Books by Brianne Donaldson
Medium, 2026
Integrating education and experience in nonviolent direct action into university curriculum will ... more Integrating education and experience in nonviolent direct action into university curriculum will increase student, staff and faculty learning through application and courageous engagement with critical social-ethical issues.
Free ebook version here: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.108/
Jainism, perh... more Free ebook version here: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.108/
Jainism, perhaps more so than any other South Asian tradition, focuses strongly on the ethics of birth, life, and death, with regard to both humans and other living beings. Insistent Life is the first full-length interdisciplinary examination of the foundational principles of bioethics within Jain doctrine and the application of those principles in the contemporary sphere. Brianne Donaldson and Ana Bajželj analyze a diverse range of Jain texts and contemporary sources to identify Jain perspectives on bioethical issues while highlighting the complexity of their personal, professional, and public dimensions. The book also features extensive original data based on an international survey the authors conducted with Jain medical professionals in India and diaspora communities of North America, Europe, and Africa.
Feeling Animal Death: Being Host to Ghosts, 2019
The emotional exchange between so-called “humans” and more-than-human creatures is an overlooked ... more The emotional exchange between so-called “humans” and more-than-human creatures is an overlooked phenomenon in societies characterized by the ubiquitous deaths of animals. This text offers examples of people across diverse disciplines and perspectives—from biomedical research to black theology to art—learning and performing emotions, expanding their desires, discovering new ways to behave, and altering their sense of self, purpose, and community because of passionate, but not romanticized, attachments to animals. By articulating the emotional ties that bind them to specific animals’ lives and deaths, these authors play host to creaturely ghosts who reorient their world vision and work in the world, offering examples of affect and feeling needed to enliven multi-species ethics.
The Future of Meat Without Animals, ed. Brianne Donaldson and Christopher Carter (Rowman and Litt... more The Future of Meat Without Animals, ed. Brianne Donaldson and Christopher Carter (Rowman and Littlefield International, Summer 2016)
Plant-based and cell-cultured meat, milk, and egg producers aim to replace industrial food production with animal-free fare that tastes better, costs less, and requires a fraction of the energy inputs. These products are no longer relegated to niche markets for ethical vegetarians, but are heavily funded by private investors betting on meat without animals as mass-market, environmentally feasible alternatives that can be scaled for a growing global population.
This volume examines conceptual and cultural opportunities, entanglements, and pitfalls in moving global meat, egg, and dairy consumption toward these animal-free options. Beyond surface tensions of “meatless meat” and “animal-free flesh,” deeper conflicts proliferate around naturalized accounts of human identity and meat consumption, as well as the linkage of protein with colonial power and gender oppression. What visions and technologies can disrupt modern agriculture? What economic and marketing channels are required to scale these products? What beings and ecosystems remain implicated in a livestock-free food system?
A future of meat without animals invites adjustments on the plate, but it also inspires renewed habits of mind as well as life-affirming innovations capable of nourishing the contours of our future selves. This book illuminates material and philosophical complexities that will shape the character of our future/s of food.
To review an advanced copy, please contact Brianne Donaldson.
An understandable allergy to metaphysics characterizes animal liberation and poststructural disco... more An understandable allergy to metaphysics characterizes animal liberation and poststructural discourses, which has allowed inadequate and narrowly human-centric worldviews to dominate the field of critical animal studies. This book explores metaphysical vision that begin in the lively creaturely middle, provoking relational excesses and futures of less loss.
Environmental destruction, animal abuse, and widespread indifference toward plants and elemental ... more Environmental destruction, animal abuse, and widespread indifference toward plants and elemental systems demand that a human-centric view of the world be permanently dismantled. But once it is, what functional hierarchies take its place, if any? This volume brings Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational worldview into conversation with deeper empirical perspectives on science and religion, with activist and de/constructive philosophies, with South Asian and indigenous traditions, and with art and ethical theory to ignite new nonviolent experiments in thought and action adequate for our current buzzing planetary multiplicity.
