Zane McNeill on Building Multispecies Resistance Against Exploitation

Freedom of Species

On this show we welcome back Zane McNeill to discuss their new edited collection: Building Multispecies Resistance Against Exploitation: Stories from the Frontline of Labor and Animal Rights (published by Peter Lang, 2024). This incredible collection of contributions from activists and scholars about the structures of violence and oppression that are shared by human and non-human labourers working and dying in necropolitical facilities. The book also asks readers to consider the intersection between class and species, race, gender and other categories of oppression, and the ways that the contemporary Animal Activist Non-profit Sector (AANS) upholds hierarchies in its mission towards animal liberation. There are some powerful examples of successful social and political campaigns that we can draw from and that can help us to build strategic alliances and coalitions between social movements and political subjects. Zane McNeill is a scholar-activist, 15-year vegan, and National Lawyers Guild’s Animal Liberation Committee chair. They have worked closely with the Institute of Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) and have published chapters in ICAS collections, including Vegans on Speciesism and Ableism: Ecoability Voices for Disability and Animal Justice and Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays on Solidarity and Total Liberation. He has also edited Queer and Trans Voices: Achieving Liberation Through Consistent Anti-Oppression, Vegan Entanglements: Dismantling Racial and Carceral Capitalism, and Building Multispecies Resistance Against Exploitation: Stories from the Frontlines of Labor and Animal Rights. The music we played on the show: Álmatlanság by Magashegyi Underground L by Laveda I exist, I exist, I exist by Flatsound