A.F.A.R.
Wednesday October 7th, 2020 with Carolyn
This week, we'll be listening to a re-broadcast of my interview with the vegan sociologists Kate Stewart and Matthew Cole, who discuss the ways that animals are depicted in children's stories.

This is a re-broadcast of an episode from June 2020. This is an abridged version of the longer interview. For the entire interview, please visit: https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/553/48042.html This week on Always for Animal Rights, I am pleased to present my recent interview with the vegan sociologists Matthew Cole and Kate Stewart. Kate and Matthew are the authors of the 2014 book, Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. They have also written many academic articles about human-nonhuman relations, such as "The Conceptual Separation of Food and Animals in Childhood", published in 2009 (https://www.academia.edu/320020/The_Conceptual_Separation_of_Food_and_Animals_in_Childhood). In this interview, Kate and Matthew discuss the following topics: *their conceptual map that illustrates how humans categorize nonhuman animals, not according to the animals' innate characteristics, but according to how humans want to exploit them; *how popular films and stories for children reinforce (and occasionally challenge) speciesism; *how the animal toys provided to children by fast-food companies are designed in a way that prevents children from "making the connection" between the dead animals in the fast-food bag and the living animals who the child might care about; and *how vegan children's books challenge dominant speciesist narratives in society.