Constructing the Biotech Nonhuman Animal: Instrumentalism and Ambivalence

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 439-458
Author(s):  
Sari Ung-Lanki
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Moral Status ◽  
Scientific Journal ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Nature Biotechnology ◽  
Animal Mind ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Insight Into

This article was designed to give insight into the role of biotechnology in redefining the complex human-animal relations of our times. In particular, it is used to examine accounts of nonhuman animals and animal usage in the context of biotechnology, as covered in the leading scientific journalNature Biotechnology. Data consist of editorials, commentaries, and research news for four years (N= 104), and has been analyzed using discourse analysis. The journal constructs a consistent, yet one-sided, view on animals as they are represented through physico-material, technical and biomedical discourses, as well as discourses on human benefits and manageable risks. The biotechnological epistemology of the animal is positioned at the far end of the subjectification-instrumentalization continuum in our treatment of other animals. It also clashes with simultaneous discussions on animal mind, subjectivity, and moral status. These developments are likely to further intensify the discrepancies in human-animal relations in science and society.

"No insignificant creature": Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 494-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisha Cohn
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Tess Of The D'urbervilles ◽  
Moral Ideals ◽  
Human Autonomy ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Changing Role ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

Elisha Cohn, "'No insignificant creature': Thomas Hardy's Ethical Turn" (pp. 494––520) This essay examines the limitations of ethically motivated representations of animals in Victorian realism. As many critics have argued, evolutionary theory's challenge to human supremacy had the potential to alter radically literature's focus on individual subjectivity and social ideals. In particular, the new relevance of animals to human life threatened to deflate the human moral ideals. The treatment of animals in Victorian literature is rarely interpreted as exploring evolution's radically anti-humanist implications. More often, animals are thought to function as objects of sympathy in a larger project of constructing middle-class subjectivity. As i argue, it is important to account for the relationship between the sympathetic and the anti-humanist representation of animals in Victorian works. The changing role of animals in Thomas Hardy's works highlights the disconnect between the radical implications that critics see in evolutionist thought and the way in which animals in Victorian writings are usually construed as objects of sympathy. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) places these two approaches in conversation by shifting emphasis from a destabilizing lyricism associated with human-animal affinity to a more distanced narrative stance associated with human autonomy, sympathy, responsibility, and critique. Examining how Hardy grounds his ethically motivated expectations of stable human agency after having seemingly dispensed with them suggests the need for a distinction between a lyrical, evolutionist aesthetic and an ethical aesthetic. This approach also offers insight into the enabling conditions——and limitations——shaping sympathetic agency in defense of animal lives. In examining the intersections between Hardy's work and recent approaches to theories of animality, particularly those based on Gilles Deleuze's concept of becoming-animal, Tess helps us to rethink the theory, to understand why ethical claims require boundaries between species, and on what basis these boundaries can be legitimated.

scholarly journals Inklings and Tentacled Things: Grasping at Kinship through Video Games // Inklings y cosas con tentáculos: Aferrarse al parentesco a través de videojuegos

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-150
Author(s):  
Melissa Bianchi
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Para Determinar ◽  
Nonhuman Species

      Connecting Haraway’s recent observations about “making kin” to video games, this essay examines how particular elements of the medium might cultivate nuanced considerations for multispecies relations. To fully grasp how video games broadly redefine relations between human and nonhuman animals, we must consider the role of game aesthetics and play mechanics in players’ experience of becoming-with. These elements of games fundamentally shape players’ engagements with the medium and are inextricably linked to their storytelling and production. Moreover, game aesthetics and play mechanics (in conjunction with storytelling) demand that players take specific actions and inhabit distinct roles during play, enabling players to not only think alternative kinships, but also enact making them. To demonstrate these points, I examine the aesthetics and gameplay of two tentacular video games, analyzing how they offer rhetorical models for productively thinking about humans’ relations to nonhuman species. I primarily focus on games that heavily feature cephalopod creatures because this specific animal class is often viewed as a rich site for phenomenological and ontological investigations (including in Haraway’s work). Thus, my research attends to specific video games and their tentacled characters to determine how they challenge players to entertain and enact alternative ontologies and human-animal relationships through play. Resumen      Conectando las observaciones recientes de Haraway sobre "hacer parentesco" con los videojuegos, este ensayo examina cómo elementos particulares del medio pueden cultivar consideraciones matizadas para las relaciones multiespecies. Para comprender plenamente cómo los videojuegos redefinen ampliamente las relaciones entre los animales humanos y los animales no humanos, debemos considerar el papel de la estética del juego y la mecánica del juego en la experiencia de convertirse en jugador. Estos elementos de juegos fundamentalmente conforman los compromisos de los jugadores con el medio y están inextricablemente ligados a su narración y producción. Además, la estética del juego y la mecánica del juego (junto con la narración) exigen que los jugadores tomen acciones específicas y ocupen roles distintos durante el juego, permitiendo a los jugadores no sólo pensar en parentescos alternativao, sino también promulgarlos. Para demostrar estos puntos, examino la estética y la jugabilidad de dos videojuegos tentaculares, analizando cómo ofrecen modelos retóricos para pensar productivamente sobre las relaciones de los humanos con las especies no humanas. Me centro primordialmente en los juegos que caracterizan fuertemente a las criaturas cefalópodas, ya que esta clase específica de animales se ve a menudo como un sitio rico para investigaciones fenomenológicas y ontológicas (incluso en el trabajo de Haraway). Así, mi investigación atiende a videojuegos específicos y sus personajes con tentáculos para determinar cómo desafían a los jugadores a entretener y promulgar ontologías alternativas y relaciones entre humanos y animales a través del juego.

scholarly journals Animals and Attachment Theory

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Rockett ◽  
Sam Carr
Keyword(s):  
Attachment Theory ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Attachment Quality ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal

The study of nonhuman animals in the context of attachment theory is steadily growing. This paper sought to pull together recent literature in order to review, summarize, and discuss (a) animals as attachment figures, (b) the conceptualization of attachment quality in human-animal bonds, and (c) the role of animals in assisting the development of human-human attachment.

Plasminogen Activation In Vivo upon Intravenous Infusion of DDAVP

1992 ◽  
Vol 67 (01) ◽  
pp. 111-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcel Levi ◽  
Jan Paul de Boer ◽  
Dorina Roem ◽  
Jan Wouter ten Cate ◽  
C Erik Hack
Keyword(s):  
Monoclonal Antibodies ◽  
Plasminogen Activator ◽  
Plasma Levels ◽  
Fold Increase ◽  
Fibrinolytic System ◽  
Plasminogen Activation ◽  
Plasminogen Activator Activity ◽  
Insight Into

SummaryInfusion of desamino-d-arginine vasopressin (DDAVP) results in an increase in plasma plasminogen activator activity. Whether this increase results in the generation of plasmin in vivo has never been established.A novel sensitive radioimmunoassay (RIA) for the measurement of the complex between plasmin and its main inhibitor α2 antiplasmin (PAP complex) was developed using monoclonal antibodies preferentially reacting with complexed and inactivated α2-antiplasmin and monoclonal antibodies against plasmin. The assay was validated in healthy volunteers and in patients with an activated fibrinolytic system.Infusion of DDAVP in a randomized placebo controlled crossover study resulted in all volunteers in a 6.6-fold increase in PAP complex, which was maximal between 15 and 30 min after the start of the infusion. Hereafter, plasma levels of PAP complex decreased with an apparent half-life of disappearance of about 120 min. Infusion of DDAVP did not induce generation of thrombin, as measured by plasma levels of prothrombin fragment F1+2 and thrombin-antithrombin III (TAT) complex.We conclude that the increase in plasminogen activator activity upon the infusion of DDAVP results in the in vivo generation of plasmin, in the absence of coagulation activation. Studying the DDAVP induced increase in PAP complex of patients with thromboembolic disease and a defective plasminogen activator response upon DDAVP may provide more insight into the role of the fibrinolytic system in the pathogenesis of thrombosis.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Dažu vācu muzikālo tradīciju pārnese latviešu kultūrtelpā 18. gadsimta II pusē

Letonica ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Māra Grudule
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Musical Instrument ◽  
German Society ◽  
Original Form ◽  
Musical Life ◽  
Popular Songs ◽  
Death Of Jesus ◽  
Musical Traditions ◽  
Insight Into

