Find our Sentientism conversation (with Michelle St. John) on the Sentientism YouTube here and the Sentientism Podcast here.

Heather is a Senior Lecturer and Religious Education PGCE Course Leader at Edge Hill University. She is a specialist in religious education pedagogy but also has interests spanning diversity in learning environments, the impact of digital technologies on teaching, teacher identity formation, education policy, and effective assessment strategies. Heather is committed to inspiring the next generation of teachers through innovative and inclusive teaching practices. As a passionate researcher and advocate for the inclusion of veganism within educational curricula, her work explores the ethical, environmental, and health dimensions of plant-based living. Heather is proud to be a VinE (Veganism in Education) Ambassador.

Heather has a naturalistic worldview. She is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope.

Heather at Edge Hill University

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Tom Cledwyn describes himself as the “chief emailer” at Drop Dead Generous (he’s actually the co-founder). Inspired by Chris Anderson’s (of TED) book, “Infectious Generosity“, Tom and his co-founder John Sweeney set up DDG as an experiment in sparking creative, fun, hopefully infectious generosity. They’re giving away half a million dollars in $500 chunks to people who want to do something kind for someone else (whether human or not).

Tom has a broadly naturalistic worldview. He is vegetarian and is working on putting his sentiocentric moral scope more fully into practice.

Drop Dead Generous project

@Dropdeadgenerous

Tom on LinkedIn

The DropDeadGenerous ideas voicemail podcast

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Jack Waverley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Manchester. He uses marketing and consumer research to protect and promote the interests of all animals, including humans. Jack teaches on a range of BSc and MSc courses in the Fashion, Business, and Technology (FBT) group. He also supervises a number of PhD and dissertation students. He is an academic expert member of the Academy of Marketing and a member of the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee.

Jack is vegan and has a sentiocentric moral scope. He has a naturalistic epistemology and worldview.

Jack at Manchester University
Jack on LinkedIn

Nathan on Twitter

Mary Midgley was a philosopher who worked at Newcastle University in the UK. She was best known for her work on moral philosophy, epistemology and science and animal ethics.

She seemed to have a broadly naturalistic worldview, saying of Christianity “I couldn’t make it work. I would try to pray and it didn’t seem to get me anywhere so I stopped after a while.” At the same time she also said: “But I think it’s a perfectly sensible world view.” She was a strong critic of narrowly scientistic, reductionist forms of science and was an advocate for James Lovelocks’ Gaia Hypothesis as a holistic, moral way of thinking.

She wrote extensively on animal ethics, including in her books “Beast and Man” and “Animals and Why They Matter”. In the latter, she wrote: “The symbolism of meat-eating is never neutral. To himself, the meat-eater seems to be eating life. To the vegetarian, he seems to be eating death.” Her approach combined aspects of virtue and care or relational ethics, insisting that we should show compassion to other animals (both human and non) because of who they are and because of our relationships with them. She criticised “Those who defend the treatment of animals as mere objects, antiseptically detatched from sympathy, in laboratories and battery farms…”

Mary on Wikipedia

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Steven Rouk is founder of the non-profit Connect For Animals, a platform that connects people who want to end factory farming and bring about a more anti-speciesist world. He also helps high-positive-impact organisations implement technology and artificial intelligence solutions.

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

Connect For Animals
Steven on Insta
Steven on LinkedIn
Steven on Twitter
StevenRouk.com

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Seb Alex is an animal and human rights activist, as well as a lecturer, photojournalist and author. He is Founder of the Middle East Vegan Society. Seb has run animal rights advocacy workshops for over 1300+ activists across Europe, the Middle East and Australia. He has given lectures in over 2/3 of universities in The Netherlands and more than 55 universities and schools in Canada, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Portugal, reaching more than 6000 students. In 2020 and 2021, Seb collaborated with Lebanese Vegans in opening the world’s first animal rights and Vegan support centre that still operates today in the heart of Beirut, Lebanon.

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

@seb.alex
SebAlex.org
Vegan Islam
Middle East Vegan Society

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Mark Rowlands is a writer and philosopher. He is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami and the author of several books on the philosophy of mind, the moral status of non-human animals, and cultural criticism. He is known within academic philosophy for his work on the animal mind and is one of the principal architects of the view known as vehicle externalism, or the extended mind, the view that thoughts, memories, desires and beliefs can be stored outside the brain and the skull. His books include Animal Rights, The Body in Mind, The Nature of Consciousness, Animals Like Us, The Happiness of Dogs and a personal memoir, The Philosopher and the Wolf. His latest book is The Word of Dog.

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

Mark at the University of Miami
Mark on PhilPapers
Mark on Wikipedia

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Ronen Bar is a social entrepreneur and the co-founder and former CEO of Sentient, a meta non-profit for animals focused on community building and developing tools to support animal rights advocates. He is currently focused on advancing a new community-building initiative, The Moral Alignment Center, to ensure AI development benefits all sentient beings, including animals, humans, and future digital minds. For over a decade, his work has been at the intersection of technological innovation and animal advocacy, particularly in the alternative protein and investigative reporting sectors.

His background includes roles as an investigative journalist on television and a venture partner at Lever VC. He has also founded and relaunched several non-profits. Ronen has been practicing Vipassana meditation for several years.

