Natalie Khazaal | Pretty Lies, Racism, Dehumanisation and Speciesism in the Oscars | Sentientism 248

Dr. Natalie Khazaal is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech, where she directs the Arabic and Middle East & North Africa programs. Her work spans teaching Arabic, exploring the lives of atheists and apostates in Arab and Muslim communities, nonhuman animal ethics, and the media's role in normalizing speciesism and racism. Natalie is the co-creator of the MARS test (Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism), an evaluative framework—similar to the Bechdel and DuVernay tests—that measures racism and speciesism in media.She joins Sentientism episode 248 to talk about growing up in a secular household in Bulgaria, the "pretty lies" media tell to avoid uncomfortable truths (the subject of her book on Lebanese television during the civil war), and how her research on the MARS Test reveals overlapping patterns of racism and speciesism in mainstream media, including Oscar-winning animations.We explore her naturalistic approach to reality and happiness, her path to veganism as a purely ethical decision, and her argument that racism and speciesism are structurally linked through slaughterhouse labour, environmental racism, dehumanising rhetoric about migrants, and the historical use of animals as instruments of racial violence.We close by asking how storytelling and material change together might shift humanity toward a less oppressive, more sentience-inclusive, more reality-based worldview.Here's Natalie's work applying the MARS (Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism) test to the animated and short film Oscars: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2025.1483941/full and here's Fox News attacking that work: https://www.foxnews.com/media/professors-claim-disneys-lion-king-other-animated-films-promote-white-privilege-new-study.Follow and read Natalie:- https://modlangs.gatech.edu/people/person/natalie-khazaal- https://modlangs.gatech.edu/featured-people/natalie-khazaal- "Nonbelievers, Apostates and Atheists in the Muslim World" (ed) https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15422/9781032484785- "Pretty Liar: Television, Language and Gender in Wartime Lebanon" https://uk.bookshop.org/a/15422/978081565451300:00 Clips01:00 Welcome03:03 Natalie's Intro06:08 What's Real?38:18 What Matters?45:25 Who Matters?01:03:12 A Better World?01:14:06 Follow Natalie and Her WorkFull show notes will be at: https://sentientism.info/In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"

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