Articles/Chapters by Brianne Donaldson
Process Studies, 2026
In this essay, I reconsider Alfred North Whitehead's underexplored human exceptionalism as a prod... more In this essay, I reconsider Alfred North Whitehead's underexplored human exceptionalism as a productive feature of process ethics, rather than a glitch. Utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of "conceptual personae" as thought provocations toward alternate futures, I revisit Whitehead's claim that in "the human"-as distinct from "the animal"-"[t]he Rubicon has been crossed" (MT 27).
At one level, Whitehead's repetition of anthropocentrism's founding gesture of defining the human over and against the animal would severely curb the usefulness of process metaphysics to challenge ubiquitous harms to animals and the environment. But I argue that a careful reading of Whitehead's concept of "Reason," when considered alongside the "conceptual personae" of the "animal body" as well as the individual animals through which Whitehead defines Reason, reworks the exceptional human as expressed most fully through its attempts at harm reduction and expansive planetary flourishing.
Nursing Philosophy, 2026
Prompted by a nursing case study that occurred in 2022, this paper joins the perspectives of a nu... more Prompted by a nursing case study that occurred in 2022, this paper joins the perspectives of a nurse practitioner and crosscultural medical ethics professor to consider who can ask a question in the healthcare system, what questions can be heard, and how to develop pluralistic care models-beyond relativism and imperialism-that solicit more diverse experiences and inquiries. Specifically, I utilise the metaphysical concepts of Alfred North Whitehead's 'actual occasion' alongside the 'manysided-view' (anekānta-vāda) from the Jain tradition of South Asia to theorise a processual 'habitus of multiplicity' by which healthcare professionals, especially nurses, engage with and as a many-faceted event. As event, cultivating this 'habitus of multiplicity' is akin to a perceptive mode that: (1) anticipates the complex 'who' of each individual patient and provider as creative powers-in-process, (2) solicits novel inquiries between patients, providers, and health systems, including those previously 'unheard of' in dominant frameworks, and (3) promotes procedural efforts to mutually pluralise, rather than relativise, non-hierarchical care models.
International Journal of Jaina Studies, 2026
This original article by Marie-Claude Mahias was published in French in 2021 as "Le végétarisme d... more This original article by Marie-Claude Mahias was published in French in 2021 as "Le végétarisme des Jains: De l'ascétisme à un art de vivre." Mahias brings the lens of anthropology and a candid analysis to her multi-year fieldwork (1975-2010) with Jains in various north Indian states. In addition to providing an approachable introduction to Jain religious conceptions and biological classifications as the essential backdrop of Jain food practices, Mahias helpfully frames the socio-political, religious, and economic factors of Jain diet. Even as vegetarianism emerges as a hallmark of Jain identity, the author pluralizes the foodways of global Jains by multiplying meanings and practices through sect, generational differences, diaspora, gender, wealth, the level of spiritual advancement, and even kitchen organization. Mahias invites readers to consider "food as a mediator of the individual's relationship to society and the universe; and a conception of the individual as physically and and mentally linked to what they eat…”. The author’s focus on Digambara practices, for which there is less research compared to other Jain sects, further sets this study apart. The addition of four photos taken by Mahias, not included in the original publication, allows readers a rare
glimpse of Jains living out their tradition in India.
Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies, 2025
I explore varieties of knowledge in the first book of the Ācārāṅga-sūtra or “Book of Conduct” to ... more I explore varieties of knowledge in the first book of the Ācārāṅga-sūtra or “Book of Conduct” to demonstrate how: (1) early Jain knowledge of universal sentiency prefigures Jeremy Bentham’s utility calculations of pleasure and pain, and recognizes sensory capacities in every existing entity which, per the early Jain sages, can best be known through analogy with the self; (2) Jain knowledge of interchangeable life forms through innumerable rebirths offers a meaningful parallel to John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” by which reciprocal suffering is a transformative mode of (un)knowing oneself as separate and secure in order to produce justice; (3) how ethical restraints of carefulness arise from, contribute to, and function as right comprehension and right knowing of a living multiplicity, resonating with feminist physicist Karen Barad’s claim that quantum world-making is best understood as the mutual-constitution of “onto-ethico-epistemology” in every becoming.
