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

Dr Iyan Offor is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birmingham City University conducting interdisciplinary, theoretical research focusing on global animal law, environmental justice, intersectionality, posthumanism and law in the Anthropocene. Iyan is passionate about delivering legal education and research that will lead to the improvement of protections for animals and the environment in law. Iyan teaches international environmental law and human rights, legal theory, legal research, and constitutional law. He will also be creating a new course on animals in environmental law. His new book, “Global Animal Law From The Margins“, is published by Routledge.

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

@IyanOffor
Iyan on LinkedIn
Iyan at Birmingham City University

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

Jane is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Deakin Law School. Jane obtained degrees in Commerce, Law (with Honours), and a PhD in human rights law from Deakin University, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching (Teach for Australia) from the University of Melbourne. Jane has published research in relation to the human right to education, the human rights of disabled people, animal rights, and animal related laws. She has taught a variety of units, including human rights law, administrative law and contract law. She was a finalist for ‘Academic of the Year’ in the Australian Law Awards in 2019 and 2020. Her article titled ‘Recognising the Sentience of Animals in Law: A Justification and Framework for Australian States and Territories’ was given an Australian Legal Research Award in 2022 for Best Early Career Research Article. Before embarking on her career in academia, Jane served as an associate in the inaugural Teach for Australia program. Prior to this, she was in private legal practice for a number of years, principally in commercial litigation.

Jane is not religious and has a broadly naturalistic worldview while being open minded about the possibility there are things beyond the natural world. She is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope, complemented by a wider concern for ecosystems.

Jane at Deakin University

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

John is a writer, philosopher, cultural critic and magician. He is best known for his book, The Postmodern Prince, and for his more recent work in Critical Animal Studies where he edited the collection “Critical Theory and Animal Liberation“. Also in that field his book “The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong about Meat, Animals, and the Nature of Moral Life” will be published by NYU Press in 2024. John was raised in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and received his BA from Hampshire College and his PhD in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, DePaul University, and the University of California Santa Cruz, and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, where he teaches ethics, politics, existentialism, and other courses.  In his spare time, he performs as a professional magician and mentalist.

In “The Omnivore’s Deception” John argues for complete elimination of the meat, egg, dairy, and fishing industries. He says “However, it is no more a book about veganism than Rosemary’s Baby is a movie about becoming a first-time mom. Rather, it’s about civilizational error. It’s about what happens when we organize society, economy, and daily life around a radical evil, then engage in elaborate self-deceptions to keep the truth of that evil from ourselves.”

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

JohnSanbonmatsu.com
@SanbonmatsuJ

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

Luke is a lecturer working in the Department of Psychology at the University of Exeter. His research examines social and moral development between childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Between 2017 and 2020 he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow on the Wellcome Trust, ESRC and NSF funded “STEM Teens” project. This project examined the role of youth educators in informal science learning sites, both by longitudinally following youth educators and by quasi-experimentally examining their role in these sites.

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

@lukemcguirex
LukeMcGuire.co.uk

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

Jared is a researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Until the summer of 2023 he was a lecturer at the University of Washington School of Computer Science. While there he created a class on the philosophy of AI and created and taught an ethics course as well as teaching technical artificial intelligence courses. His satirical novel “The Strength of The Illusion” was published in the summer of 2023. Previous Sentientism guest Mark Solms called it “extraordinary”.

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

JaredMoore.org
@jaredlcm
The Strength Of The Illusion

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

Kat is an effective altruist who co-founded Nonlinear (incubating artificial intelligence extinction risk non-profits), Charity Entrepreneurship (helping people start new, effective charities), and Charity Science Health. She describes her main focus today as trying “to make transformative artificial intelligence go well instead of poorly.”

Kat is an atheist and has a naturalistic worldview. She has a sentiocentric moral scope.

