

Sentientist

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism Podcast.

Kendra is a professor of management and organisational studies at Huron University and a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is a leading expert on animals and work, animal protection organizations and policy, and gender equity. Kendra has led multiple research projects enriching our understanding of human-animal work and animals’ own forms of labour in important new directions including through development of the concepts of humane jobs, interspecies solidarity, and ecosocial reproduction.

Kendra’s latest book is Defending Animals: Finding Hope on the Front Lines of Animal Protection. She is the author of dozens of scholarly articles, book chapters, and public reports, as well as the path-making Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity. She is the co-editor of Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? Kendra has also published more than sixty columns including for The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Salon, Ottawa Citizen, Winnipeg Free Press, Edmonton Journal, The Conversation, iPolitics, and National Observer. Her work has so far been translated into French, Swedish, Japanese, Korean, German, and Bahasa Indonesia.

Kendra is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope. She is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview.

@DrKendraCoulter
Kendra on Insta
Kendra at Huron University

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Cansu Yersal

Sentientist

I am in favor of sentientism because I believe ‘any individual who is capable of subjective experience should be considered a moral subject’. I also believe in treating feeling beings with compassion.

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Head and shoulders shot of Monica Murphy, Bill Wasik and a dog family member sitting together.

“This great unresolved tension of modern life” – Monica Murphy & Bill Wasik – Sentientism Ep:214

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“This great unresolved tension of modern life” – Monica Murphy & Bill Wasik – Sentientism Ep:214

Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy are the authors of "Our Kindred Creatures". A Sentientism conversation about "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?"
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“Spirituality is a great way in which capitalism commodifies people’s belief” – Richard Twine – Sentientism Ep:213

Richard Twine is Reader in Sociology at Edge Hill University. A Sentientism conversation about "what's real?", "who matters?" and "How to make a better future?"
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“You don’t really have to convince people to be compassionate” – Jesse Tandler – New Roots Institute – Sentientism Ep:212

Jesse Tandler is MD of New Roots Institute. A Sentientism conversation about "what's real?", "who matters?" and "how to make a better world?"
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