Introducing the Multispecies Collective's New Members

Since the relaunch of the Multispecies Collective, we have welcomed applications to join the collective as a full member, affiliate member, or partner. We are delighted to share the profiles of our new members who have been contributing to our collective conversations over recent months.

The first objective of the Multispecies Collective is to 'generate inter/cross disciplinary knowledge that conceptualises and instigates multispecies flourishing through legal, political and societal change'. Our newest members personify this mission, bringing diverse multidisciplinary expertise across law, philosophy, design and social science. They also bring research experience within and outside academia, and practitioner experience in law, political lobbying, education, and wildlife rehabilitation.

Introducing our new members

Cebuan Bliss

Cebuan is an independent researcher and founder of the Transformative Interspecies Democracies (TIDE) project. TIDE will be a research and education centre for multispecies flourishing in Portugal. Her research interests include governance, interspecies communication, non-human representation, animals in sanctuaries, nature-based learning and storytelling.

Fatimazahra Dehbi

Fatimazahra is a PhD student at the University of Greenwich (supervised by fellow Collective member Professor Stacy Banwell) where her research examines the potential avenues under international law through which the right to a healthy environment could be invoked to address the potential human rights and environmental impacts of deep seabed mining in the Area.

Christina Easton

Christina is an Assistant Professor in the Ethics of Non-Violence at the University of Birmingham. She works in political philosophy and especially the ethics of public policy-making. Christina's current research includes projects on promoting plant-based diets in schools and on the justification and practice of education for multispecies flourishing. She has also written on liberalism and legitimate state policy. Her first monograph, Teaching Values Whilst Respecting Difference, was published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Sean Madden

Sean upgraded from affiliate to full membership and is a newly-appointed Teaching Fellow in Law at the University of Birmingham. His research focusses on the impact of globalised industrial agricultural production on food security, human rights, and climate breakdown, with particular regard to Indigenous and minority communities in the global south, and women within those communities. He adopts a critical approach to international law and global governance.

Isabel Stanley

Isabel Stanley is an ESRC-funded PhD student in the Department of Political Science and International Studies, School of Government, at the University of Birmingham. Her PhD project commenced in October 2025 and is exploring whether UK assistance dogs are performing ‘Acts of Citizenship’. The project is interdisciplinary, with supervisory support from the University of Birmingham’s School of Biosciences. Isabel also volunteers on the Canine Partners Research Working Group.

Jacqui Wilmshurst

Jacqui is a PhD researcher at the Open University. She uses multispecies autoethnography to explore and analyse her caring relationships with wild-born rescued animals in the sanctuary she runs from her home. Her research focuses on questions of ‘appropriate care’, and surfaces roles and relationships that influence quality of life for permanently captive non-domesticated animals. Her work seeks to inform care practice and policy and building on an original concept in animal care of ‘relational rehabilitation’.

Deborah Weinrauch

Deborah is a PhD student in Animal Law at the University of Birmingham, where where she is investigating why companion animal abuse cases are underprosecuted and state codes that criminalise animal abuse are underenforced in California, Connecticut and Iowa. Deborah is also the founder of the Friends of Culver City Animals, the District Leader for Humane World for Animals, lobbying for animal welfare legislation in the USA government, as well as a lawyer working on national and international cases of animal welfare.

Introducing our new affiliate members

Madelena Mañetto Quick

Madelena is an affiliate member and Lecturer in Visual Communication Design at University of Wales Trinity Saint David. Her work centres multispecies design and design justice, particularly understanding the worlds we build with farmed animals. Her recent research explores interspecies relationships within farms and farm animal sanctuaries and the stories surrounding them. Her work aims to challenge prevailing assumptions, reimagine more-than-human relationships, and envision our futures through critical design and storytelling.

Elizabeth O'Connor

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham working as a Researcher Development Officer for the University of Birmingham and as a Freelance Author. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes and ecologies. Her debut novel, WHALE FALL, was published in 2024 by Picador in the UK and Pantheon in the US.

Introducing our visiting researchers

Karolina Heck

Karolina Heck is a Ph.D. student at the University of Flensburg and Technical University Berlin Germany. Trained as a geographer (BSc at Freie Universität Berlin, MSc in Geography of Global Change at Universität Freiburg), Karolina worked as a water analyst for a environmental policy consultancy, on projects for UN-Water, GIZ, the European Commission and the FAO. Today they teach on queer climate justice, queer ecology and embodied knowledge.

Colette Schefer-Peisker

Colette Schefer-Peisker is a doctoral candidate at Prof. Dr. Norer's Chair of Public Law and Rural Law at the University of Lucerne. Her research focuses on animal welfare in slaughter. In addition to her dissertation, Colette has written several articles on animal welfare law, including on animal dignity and criminal animal welfare law. Alongside her research, Colette works as a lawyer in environmental consulting.

You can read more about all the Multispecies Collective members here.

Interested in joining the Multispecies Collective?

Our three types of membership

• Full membership - this is open to researchers actively leading at least one research project aligned with the goals and values of the Multispecies Collectice (including PhD projects).

• Affiliate membership - this is open to change-makers (activists, civil society organisation employees, lawyers, policymakers etc) or a future-oriented creative (artists, designers, writers, etc) working towards multispecies flourishing, or a researcher not falling within the category of full member.

• Partnership - this is open to change-making or creative associations working towards multispecies flourishing (such as civil society organisation, activist organisation, legal or policy groups, associations of artists, designers or writers).

We also have have opportunities for visiting researchers, PhD students and support for postdoctoral funding applications. Find out more here.

We invite you to join us at our events before applying so that we can get to know one another. See our upcoming events here.

Apply to join us

You will find all the details on you need on our website.