KatWoods.org
Kat__Woods
Kat on FaceBook

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

Alexandra is an actress, activist and health coach. She has appeared in more than 100 feature films and television programs starring alongside actors including Tom Hanks, Pamela Anderson, Pierce Brosnan, Kevin Costner and Dan Ackroyd. She is internationally recognized for her 5-year starring role as Lt. Stephanie Holden in the tv series Baywatch. For 4 years, Alexandra hosted the extreme sports series Wild Waters on the Outdoor Life Network, in addition to hosting the WE network series Winning Women for two seasons. She also hosted 150 episodes of the environmental cable access talk show EarthTalk Today. Alexandra has her own wellness coaching business through which she personally coaches clients all over the world and speaks to groups on how to change their habits for a healthier lifestyle and a happier life. Alexandra co-hosts a weekly podcast, Switch4Good which is heard worldwide and has over 3 million downloads and YouTube views.

Alexandra was honored by the ACLU of Southern California as their “2005 Activist of the Year” for her long history of fighting for the environment, voting rights and peace issues. In 1997, the United Nations commended Alexandra for her work on human overpopulation. In 1999, she won the International Green Cross award. She walked across America for over five weeks on The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, and has been arrested over a dozen times for protesting at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. She was also arrested during a peaceful 1990 sit-in for AIDS patients to access fast tracked pharmaceutical drugs and protecting electric cars from being crushed. She has been arrested 5 times for peacefully protesting animal exploitation. She has been involved in open rescues of other farm animals. Alexandra wrote, produced and hosted Jam-packed, an educational film broadcast on PBS about the human overpopulation crisis, which has won several environmental awards. She followed that up with The Cost of Cool- Finding Happiness in a Materialistic World, which won a CineEagle award. In 1986, she (along with producer / manager Daniel Sladek) founded Young Artists United, a successful non-profit organization dedicated to helping teenagers in need. Alexandra has also personally spoken, classroom-by-classroom, to over six thousand Los Angeles teenagers on the issue of human overpopulation and continues to speak at universities and conferences on the issue. Alexandra has a TEDx talk on the benefits of a one child family which currently has 675,000 views. In 2000, Alexandra and her identical twin sister Caroline were the recipients of the Christopher Street West Rainbow Award for their ongoing support of gay and lesbian rights.

Alexandra was a certified EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) for 23 years. She competes in long distance swimming and Ironman races, including competing in the World Ironman Championship in Hawaii (2.44 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and 26.2 mile marathon) which she completed in 13:18:52. In 2012, Alexandra swam around Key West, a 12.5 mile race. In 2014, she swam the 22 km Reto Acapulco off the coast of Mexico.

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

Alexandra on Wikipedia
AlexandraPaul.com
Alexandra_actress (Instagram)
Alexandra on FaceBook
Switch4Good podcast

Delci is an animal protection lawyer, scholar, teacher and programme builder. She is an associate professor of law and Director & Founder of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School. The Institute is committed to training animal advocacy leaders (e.g. masters degrees and programmes, Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic) and serving as a resource hub.

Delci previously taught at Lewis & Clark Law School, where she directed the world’s first law school clinic dedicated to farmed animal advocacy. She served as Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at the PETA Foundation, was the first Academic Fellow of the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, and was a visiting scholar at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Her primary interests are in animal law and administrative law. She has also taught animal law at Tulane University School of Law and Loyola University New Orleans College of Law.

Delci’s work has appeared in the Denver Law Review, Florida State Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, NYU Law Review, and the Animal Law Review. She has also published extensively in the popular press, including The Hill, National Geographic, Newsweek, New York Daily News, Salon, U.S.A. Today, and numerous other outlets.

Delci is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope “overlaid with a respect for systems and interconnectedness”. She is an atheist and has a naturalistic worldview.

Find our Sentientist Conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast. Full show notes and all the links are here too.

@DelciannaW
@ProfWinders (Instagram)
Delci on LinkedIn
Delci at VLGS

Milan was a novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was regranted citizenship in 2019. Milan’s best-known work is “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. Before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the country’s ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia banned his books. He led a low-profile life and rarely spoke to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Milan was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia, Borut Pahor.

