Dr. Paulina Siemieniec
Biography
Dr. Paulina Siemieniec completed her Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department at Queen's University, under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. She specializes in animal law, politics, and ethics, as well as feminist philosophy and disability theory. She has presented her work at over 20 conferences worldwide and has been awarded the R. Samuel McLaughlin Fellowship twice from Queen's University, in addition to three other fellowships.
POLITICS
Her doctoral dissertation, A Political Theory of Care and Accessibility, explores the normative questions of whose responsibility it is to enable the political agency of animals. She proposes a care turn in animal politics and crips the political agency debate by arguing that political agency is an accessibility issue for animals.
LAW
Dr. Siemieniec has been working on animal law topics since her master's degree, which was on the legal subjectivity debate about animals. Her article, "Centering Animality in Law and Liberation: The Zoopolitics of Reclaiming the Animal in Personhood" is published in Between The Species.
Dr. Siemieniec has been awarded the 2023 Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law. She was supervised by Sean Butler (St. Edmund's College) and Raffael Fasel (Jesus College). During her research stay, she wrote an article that develops the first (normative legal) theory of sexual and reproductive rights to health for domesticated animals. The Journal of Animal Ethics has accepted this article and it will be published as a discussion piece this spring.
More recently, an article that she co-authored with Visa Kurki on introducing an agency turn in animal law has been accepted by the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
ETHICS
Dr. Siemieniec continues to work on normative questions surrounding animal agency and human responsibility from a care and disability perspective. She has a forthcoming chapter, Cripping Animal Politics: Justice as Access, in Zoopolitical Remains, edited by Serrin Rutledge and André Krebber (University of Toronto Press). She is currently working on further developing her political theory of accessibility for animals in human care and her theory of sexual and reproductive rights for animals. Click here to see her interview on the topic with a Swedish magazine.
CARE WORK
Dr. Siemieniec has been volunteering as an animal caregiver at Sandy Pines Wildlife Centre for over five years. It is through her care work that she learned what it means to do politics with animals. She has also volunteered at veterinary clinics and animal shelters.
AFFILIATIONS
Dr. Siemieniec is an APPLE (Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics) fellow at Queen's University. She coordinated the APPLE reading group from 2018-2025 and started and coordinated the animal studies work-in-progress research reading group from 2020-2025. She was the editor of the monthly APPLE newsletter from 2021-2025. She was the advisor for the Human-Animal Relations student club at Queen's.
She started the Disability and Accessibility Advocacy Network for Students at Queen's University. She organized an educational workshop on De-stigmatizing Disability and Accessibility.
Presently, Dr. Siemieniec is working with ICARE (the International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics). She will be the interviewer for the Centre's Litigating and Legislating for Animal Rights Seminar Series. She will also be teaching two courses that she designed at the Cambridge Animal Rights Law Centre’s Law Lecturers’ Workshop: one on animal ethics and one on the philosophy of animal rights law.
