Dr. Paulina Siemieniec
Biography
Dr. Paulina Siemieniec is a philosopher working at the intersection of law, politics, and ethics, with a focus on animals. Her areas of specialization are animal ethics, philosophy of law, feminist philosophy, and philosophy of disability. She is writing her first book, under contract with Hart, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, and her work appears in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Animal Ethics, and Between the Species.
Dr. Siemieniec holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Queen's University, where she was supervised by Prof. Will Kymlicka. She is a Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and the recipient of a 2026 research grant from the Culture and Animals Foundation. She has held a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law and is a two-time recipient of the R. Samuel McLaughlin Fellowship from Queen's University. She has presented her research internationally, including at the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Princeton University, and New York University.
She currently teaches Sociology of Law at Laurentian University and is the Founder and Director of Ivy Animal Representation Consultancy Inc.
Law
Dr. Siemieniec's engagement with animal law dates to her master's research on the legal subjectivity debate concerning animals, which led to her article "Centering Animality in Law and Liberation: The Zoopolitics of Reclaiming the Animal in Personhood" in Between the Species. In 2023, as a Visiting Researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, where she was supervised by Sean Butler (St. Edmund's College) and Raffael Fasel (Jesus College), she developed the first normative legal theory of sexual and reproductive rights to health for domesticated animals, published in the Journal of Animal Ethics. With Visa Kurki, she co-authored "Towards an Agency Turn in Animal Law" in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
Political Philosophy
Dr. Siemieniec's doctoral dissertation, A Political Theory of Accessibility and Care for Animals, 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.
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-Prior 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.
Teaching & Public Engagement
Dr. Siemieniec teaches Sociology of Law at Laurentian University. In 2025, she taught The Philosophy of Animal Rights Law as instructor of record for ICARE (International Centre for Animal Rights and Ethics) and moderated the Centre's Litigating and Legislating for Animal Rights seminar series. In 2023, she developed the course "Bridging Animal Rights Philosophy and Law" as part of the Cambridge Animal Rights Law Lecturers' Workshop, certified by the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law. In 2026, she facilitated the AIxAnimals Fellowship at Sentient Futures.
She was invited to deliver the keynote address at the 2026 Disabled Vegan Expo. Her work has been featured by CBC, by the Swedish magazine OTTAR in a special issue on the sexual and reproductive rights of animals, and on podcasts including The Animal Turn Podcast.
Service & Affiliations
Dr. Siemieniec is an APPLE (Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics) Fellow at Queen's University, where she coordinated the APPLE reading group (2018–2025) and the APPLE Work-in-Progress Research Reading Group (2020–2025), and served as editor of the monthly APPLE newsletter (2021–2025). She also served as advisor for the Human-Animal Relations student club at Queen's (2022–2023), coordinated the Disability and Accessibility Advocacy Network for Students (2021–2022), and organized an educational workshop on de-stigmatizing disability and accessibility.
She serves on the Advisory Council of the National Animal Foster Network and has reviewed for the Journal of Animal Rights Law and a UNESCO special issue. She is a member of the Canadian Philosophical Association.
Selected Publications
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
Siemieniec, Paulina. "Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights for Domesticated Animals: Beyond Population Control, Towards Affirming Bodily Integrity and Self-Determination." Journal of Animal Ethics, vol. 15, no. 1, 2025, pp. 67–92. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/954679
Siemieniec, Paulina. "Cripping Animal Politics: Justice as Access." Zoopolitical Remains, edited by Serrin Rutledge-Prior and André Krebber, University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.
Siemieniec, Paulina. "Centering Animality in Law and Liberation: The Zoopolitics of Reclaiming the Animal in Personhood." Between the Species, vol. 26, no. 1, 2023, article 5. https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol26/iss1/5