Astrophilosophy, Exotheology, and Cosmic Religion: Extraterrestrial Life in a Process Universe , 2024
Process scholars focused on ethical-aesethetic dimensions of process thought such as "beauty" and... more Process scholars focused on ethical-aesethetic dimensions of process thought such as "beauty" and "intensity" as preserving valuable (and/or ecological) conflict often overlook a normative aspect of Whitehead's religious and metaphysical vision of a possible future characterized by less, or perhaps no, loss. Utilizing the metaphysical framework of Jainism, an ancient Indian tradition centered on ethical experiments in nonviolence, as a comparative case study, I will provide an account of Whitehead's ethical aim as a telos of nonviolence. Technical concepts in Whitehead's works, such as "unison of immediacy," the "many" and the "one", the potentiality of "eternal objects" or the "subjective aim", the "lure", his description of the "khora," and even his use of the term "peace," present a vision of social and ecological nonviolence for an unfolding future. In this view, harm reduction and social ecology need not be at metaphysical odds. Rather, I argue that nonviolence is part of the structure of becoming in a process metaphysics, not only for certain exceptional beings, but ultimately for all existent entities.
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Books by Brianne Donaldson
Jainism, perhaps more so than any other South Asian tradition, focuses strongly on the ethics of birth, life, and death, with regard to both humans and other living beings. Insistent Life is the first full-length interdisciplinary examination of the foundational principles of bioethics within Jain doctrine and the application of those principles in the contemporary sphere. Brianne Donaldson and Ana Bajželj analyze a diverse range of Jain texts and contemporary sources to identify Jain perspectives on bioethical issues while highlighting the complexity of their personal, professional, and public dimensions. The book also features extensive original data based on an international survey the authors conducted with Jain medical professionals in India and diaspora communities of North America, Europe, and Africa.
Plant-based and cell-cultured meat, milk, and egg producers aim to replace industrial food production with animal-free fare that tastes better, costs less, and requires a fraction of the energy inputs. These products are no longer relegated to niche markets for ethical vegetarians, but are heavily funded by private investors betting on meat without animals as mass-market, environmentally feasible alternatives that can be scaled for a growing global population.
This volume examines conceptual and cultural opportunities, entanglements, and pitfalls in moving global meat, egg, and dairy consumption toward these animal-free options. Beyond surface tensions of “meatless meat” and “animal-free flesh,” deeper conflicts proliferate around naturalized accounts of human identity and meat consumption, as well as the linkage of protein with colonial power and gender oppression. What visions and technologies can disrupt modern agriculture? What economic and marketing channels are required to scale these products? What beings and ecosystems remain implicated in a livestock-free food system?
A future of meat without animals invites adjustments on the plate, but it also inspires renewed habits of mind as well as life-affirming innovations capable of nourishing the contours of our future selves. This book illuminates material and philosophical complexities that will shape the character of our future/s of food.
To review an advanced copy, please contact Brianne Donaldson.
Articles/Chapters by Brianne Donaldson
At one level, Whitehead's repetition of anthropocentrism's founding gesture of defining the human over and against the animal would severely curb the usefulness of process metaphysics to challenge ubiquitous harms to animals and the environment. But I argue that a careful reading of Whitehead's concept of "Reason," when considered alongside the "conceptual personae" of the "animal body" as well as the individual animals through which Whitehead defines Reason, reworks the exceptional human as expressed most fully through its attempts at harm reduction and expansive planetary flourishing.
glimpse of Jains living out their tradition in India.