Dr. Paulina Siemieniec
Biography
Dr. Paulina Siemieniec holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy at Queen's University, where she was supervised by Will Kymlicka. Her research sits at the intersection of law, politics, and ethics, with particular emphases in feminist philosophy and disability theory. She has presented her scholarship at more than 20 conferences internationally and is a two-time recipient of the R. Samuel McLaughlin Fellowship from Queen's University, along with three additional fellowships.
Dr. Siemieniec is the Founder and Director of Ivy Animal Representation Consultancy Inc., a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, and the recipient of a 2026 research grant from the Culture and Animals Foundation.
Politics
Dr. Siemieniec's doctoral dissertation, A Political Theory of Care and Accessibility, examines the normative question of whose responsibility it is to enable the political agency of animals. She proposes a care-based turn in animal politics and reframes the political agency debate through a disability studies lens, arguing that political agency constitutes an accessibility issue for animals.
Law
Dr. Siemieniec's engagement with animal law dates to her master's research on the legal subjectivity debate concerning animals. Her article "Centering Animality in Law and Liberation: The Zoopolitics of Reclaiming the Animal in Personhood" is published in Between the Species.
In 2023, she was awarded a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, where she was supervised by Sean Butler (St. Edmund's College) and Raffael Fasel (Jesus College), for whom she continues to serve as a research assistant. During this fellowship, she developed the first normative legal theory of sexual and reproductive rights to health for domesticated animals.
Siemieniec, Paulina. "Sexual and Reproductive Rights for Domesticated Animals: Beyond Population Control, Toward Affirming Bodily Integrity and Self-Determination." Journal of Animal Ethics, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025, pp. 67–92. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/954679
She has also co-authored a recent article with Visa Kurki introducing an agency turn in animal law:
Kurki, Visa A. J., and Paulina Siemieniec. "Towards an Agency Turn in Animal Law." Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, Winter 2025, pp. 923–949. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqaf024
Ethics
Dr. Siemieniec continues to develop normative theories of animal agency and human responsibility through the frameworks of care ethics and disability studies. Her forthcoming chapter, "Cripping Animal Politics: Justice as Access," will appear in Zoopolitical Remains, edited by Serrin Rutledge and André Krebber (University of Toronto Press). She is currently advancing her political theory of accessibility for animals in human care and her theory of sexual and reproductive rights for animals.
Fieldwork & Care Practice
Dr. Siemieniec has volunteered as an animal caregiver at Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre for over five years as part of her ethnographic research on care as a form of politics. She has also volunteered at veterinary clinics and animal shelters, grounding her theoretical work in direct practice.
Affiliations
Dr. Siemieniec is an APPLE (Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics) Fellow at Queen's University. She coordinated the APPLE reading group (2018–2025), founded and coordinated the Animal Studies Work-in-Progress Research Reading Group (2020–2025), and served as editor of the monthly APPLE newsletter (2021–2025). She has also served as faculty advisor for the Human-Animal Relations student club at Queen's.
She founded the Disability and Accessibility Advocacy Network for Students at Queen's University and organized an educational workshop on de-stigmatizing disability and accessibility.
In 2025, Dr. Siemieniec collaborated with ICARE (International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics), serving as moderator for the Centre's Litigating and Legislating for Animal Rights seminar series and teaching a course she designed at the Cambridge Animal Rights Law Centre's Law Lecturers' Workshop on the philosophy of animal rights law.
In 2026, she is leading the AIxAnimals Fellowship at Sentient Futures.
