15 January 2026, 4pm - 5:30pm

Institute of Philosophy, Jilská 1, Seminar Room 124a, Prague 1

Public lecture, free entry.
Informal drinks after the talk (self-paid), location TBD.

Abstract:

The so-called ‘political turn’ in animal ethics has seen various attempts made to justify the representation of nonhuman animals in political decision-making, and several proposals have been sketched and defended regarding how such representation might take place. In all cases, authors have been eager to devise strategies to mitigate the significant challenges of such representation, such as the problem of identifying the proper interests of animals and finding robust means of holding those representatives to account. But the political representation of animals is not just an aspiration for transformed policy-making institutions, it is also something that goes on in the actions of many activist groups who claim to speak and act for vulnerable animals. In these cases, the challenges of representation appear to be even more acute, and yet there is no literature that has yet attempted to identify them and explore how they might be met. This talk thus offers an initial attempt at this task, and sketches a series of proposals that aim to make the informal representation of animals more robust.

Alasdair Cochrane received a First Class BA in Politics from the University of Sheffield in 2000. He then went on to complete an MSc in Political Theory, a PGCHE and his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He was then Fellow in Human Rights and then Lecturer in Human Rights at the LSE. Alasdair rejoined the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield as Lecturer in Political Theory in January 2012. Alasdair Cochrane's main research interests include: contemporary political theory, rights theory, human rights, environmental ethics, animal ethics and bioethics.