Milan was an atheist and seemed to have a naturalistic worldview, having said “I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us.” He seemed to have a sentiocentric moral scope, saying “Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test… consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect humankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.” He also said “What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse.”

Milan on Wikipedia
Milan’s entry at the Freedom from Religion Foundation

Varda Mehrotra is an animal advocate and movement builder, exploring intersectional solutions. Most recently, she founded Samayu to undertake intersectional work and apply a systems approach for issues surrounding justice and animals in food systems. Under her decade-long leadership, FIAPO – India’s federation for animal organisations – was recognized as one of the most effective animal charities. She has spearheaded several large-scale undercover investigations, campaigns for farmed animals, companion animals and wild animals and was the architect of India’s largest plant-based advocacy network which has created many animal advocate leaders in the country. Prior to that, she spent several years organising within the grassroots animal advocacy movement in Scotland.

Varda has a broadly naturalistic worldview, describing herself as a “nothingist” when it comes to deities. She is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope.

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

@MehrotraVarda

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

Dr Yamini Narayanan is Senior Lecturer in International and Community Development at Deakin University. Her work makes substantive contributions to the rapidly emergent field of South Asian Animal Studies through a twin focus on animals in political and urban life in India. It addresses species as an explicit identity category in Indian national politics through the intersections of anthropocentrism, sectarianism, and casteism. Her book Mother Cow, Mother India offers one of the first empirical critiques of India’s cow protectionism discourse and politics from a critical animal studies standpoint. Yamini’s work on urban animals is the first to theorise species as part of populations in urban informal spaces. Her work is published in leading journals including Environment and Planning A, D and E; Urban Geography; Geoforum; Hypatia; and South Asia.

Yamini is the founding Convenor of the Deakin Critical Animal Studies Network and is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. In 2019, Yamini was awarded Deakin University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Mid-Career Research Excellence. Yamini serves as Special Issues Editor of Urban Geography; Associate Editor of Environmental Humanities; and South Asia Editor for Asian Studies Review. Yamini publishes widely in media on issues related to animal rights, including the Animal Liberation Currents, The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy, Huffington Post and Animal People Forum. She has been interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, BBC Brazil, and for documentaries on cow protection politics and animal advocacy in India.

Yamini is Hindu and applies a broadly naturalistic worldview in practice. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@YaminiNarayanan
Yamini at Deakin

Nicolas is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Environmental Studies at the New College of Florida. In Fall 2023, he will join the College of Charleston as Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Nicolas is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope (see his work and our conversation below about moral consideration for non-sentient “agents”). He has a naturalistic worldview.

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

NicolasDelon.com
Nicolas’ Substack Blog “Running Ideas”
@NicoDelon

Anita is Executive Director of the Plant Based Treaty initiative & the Animal Save Movement, a worldwide network of Save groups bearing witness to farmed animals & promoting veganism & love-based, grassroots activism. She describes herself as an animal rights and an environmental activist. She is the co-author of the book “The Secret Lives of Pigs“.

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

Find our Sentientist Conversation (along with Nicola Harris) here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

@animalrightsyay
Plant Based Treaty

Nicola is Director of Communications for the Plant Based Treaty initiative and works on the Animal Save Movement‘s communications team. She has over 20 years of experience in pressure campaigning in the UK.

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

Find our Sentientist Conversation (along with Anita Krajnc) here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast.

@Nicola_ASM
Plant Based Treaty

Elan is a cultural anthropologist focusing on human-animal interactions, environmental justice, and food politics. He is assistant professor of the practice in environmental studies and coordinator of the animal studies minor at Wesleyan University. He is the author of the Gregory Bateson Prize winning book: “Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care“. He also contributed a chapter called “The Empty Promises of Cultured Meat” to the book “The Good it Promises, the Harm It Does: Critical Essays on Effective Altruism“.

Elan is vegan and has (at least) a sentiocentric moral scope. He is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview.

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

@ElanAbrell
Elan on LinkedIn
Elan’s interview on Our Hen House

Brian is a theoretical physicist, mathematician and string theorist. He is a professor at Columbia University and has been chairman of the World Science Festival since co-founding it in 2008. Brian has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality, and related PBS television specials. He also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode “The Herb Garden Germination”, as well as the films Frequency and The Last Mimzy. He is currently a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Brian is an atheist and has a naturalistic worldivew. He is vegan, implying he has a sentiocentric moral scope.

@bgreene
briangreene.org
Brian on Wikipedia
Brian at Columbia

Kate is a singer-songwriter and actress. Her 2007 single “Foundations” became a hit and brought her to public attention in the UK. Her debut album, Made of Bricks, peaked at No. 1 in the UK and was an international success. Kate subsequently won the award for Best British Female Artist at the 2008 Brit Awards. Her second studio album, My Best Friend Is You, was released in 2010 and reached the top 10 in the UK and Germany. After her departure from a major label, Nash self-released the albums Girl Talk and the Kickstarter supported Yesterday Was Forever.

Aside from music, Nash has appeared in films such as the drama Greetings from Tim Buckley, the comedy Powder Room, and the comedy-drama Syrup. She played Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson in the Netflix comedy-drama series GLOW. She also stars in the 2023 comedy film Coffee Wars about a vegan coffee shop owner fighting to save her business by competing in the World Barista Championship. Kate was awarded the Rising Star Award at the Maui Film Festival for this role. Kate is a vocal campaigner for feminism, LGBT and non-human animal rights.

Kate is vegan and seems to have a sentiocentric moral scope. She seems to have a broadly naturalistic worldview.

Kate on Wikipedia
Kate’s Interview on Our Hen House
KateNash.com
@katenash
Kate on Instagram

Max is a physicist, cosmologist and machine learning researcher. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute. He is also a scientific director at the Foundational Questions Institute and a supporter of the effective altruism movement. He is the author of Our Mathematical Universe and Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Max is vegan, implying he has a sentiocentric moral scope. He has a naturalistic worldview.

Max on Wikipedia
Max at MIT
@tegmark

Peter holds a Canada Research Chair in Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, at Ontario Tech University. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Business and Information Technology, where he leads the Trustworthy AI Lab. He co-edited the foundational book, Self-Aware Computing Systems, published by Springer, and is Associate Editor of IEEE Technology & Society Magazine. He has published over 75 papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, and led teams that have worked with dozens of companies in the areas of artificial intelligence, data science, and software development.

Peter has a naturalistic worldview. He is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope. His article “Of Fish and Robots” links his sentiocentrism with his work on artificial intelligence.

Petelewis.com
Peter at the Trustworthy AI Lab
@petelewis

Dhruv is a PhD student at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. He has interests in psychology, philosophy and animal advocacy.

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

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

Dhruv on the EA Forum
Dhruv’s article “Abolitionist in The Streets, Pragmatist in The Sheets”
Dhruv on LinkedIn
Dhruv at the University of Cambridge
Dhruv on Medium

Otep is a writer, singer, voice-over artist and activist best known as the lead vocalist and founder of the metal band Otep.

She is an animal rights advocate and vegan, implying a sentiocentric moral scope. Otep seems to be non-religious so may have a naturalistic worldview.

Otep on Wikipedia
@otepofficial
Otep on Tumblr
Otep on YouTube
Otep on Instagram

Douglas is a scholar of cognitive science, physics and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is Director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University Bloomington. His 1979 book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” won both the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and a National Book Award for Science. His 2007 book “I Am a Strange Loop” won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

Douglas describes himself as a “non-religious person” and a “materialist” who is strongly critical of pseudoscience and claims of the paranormal – so has a naturalistic worldview.

