PAN on Medium

Ethics think tanks like ours are key organizations for envisioning how we ought to live, and then translating that into specific ideas, best practices and policy proposals for the community at large.

While there are a plethora of think tanks focusing on social issues, and a few for the environment and sustainability, there were few to none for animals either domesticated or wild. Inspired in large part by the work of Mary Midgley, PAN Works formed as a think tank to serve as a global platform investigating “why animals matter” and what that means for the “mixed community” of people, animals and nature.

This makes it particularly important that we reach out with public facing essays that are accessible to all, what is sometimes called public scholarship. PAN on Medium is our column for doing just that.

Submit a Pitch!

We hope you’ll find the content stimulating to your walk in the world, and we look forward to being in dialogue with you. To this end, we also invite you to submit pitches of an essay you would like to write for this column.

We are particularly interested in hearing from people in the “animal space” — professors, graduate students and professionals who care about and/or may work directly with wild and domesticated animals. The focus should be the normative aspects of how humans related to wild and domesticated animals. This might take many forms, such as an essay on a human-animal conflict, an exploration of our worldviews of animals, or an artistic expression of people, animals and/or nature. Animal wellbeing, compassionate conservation, the moral panic over cats, multispecies justice, and rewilding are a few of the topics we’ve covered. These are examples only, and do not delimit what authors may share in this column.

Essays should be 800 to 1,500 words long, written in fluent English of a conversational tone. First person is welcomed when appropriate. In text links are encouraged as is a list of further reading at the end of the essay. We offer warm greetings to returning writers.

To submit a pitch, please be in contact with our Associate Editor, Kim Hightower. She will review your pitch and be in contact thereafter. In your pitch, include the following information.

If your pitch is accepted, the workflow will be as follows — pitch submission, pitch acceptance, submission of full article, editing, and final publication.