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Person-Post: Thomas Ryan, PhD – Associate Fellow

9th July 2008

is a social worker who lives and works in country north-east Tasmania, Australia. He has spent most of his life in country communities, and animals have always been part and parcel of the wider Ryan household. In 1993 he graduated with a Bachelor of Social Work with First Class Honours degree from James Cook University in Townsville, North Queensland, Australia. His honours thesis, the first in social work concerning animals, was entitled ‘The Widening Circle: Should Social Work Concern Itself with Nonhuman Animal Rights?’ In late 2006, he was awarded a PhD in social work by Edith Cowan University in Bunbury, Western Australia, with a doctoral thesis, the first in the discipline,  titled ‘Social Work, Independent Realities, and the Circle of Moral Considerability: Respect for Humans, Animals and the Natural World’.

Dr Ryan’s publications include Animals and Social Work: A Moral Introduction (2011),  and his edited Animals in Social Work: Why and How They Matter (2014), both published by Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Animal Ethics Book Series. He has also published ‘Social Work and Nonhuman Animal Rights’, Northern Radius,1(1), November 1993, and  a chapter in Environmental Social Work (Routledge, 2012). Dr Ryan’s doctoral theses and publications represent pioneering contributions to the discipline of social work; they present cogent arguments for the inclusion of animals within social work’s moral and conceptual frameworks, and articulate a revised social work code of ethics that has profound theoretical and practical consequences for the discipline and its practitioners.