He seems to have at least a theoretical sentiocentric moral scope, having gone vegan as a teenager due to his views on the distribution of consciousness across the animal kingdom and due to his compassionate ethics. In “I Am a Strange Loop” he describes himself as vegetarian.

Douglas on Wikipedia
Douglas at Indiana University

Find our conversation here on the Sentientism YouTube and here on the Sentientism podcast. Full show notes are here.

Tania is the Arthur W. Marks Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She oversees the Concepts and Cognition Laboratory, which uses the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy to study the human mind. Their research focuses on topics including explanation, learning, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology.  Tania is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She blogs about psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science at Psychology Today and for NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture.

Tania has a naturalistic worldview. She has said “These new strands of research can’t promise a scientifically grounded account of human origins that rivals creationism in its psychological appeal, but they can help to explain how some people find beauty and fulfillment in a naturalistic worldview. There is something deeply satisfying in broadening the scope of what we understand. And that is part of the seductive grandeur of science.” She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

Tania on Wikipedia
Tania at Princeton
The Concepts and Cognition Lab
@TaniaLombrozo

Andrew is Professor of Animal Welfare and Ethics and Founding Director of the University of Winchester Centre for Animal Welfare, Adjunct Professor in the School of Environment and Science at Griffith University, Queensland, EBVS European and RCVS Veterinary Specialist in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law, American and New Zealand Veterinary Specialist in Animal Welfare, Fellow of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, and Principal Fellow of Advance HE.

@DrAndrewKnight
Andrew on LinkedIn
Andrew on FaceBook
AndrewKnight.info
SustainablePetFood.info

Katherine is chief of Science Advancement and Outreach (SAO) at PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). SAO aims to change the paradigm of biomedical research by promoting the development and implementation of cutting-edge strategies in biomedical research and training and eliminating the use of animals in experimentation. Katherine earned her bachelor’s degrees in biology and psychology from Syracuse University and her Ph.D. in experimental psychology and cognitive science from the University of California–San Diego. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, she went on to become a research fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she stayed for eight years. Over the course of her research career, she studied the neural correlates of linguistic, spatial, and memory processes, working with children with early focal brain injury, adults and children with schizophrenia, and individuals with Williams syndrome and related genetic disorders. Katherine has more than 20 years of experience conducting brain and neuroimaging research with humans and is an expert at experimental design and data analysis. She has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and has presented her findings at national and international industry conferences.

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

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

Katherine at SAO
PETA’s Research Modernisation Deal
@BooLacey

Crystal is a veterinary practitioner, a journalist and an activist. She is the co-founder of Our Honor, a charity aiming to create an organized network of veterinary professionals who are able to challenge unethical institutionalised systems and amplify the voices of those who have been marginalised.

Crystal is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope. She has a scientific and naturalistic worldview although is open to the idea that “consciousness may be a supernatural thing”.

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

@drcrystalheath
Crystal on Instagram
Crystal on TikTok
CompassionateBay
VAVSD

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

Eva is the operations lead for the non-profit Pax Fauna. Pax Fauna exists to design a more effective social movement for animal freedom in the U.S., using original research as well as careful study of social movement literature and the recent history of the animal movement in order to reverse the cultural norm of eating animals. Eva has been organizing in the animal freedom movement since 2015 when she started working with DxE in Chicago, where she focused on building community, writing protest music, and compiling the movements’ songs into an online songbook used by advocates around the world. She started working full time as DxE’s legal coordinator in 2018, managing the organization’s many legal cases, organizing trainings, and orchestrating large artistic demonstrations. Eva has a deep curiosity about culture in all its forms, and how social movements engage with culture both internally and externally. Through songwriting, she has explored how music and art can shape the messaging and attitudes of the animal movement. Building on a background in Kingian nonviolence, she is a dedicated student of Nonviolent Communication, and she is committed to bringing NVC’s repertoire of creative problem-solving tools to the work of building a better culture in the animal movement. Working for years as a music therapist in hospice taught Eva how to apply metrics to aspects of life that are difficult to measure- and how to judge when metrics aren’t working to tell the whole story.

