Maneesha Deckha (BA Joint Honours, McGill University; LLB, University of Toronto; LLM, Columbia University) is Professor and Lansdowne Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include critical animal law, feminist analysis of law, postcolonial legal studies, reproductive rights, health law and bioethics. Her work has been published in Canada and internationally in socio-legal and interdisciplinary venues including the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, the Harvard Journal of Gender and LawHypatia, the McGill Law Journal, and Sexualities. She has also contributed to multiple anthologies relating to critical animal studies, feminism, cultural pluralism, and health law and policy, and is the recipient of grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program. Professor Deckha has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law & Society at New York University. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Politics and Animals and Hypatia.
Contact: mdeckha@uvic.ca
Recent Publications:
- “Animal (Rights) Law: Fifty Years of Taking Exception to Human Exceptionalism Amidst Enduring Themes (2023) 50:3 Dalhousie Law Journal 339-377. Open access: https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/dlj/vol46/iss1/13/
- “Animalization and Dehumanization Concerns: Another Psychological Barrier to Animal Law Reform” (2023) 2:2 PHAIR: Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations 1-16, Art e10147, open access: https://doi.org/10.5964/phair.10147.
- “(Feminist) Animal rights without animal personhood? in Erika Cudworth, Ruth E McKie & Di Turgoose, eds, Feminist Animal Studies: Theories, Practices, Politics (Routledge, 2023), 19-34.
- “Human Children, Nonhuman Animals, and a Plant-Based Vegan Future” In Feminist Animal and Multispecies Studies(Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2023), 175-204. Open access: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004679375/BP000015.xml
- “Sup-Plant-ing Anthropocentric Legalities: Can the Rule of Law Tolerate Intensive Animal Agriculture?”, In International Law and Posthuman Theory, eds Mathilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (London: Routledge, 2023).
Dr. Jodey Castricano is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus. Her teaching is grounded in Eco-Criticism and Critical Animal Studies, and turns upon the question of posthumanism as being “after humanism” and anthropocentrism. Her teaching areas also include the history of ideas in the 19th century, (psychoanalysis), Gothic Studies and critical and cultural theory, including feminist, queer, and gender studies. She serves on a number of advisory boards for Critical Animal Studies journals and is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics at Oxford University, United Kingdom.
Books:
- Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (2008)
- Animal Subjects 2.0 (2016)
- Critical Perspectives on Veganism (2016)
Contact: jodey.castricano@ubc.ca
Recent Publications:
“Learning by Heart: Storytelling and Animal Loss in the Anthropocene” in Lost Kingdom: Animal Death in the Anthropocene, Wendy A. Wiseman, Burak Kesgin (Eds.) Willmington, Delaware: Vernon Press, 2024, 125-147.
Annette Dehalt (BSc, BEd, MSc) is an instructor in Camosun College’s Biology Department and Environmental Technology Program, where she incorporates topics of animal sentience, compassionate conservation and anthrozoology into her Marine Biology and Vertebrate Ecology lectures. She also facilitates Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Wisdom within the Western Science curriculum, hoping to foster a deeper respect for the natural world and non-human individuals. Annette has volunteered as a humane education coordinator/presenter for the SPCA’s school programs, and has initiated an Animal Ethics group at Camosun. She has also served as vice president and scientific advisory group chair of the Urban Wildlife Stewardship Society (UWSS), promoting co-existence and humane, non-lethal population management of urban wildlife.
Contact: Dehalt@camosun.bc.ca
Stefan Dolgert (PhD, Duke; BA, University of 
Southern California) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. He writes and teaches on themes of inclusion and exclusion in democratic theory, and is especially interested in ancient Greece, classical China, posthumanism, critical animal studies, and Afrofuturism. His current project, Alien Athena, is a biomimetic posthumanist reclamation of the canonical texts of “Western Civ” (Homer, Plato, Aristotle), using an interpretive method derived from the ichneumonid superfamily of parasitic wasps. He argues that the way forward to “xenopolis” – where humans and nonhumans dwell in common – is best achieved through hacking these texts that form our civilizational DNA, and he is excited to further this research as a part of the ASRI community for the coming year.
Contact: sdolgert@brocku.ca
Angus Taylor (Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought, York University) taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at the University of Victoria. He has published articles on animal ethics, environmental ethics, political philosophy, and science fiction. He is the author of Animals and Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate (Broadview Press: 3rd edition, 2009) and one of the editors of Ethical Issues: Perspectives for Canadians (Broadview Press: 4th edition, 2020). He is also an associate editor of Between the Species, an on-line journal of animal ethics.
Contact: amt@uvic.ca
Lisa Warden is a writer and independent scholar with a PhD in political philosophy and French literature from the University of Calgary. She worked in the field of dog population management in India, and in animal protection in India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Her research on challenges in dog population management in India has been published in critical animal studies anthologies. Her current area of study focuses on parallels effects of neoliberal urban planning schemes on street dogs and the urban poor in India.
Contact: lisa.warden@gmail.com