Kendra Coulter

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Kendra Coulter is a Canadian professor at Huron University College, Western University, where she teaches management and organizational studies. Her research focuses on labor studies, human–animal studies, and organization studies. She is the author of Revolutionizing Retail: Workers, Political Action, and Social Change (2014), Animals, Work, & the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity (2016), and Defending Animals: Inside the Front Lines of Animal Protection (2023). She is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

Coulter trained as an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Toronto. She co-edited Governing Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Labor, Power, and Government (2012) with William R. Schumann.

Her first book, Revolutionizing Retail, examines the retail sector and how workers can improve their lives through unions and public policy. It won the 2015 Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies book prize.

In Animals, Work, & the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity, she argues that both human workers and animals do meaningful kinds of work, a topic often ignored in labour and human–animal studies. She introduces ecosocial reproduction to describe how wild animals’ labor affects ecosystems and discusses the idea of humane jobs to promote social change.

In 2017 she was named to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and received the Brock University Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence. In 2020 she co-edited Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice? with Charlotte E. Blattner and Will Kymlicka. That year she was invited to Ontario’s Provincial Animal Welfare Services Advisory Table and serves on the Violence Link Coalition’s Strategic Planning Committee and the City of London’s Animal Welfare Advisory Committee.