Critical Animal and Media Studies

This book aims to put the speciesism debate and the treatment of non-human animals on the agenda of critical media studies and to put media studies on the agenda of animal ethics researchers. Contributors examine the convergence of media and animal ethics from theoretical, philosophical, discursive, social constructionist, and political economic perspectives. The book is divided into three sections: foundations, representation, and responsibility, outlining the different disciplinary approaches? application to media studies and covering how non-human animals, and the relationship between humans and non-humans, are represented by the mass media, concluding with suggestions for how the media, as a major producer of cultural norms and values related to non-human animals and how we treat them, might improve such representations.

"This edited international collection makes an original contribution to the fields of critical animal studies and critical media studies. The converging of these two critical fields provides a particularly interesting interdisciplinary approach to the ethical consideration of our treatment of nonhuman animals through the lens of media studies and the political economy of communication."

- Kay Peggs, University of Portsmouth, UK

"This volume is a positive step in bringing attention to media culpability in violence, and responsibility to advocate on behalf of those who can neither speak nor control their images or portrayals, who lack lawyers to sue for slander or libel, much less for being cruelly mistreated then butchered. (...) This important and searing collection of essays provides a rationale for reflecting on animals by anyone whose work or community engagement involves media."

- Ellen W. Gorsevski, Bowling Green State University, USA for Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly