Founding Member
Claudia Hirtenfelder
Animal Geographer and Podcaster
Claudia Towne Hirtenfelder is an animal studies scholar and podcaster. She has a PhD in geography from Queen’s University Canada and is interested in the urban animal histories and futures. Claudia is also the founder and host of The Animal Turn and Animal Highlight podcasts. She is currently an external lecturer in Change Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
Projects
The Animal Turn
Claudia has been the producer and host of the award-winning podcast The Animal Turn since 2020 and in 2024 she launched its sister podcast The Animal Highlight. In this work Claudia seeks to understand the core tenets of animal studies and the ways in which different fields are grappling with the animal turn in their thinking and practice.
Sponsor: Animals in Philosophy Politics Law and Ethics
Website: https://www.theanimalturnpodcast.com/
Urban Animals as Problems and Solutions
This project considers the ways in which urban animals are configured as problems and solutions in urban governance frameworks. It aims to think through the political and material implications of animals being discursively constituted in these ways and materially managed as such. The project is concerned with how these constitutions change over time and the implications it has for how animals are positioned within urban imaginaries and can experience being urban subjects.
Internatioal Milk Economies
This project is concerned with the multispecies dynamics of transnational milk economies and the interactions of financial mechanisms such as foreign direct investment and public-private partnerships with their development. It is focused on how milk economies impact different human and animal populations as well as its interconnections with other unjust systems, such as carceral systems.
Select Publications
Hirtenfelder, C.T., Deininger, K., Nouioua, R., and Salzani, C. (2026). Tierzentrierte urbane Infrastrukturen der Hoffnung: Das Beispiel der Wiener Fledermäuse. TIERethik, 18(32): 72–111. https://doi.org/10.58848/tierethik.2026.1.72
Hirtenfelder, C.T., 2024. Finding Traces of Cows in the Archives and Telling Stories Differently. Archivaria, 98(1): 6-41.
Hirtenfelder, C.T., 2024. An Analytical Framework to Understand the Problematization of Urban (Historical) Animals. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(5): 2182-2203.
Hill-Tout, K., Hirtenfelder, C.T, McMaster, K., and Herod, M., 2022. Who eats where, what, and how? COVID-19, Food Security, and Canadian Foodscapes. Gastronomica 2(1):11-19.
Hirtenfelder, C.T., and Prouse, C., 2021. Multispecies imbrications in the global infant formula industry: An Entangled Geography of Relations. EPE: Nature and Space, 5(3):1296-1318.
