This report is provided for stakeholders involved in the provision and management of public trans... more This report is provided for stakeholders involved in the provision and management of public transport services where there is a risk of community transmission of COVID-19 and other infections such as seasonal colds, flu, and noroviruses. It provides analysis of everyday bus user experiences within the changing conditions of the COVID-19 public health crisis, March 2020 onwards. <br><br>Central to our thinking is the concept of microbial landscapes. This is a new term we are introducing to help describe and explain what is going on all around us, but in particular, on the bus. <br><br>Microbial landscapes describes the intertwining BETWEEN the various ways different bus passengers visualise and sense the bus environment, AND the physical, material elements like other passenger bodies, bus architecture, viral particles and microbes. These microbial landscapes are dynamic across the temporalities of day, different seasons, different passengers, and the local dom...
Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges as... more Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research by the social sciences and humanities. A ‘selective openness’ to this range of disciplines has been observed within multi-discipline research programmes designed to address societal grand challenges including those concerned with the sustainability of food systems, inhibiting the impact of social sciences and humanities. Further, existing research on animal-based foods within these disciplines is largely dispersed and focused on particular parts of food systems. Inspired by the ‘Sutherland Method’ this paper discusses the results of an itera...
Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of m... more Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of modern biomedicine, generating increased expectations for and connections between human and animal health. Animal research also remains controversial and its acceptability is contingent on a complex network of relations and assurances across science and society, which are both formally constituted through law and informal or assumed. In this paper, we propose these entanglements can be studied through an approach that understands animal research as a nexus spanning the domains of science, health and animal welfare. We introduce this argument through, first, outlining some key challenges in UK debates around animal research, and second, reviewing the way nexus concepts have been used to connect issues in environmental research. Third, we explore how existing social sciences and humanities scholarship on animal research tends to focus on different aspects of the connections between scientif...
Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism withi... more Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism within the cultures and societies they study and to take account of more-than-human agencies and perspectives. This poses key methodological challenges, including a tendency for animal geographies to focus very much on the human side of human–animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In this paper, we draw on recent ethnographic work, observing and participating in the care of research animals and interviewing the animal technologists, to contribute to the understandings of life within the animal house. In so doing, the paper makes three key arguments. Firstly, that studying how animal technologists perform everyday care and make sense of their relationships with animals offers useful insights into the specific skills, expertise and relationships required in order to study human–animal relations. Secondly, that animal technologists...
The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory anim... more The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory animal welfare into practice. This is the first study to explore how this is achieved in relation to their participation in implementing refinement and reduction, two of the three key guiding ethical principles––the “3Rs”––of what is deemed to be humane animal experimentation. The interpretative approach contributes to emerging work within the social sciences and humanities exploring care and ethics in practice. Based on qualitative analysis of participant observation within animal research facilities in UK universities, in-depth interviews with ATs, facility managers, and other stakeholders, and analysis of regulatory guidelines, we draw a contrast between the minimum required of ATs by law and how their care work not only meets but often exceeds these requirements. We outline how ATs constitute a key source of innovation and insight into the refinement of animal care and the reduction of a...
Client behaviour change is at the heart of veterinary practice, where promoting animal health and... more Client behaviour change is at the heart of veterinary practice, where promoting animal health and welfare is often synonymous with engaging clients in animal management practices. In the medical realm, extensive research points to the link between practitioner communication and patient behavioural outcomes, suggesting that the veterinary industry could benefit from a deeper understanding of veterinarian communication and its effects on client motivation. Whilst extensive studies have quantified language components typical of the veterinary consultation, the literature is lacking in-depth qualitative analysis in this context. The objective of this study was to address this deficit, and offer new critical insight into veterinary communication strategies in the pursuit of client behaviour change. Role-play interactions (n = 15) between UK cattle veterinarians and an actress experienced in medical and veterinary education were recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically. Analysis re...
Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insight... more Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the '3Rs'), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exerci...
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Dec 10, 2013
ABSTRACT This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directi... more ABSTRACT This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattle – we argue that habits are also always to extent improvised; shaped by the capacities of human bodies to sense and respond to the nonhuman agentive world around them, including methodological habits. We propose a new term, ‘experimental partnering’ to define an interpretative approach that is attentive to how practice can illuminate the improvisatory or unstable temporary alignments that underlie some habits. ‘Experimental partnering’ is not offering a new way to access the research field, but a term to express a particular interpretative mode that draws attention to human-nonhuman relations and assemblages, fostering new apprehensions of how these more than social relations modify and interrupt the habitual.
This report is provided for stakeholders involved in the provision and management of public trans... more This report is provided for stakeholders involved in the provision and management of public transport services where there is a risk of community transmission of COVID-19 and other infections such as seasonal colds, flu, and noroviruses. It provides analysis of everyday bus user experiences within the changing conditions of the COVID-19 public health crisis, March 2020 onwards. <br><br>Central to our thinking is the concept of microbial landscapes. This is a new term we are introducing to help describe and explain what is going on all around us, but in particular, on the bus. <br><br>Microbial landscapes describes the intertwining BETWEEN the various ways different bus passengers visualise and sense the bus environment, AND the physical, material elements like other passenger bodies, bus architecture, viral particles and microbes. These microbial landscapes are dynamic across the temporalities of day, different seasons, different passengers, and the local dom...
Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges as... more Increasingly high-profile research is being undertaken into the socio-environmental challenges associated with the over-production and consumption of food from animals. Transforming food systems to mitigate climate change and hidden hunger, ensure food security and good health all point to reducing animal-based foods as a key lever. Moving beyond animal-based food systems is a societal grand challenge requiring coordinated international research by the social sciences and humanities. A ‘selective openness’ to this range of disciplines has been observed within multi-discipline research programmes designed to address societal grand challenges including those concerned with the sustainability of food systems, inhibiting the impact of social sciences and humanities. Further, existing research on animal-based foods within these disciplines is largely dispersed and focused on particular parts of food systems. Inspired by the ‘Sutherland Method’ this paper discusses the results of an itera...
Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of m... more Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of modern biomedicine, generating increased expectations for and connections between human and animal health. Animal research also remains controversial and its acceptability is contingent on a complex network of relations and assurances across science and society, which are both formally constituted through law and informal or assumed. In this paper, we propose these entanglements can be studied through an approach that understands animal research as a nexus spanning the domains of science, health and animal welfare. We introduce this argument through, first, outlining some key challenges in UK debates around animal research, and second, reviewing the way nexus concepts have been used to connect issues in environmental research. Third, we explore how existing social sciences and humanities scholarship on animal research tends to focus on different aspects of the connections between scientif...
Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism withi... more Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism within the cultures and societies they study and to take account of more-than-human agencies and perspectives. This poses key methodological challenges, including a tendency for animal geographies to focus very much on the human side of human–animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In this paper, we draw on recent ethnographic work, observing and participating in the care of research animals and interviewing the animal technologists, to contribute to the understandings of life within the animal house. In so doing, the paper makes three key arguments. Firstly, that studying how animal technologists perform everyday care and make sense of their relationships with animals offers useful insights into the specific skills, expertise and relationships required in order to study human–animal relations. Secondly, that animal technologists...
The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory anim... more The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory animal welfare into practice. This is the first study to explore how this is achieved in relation to their participation in implementing refinement and reduction, two of the three key guiding ethical principles––the “3Rs”––of what is deemed to be humane animal experimentation. The interpretative approach contributes to emerging work within the social sciences and humanities exploring care and ethics in practice. Based on qualitative analysis of participant observation within animal research facilities in UK universities, in-depth interviews with ATs, facility managers, and other stakeholders, and analysis of regulatory guidelines, we draw a contrast between the minimum required of ATs by law and how their care work not only meets but often exceeds these requirements. We outline how ATs constitute a key source of innovation and insight into the refinement of animal care and the reduction of a...
Client behaviour change is at the heart of veterinary practice, where promoting animal health and... more Client behaviour change is at the heart of veterinary practice, where promoting animal health and welfare is often synonymous with engaging clients in animal management practices. In the medical realm, extensive research points to the link between practitioner communication and patient behavioural outcomes, suggesting that the veterinary industry could benefit from a deeper understanding of veterinarian communication and its effects on client motivation. Whilst extensive studies have quantified language components typical of the veterinary consultation, the literature is lacking in-depth qualitative analysis in this context. The objective of this study was to address this deficit, and offer new critical insight into veterinary communication strategies in the pursuit of client behaviour change. Role-play interactions (n = 15) between UK cattle veterinarians and an actress experienced in medical and veterinary education were recorded, transcribed and analysed thematically. Analysis re...
Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insight... more Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the '3Rs'), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exerci...
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Dec 10, 2013
ABSTRACT This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directi... more ABSTRACT This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattle – we argue that habits are also always to extent improvised; shaped by the capacities of human bodies to sense and respond to the nonhuman agentive world around them, including methodological habits. We propose a new term, ‘experimental partnering’ to define an interpretative approach that is attentive to how practice can illuminate the improvisatory or unstable temporary alignments that underlie some habits. ‘Experimental partnering’ is not offering a new way to access the research field, but a term to express a particular interpretative mode that draws attention to human-nonhuman relations and assemblages, fostering new apprehensions of how these more than social relations modify and interrupt the habitual.
‘Working with Animals’
6 and 7 October 2017
This meeting of the British Animal Studies Ne... more ‘Working with Animals’
6 and 7 October 2017
This meeting of the British Animal Studies Network will take place at the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. A map of the campus is here. We are in Building 38/40 on Friday until 6pm, and then are in Building 32/1015 for John Bradshaw's talk. Saturday's sessions will take place in Building 44, Lecture Theatre A. Please go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/FutureMeetings/WorkingwithAnimals.aspx for a link to register
Uploads
Papers by Emma Roe
6 and 7 October 2017
This meeting of the British Animal Studies Network will take place at the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton. A map of the campus is here. We are in Building 38/40 on Friday until 6pm, and then are in Building 32/1015 for John Bradshaw's talk. Saturday's sessions will take place in Building 44, Lecture Theatre A. Please go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/FutureMeetings/WorkingwithAnimals.aspx for a link to register