Professor Robert Garner

Contact details

• Email: rwg2@leicester.ac.uk
• Personal website: https://robert-garner.com/

Personal details

• BA (Salford), MA, PhD (Manchester), FRSA, FASS.

Completed Research Projects

The focus of my principal research interest has been the political representation of non-human interests, where non-human interests are taken to include those of non-human animals and other non-sentient parts of nature. This is an area of study that fits into the broader subject area of environmental politics.

My two most recent research projects, both funded by the Leverhulme Trust, are:

1. An examination of the relationship between theories of justice and the protection of animals. The resulting book published by Oxford University Press (A Theory of Justice for Animals: Animal Rights in a Non-ideal World) seeks to consider the value of considering the treatment of animals within the prism of justice rather than what I take to be the broader arena of ethics and morality. It is also the first work that attempts to apply both ideal and nonideal theory to animal ethics and, in particular, to develop a viable nonideal theory of justice for animals.

2. The Oxford Group and the emergence of animal rights. This research seeks to generate new insights into how intellectual and social movements emerge by providing a comprehensive account of the Oxford Group, which consisted mainly of postgraduate philosophy students, who converged on Oxford University from the late 1960s and played a prominent role in the emergence of animal rights as a prominent discourse. The subsequent book (The Oxford Group and the Emergence of Animal Rights: An Intellectual History) will be published in the Autumn of 2020 by Oxford University Press.

For a full list of my publications see the link to my personal website above.

Current Research Writing

I am currently exploring the role that creative writing can play in an exposition of ethics and politics. The focus will be on animal ethics and British electoral politics.