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

@evahamer
Eva on Mastodon
Eva on Instagram
Eva at Pax Fauna

Lori is Executive Director of The Kimmela Center and Founder & President of The Whale Sanctuary Project. She is a neuroscientist and expert in animal behavior and intelligence, formerly on the faculty of Emory University where she was also a faculty member at the Emory Center for Ethics. She is internationally known for her work on the evolution of the brain and intelligence in dolphins and whales and marine mammal welfare in captivity, as well as cognition in farmed animals through The Someone Project. In 2001 Lori co-authored a ground-breaking study with Diana Reiss offering the first conclusive evidence for mirror self-recognition in bottlenose dolphins, after which she decided against conducting further research with animals held captive in zoos and aquariums.

Lori has published over 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers, book chapters, and magazine articles on marine mammal biology and cognition, comparative brain anatomy, self-awareness in nonhuman animals, human-nonhuman animal relationships, and the evolution of intelligence. Lori has appeared in several films and television programs, including the 2013 documentary Blackfish about killer whale captivity; Unlocking the Cage, the 2016 documentary on the Nonhuman Rights Project; Long Gone Wild, the 2019 documentary; and in the upcoming documentary about Corky, the orca held captive by SeaWorld since 1969.

Lori is an atheist & has a naturalistic worldview, saying “I don’t see any reason to propose that there’s anything supernatural out there”. She is vegan & has a sentiocentric moral scope.

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

Lori on Wikipedia
Lori on FaceBook
@MarinoLori
The Kimmela Center
The Whale Sanctuary Project

Kathy is Assistant Dean, Animal Legal Education at George Washington University Law School and Director of the Animal Legal Education Initiative. Kathy has been a clinical law professor for 30 years and has been teaching animal law for 22 years. She is the first law professor hired to teach animal law full-time. Kathy helped develop the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School (L&C). For fourteen years she taught there and directed the Animal Law Clinic. She also created and directed the Aquatic Animal Law Initiative and is the co-founder of World Aquatic Animal Day along with Amy P. Wilson. Kathy co-authored “Animal Law in a Nutshell”, “Animal Law – New Perspectives on  Teaching Traditional Law” and the amicus briefs submitted in the U.S. v. Stevens and Justice v. Gwendolyn Vercher cases. She has written numerous law review and other articles and teaches and lectures widely across the U.S. and internationally.

Kathy was a board member with the Animal Legal Defense Fund; helped found the Animal Law Committee of the Cuyahoga County Bar; and was the chair and a founder of the Animal Law Section and the Balance in Legal Education Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). She was also a co-chair of the Clinical Legal Education Section of the AALS, is on the board of the Center for Teaching Peace and is a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

Kathy is vegan and has (at least) a sentiocentric moral scope. Kathy is non-religious and has a naturalistic worldview.

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

Kathy at GWU
Kathy’s papers at SSRN

Ann is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary producer and director specializing in the communication of science. She co-wrote the 1980 PBS documentary series Cosmos, hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981. She is the creator, producer, and writer of the 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and its sequel series, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, as well as the book of the same name. She directed episodes of both series. In the late 1970s Ann became the Creative Director of NASA’s Voyager Interstellar Message Project which produced the golden discs affixed to both the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft. She also published a novel, A Famous Broken Heart and later co-wrote several best selling non-fiction books with Sagan.

Ann seems to have a sentiocentric moral scope, at least in concept. It’s not clear whether she is vegetarian, vegan or neither. Ann has a non-religious, scientific, naturalistic worldview.

In the book “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, co-authored with Carl Sagan, they wrote: “Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.”

Here, she writes: “It is precisely in the absence of reciprocity, as in our mercy towards the helpless [including non-human animals], that we may be most sure that any given moral act is unalloyed by self-interest.”

Ann on Wikipedia