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

Ronen’s EA forum posts
Ronen on LinkedIn
Moral Alignment Center LinkedIn
Email: ronenbar07@gmail.com

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Anders is a peace entrepreneur, philosopher, academic, and technologist. He is founding director of the Peace and Conflict Science Institute (PACS), an academic think-tank and advocacy organisation with special consultative status at the United Nations that aims to put peace and rights mechanisms on more rigorous, evidence-based foundations. Anders is also an AI Consultant at the University of Oxford.

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

Andersreagan.com
PACSInstitute.org
Anders’ LinkTree
Anders on LinkedIn

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Mike Berners-Lee is a professor and fellow of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University and director and principal consultant of Small World Consulting. His books include How Bad are Bananas?, The Burning Question and There Is No Planet B and he is a contributing author to The Climate Book created by Greta Thunberg. His latest book is A Climate of Truth.

Mike has a naturalistic worldview and seems to have at least a sentiocentric moral scope.

“A Climate of Truth”
Mike on Wikipedia
@MikeBernersLee
Small World Consulting

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Altamush is an animal and environmental law professor. He teaches Pakistan’s 1st Animal Law Advocacy Course and is Founding Managing Partner At Environmental and Animal Rights Consultants, Pakistan’s 1st dedicated Animal and Environmental law and policy firm. Altamush is known for his non-profit work on Interspecies Justice for which he has won multiple awards. He also co-founded the Charity Doings Foundation, a non-profit that aims to save all life, be it human, animal, or the environment in Pakistan. Amongst many other advisory roles he serves as a strategic academic advisor and advocate for Muslim Veganism and Environmentalism at Green Islam.

Altamush is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope. He applies a broadly naturalistic epistemology in his work while having faith-based Islamic beliefs.

@AltamushSaeed
Altamush on LinkedIn
Altamush on Instagram
@earcpakistan
Charitydoings.org

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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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Noella is a Brooklyn-based freelance culture writer whose writing has appeared in Marie Claire, Teen Vogue, the Washington Post, Vox and elsewhere. Noella’s reporting ranges from Black culture to queer identity to intersectional veganism, internet culture, and more. She describes herself as a “journalist, vegan foodie, pokemon trainer, dj, and abolitionist.” One of her most recent pieces, for Vox, was “I’m a Black vegan. Why don’t you see more of us?”

Noella is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope. She was brought up as a Baptist Christian but is not religious any more, describing herself as agnostic. Although she applies a naturalistic epistemology in most situations she does leave space for non-evidence based supernatural beliefs.

NoellaWilliams.com
All Noella’s links on CampSite
@yonoella
Noella on Insta
I’m a Black vegan. Why don’t you see more of us?

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Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and a writer. With Bill Wasik, editorial director of The New York Times Magazine, she wrote “Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus” which was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Their latest book together, “Our Kindred Creatures” makes a case for seeing the fight against animal cruelty as a crucial thread in America’s history. Readers are introduced to the activists, scientists, and moguls who helped create our modern views on animals, with our intense compassion for certain species and ignorant disregard for others.

Monica has a broadly naturalistic worldview and at least a theoretical sentiocentric moral scope.

@murphydvm

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

Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine. With Monica Murphy, veterinarian and writer, he wrote “Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus” which was a Los Angeles Times best seller and a finalist for the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Their latest book together, “Our Kindred Creatures” makes a case for seeing the fight against animal cruelty as a crucial thread in America’s history. Readers are introduced to the activists, scientists, and moguls who helped create our modern views on animals, with our intense compassion for certain species and ignorant disregard for others.

Bill has a broadly naturalistic worldview and at least a theoretical sentiocentric moral scope.

@billwasik
Bill on Wikipedia

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 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 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 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

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

Joel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans. After completing his B.A. in philosophy at the University of Akron, he was a United States Peace Corps Volunteer in Panama working in environmental education and sustainable development. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Tennessee. Joel was a scholar-in-residence at Wesleyan University in 2013 as the New York University Animal Studies Initiative’s Animal Ethics and Public Policy Fellow. He held visiting assistant professorships at Washington State University and Binghamton University, SUNY, before coming to Loyola. His main areas of research are applied ethics, especially environmental ethics, and the philosophy of science. One of his many academic publications is “Minding Nature: A Defense of a Sentiocentric Approach to Environmental Ethics“.

Joel has a naturalistic worldview and a sentiocentric moral scope.

Joel at Loyola
Joel on LinkedIn
Joel at PhilPeople

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 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 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

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

Louisa is a Religious Education (RE) Teacher and Head of Life Skills at a school in England. She is host of the RE podcast, an RE Subject reviewer for Oak National, a member of the NATRE (National Association for Teachers of Religious Education) executive committee and the Surrey SACRE (Standing Advisory Council on Religious Education) as well as being a public speaker and author.

Louisa has a broadly naturalistic, agnostic worldview (ex-Catholic and ex-Protestant). She has at least a sentiocentric moral scope.

@TheREPodcast
The RE Podcast
Louisa on Instagram
The RE Podcast on Facebook

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 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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Carol is a Lecturer in psychology at the University of Stirling teaching social psychology and quantitative research methods. She is interested in inequality, social identity, veganism and conspiracism. Carol co-authored “The Cheese Paradox” with Devon Docherty.

Carol has a broadly naturalistic worldview although is open to the possibility of “something beyond” the natural world, being drawn to pagan and Celtic influences. She is vegan and has, at least, a sentiocentric moral scope.

@DrCarolJasper
@veganfoodtrainer

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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_