The article gives insight into a specific component of the work of Baltic enlightener Gotthard Friedrich Stender (1714–1796) that has heretofore been almost unexplored — the transfer of German musical traditions to the Latvian cultural space. Even though there are no sources that claim that Stender was a composer himself, and none of his books contain musical notation, the texts that had been translated by Stender and published in the collections “Jaunas ziņģes” (New popular songs, 1774) and “Ziņģu lustes” (The Joy of singing, 1785, 1789) were meant for singing and, possibly, also for solo-singing with the accompaniment of some musical instrument. This is suggested, first, by how the form of the translation corresponds to the original’s form; second, by the directions, oftentimes attached to the text, that indicate the melody; and third, by the genres of the German originals cantata and song. Stender translated several compositions into Latvian including the text of the religious cantata “Der Tod Jesu” (The Death of Jesus, 1755) by composer Karl Heinrich Graun (1754–1759); songs by various composers that were widely known in German society; as well as a collection of songs by the composer Johann Gottlieb Naumann (1741–1801) that, in its original form, was published together with notation and was intended for solo-singing (female vocals) with the accompaniment of a piano. This article reveals the context of German musical life in the second half of the 18th century and explains the role of music as an instrument of education in Baltic-German and Latvian societies.

The Role of Industry-Academia Collaborative Research in Mineral Exploration

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Marlatt
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Research ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Mineral Exploration ◽  
Board Members ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Development Programs ◽  
The University ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Economic Mineral

ABSTRACT Many people may not be aware of the extent of Kurt Kyser's collaboration with mineral exploration companies through applied research and the development of innovative exploration technologies, starting at the University of Saskatchewan and continuing through the Queen's Facility for Isotope Research. Applied collaborative, geoscientific, industry-academia research and development programs can yield technological innovations that can improve the mineral exploration discovery rates of economic mineral deposits. Alliances between exploration geoscientists and geoscientific researchers can benefit both parties, contributing to the pure and applied geoscientific knowledge base and the development of innovations in mineral exploration technology. Through a collaboration that spanned over three decades, we gained insight into the potential for economic uranium deposits around the world in Canada, Australia, USA, Finland, Russia, Gabon, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, and Guyana. Kurt, his research team, postdoctoral fellows, and students developed technological innovations related to holistic basin analysis for economic mineral potential, isotopes in mineral exploration, and biogeochemical exploration, among others. In this paper, the business of mineral exploration is briefly described, and some examples of industry-academic collaboration innovations brought forward through Kurt's research are identified. Kurt was a masterful and capable knowledge broker, which is a key criterion for bringing new technologies to application—a grand, curious, credible, patient, and attentive communicator—whether talking about science, business, or life and with first ministers, senior technocrats, peers, board members, first nation peoples, exploration geologists, investors, students, citizens, or friends.

Raza, ciencia, sociedad

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wade
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Discourse ◽  
Human Biology ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Race Science ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Over Time

<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><strong>Resumen </strong></span>| En este trabajo quiero presentar una cronología convencional del concepto raza que marca un movimiento en el cual raza cambia de ser una idea basada en la cultura y el medio ambiente, a ser algo biológico, inflexible y determinante, para luego volver a ser una noción que habla de la cultura<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>Resumo cómo la idea de raza ha cambiado a través del tiempo, mirando necesariamente el rol que ha desempeñado la ciencia, y enfocando los diferentes discursos de índole <em>natural-cultural </em>sobre los cuerpos, el medio ambiente y el comportamiento, en los cuales las dimensiones culturales y naturales siempre coexisten<span class="s2"><strong>.</strong></span>“La naturaleza” no puede ser entendida solamente como “la biología” y ni la naturaleza ni la biología necesariamente implican sólo el determinismo, la fijeza y la inmutabilidad Estar abiertos a la coexistencia de la cultura y la naturaleza y a la mutabilidad de la naturaleza nos permite ver mejor el ámbito de acción del pensamiento racial.</p><p class="p1"><strong><em>Race, Science and Society</em></strong></p><p class="p1"> </p><p class="p2"><span class="s1"><strong>Abstract </strong></span>| In this article I present and critique a standard chronology of race as, first, a concept rooted in culture and environment, and later in human biology and determinism, and finally back to culture alone<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>I will outline changing understandings of race over time, with some attention to the role of science, broadly understood, and on the continuing but changing character of race as a natural-cultural discourse about organic bodies, environments and behavior, in which both cultural and natural dimensions always co-exist<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>“Nature” is not to be understood simply as “biology,” and neither nature nor biology necessarily imply the fixity and determination that they are often assumed nowadays to involve<span class="s2"><strong><em>.</em></strong></span>Being open to the co-existence of culture and nature and the mutability of the latter allows us to better comprehend the whole range of action of racial thinking.</p>

Literalism and Moral Status

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Figdor
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Moral Standing ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Moral Boundaries ◽  
Psychological Capacities

Chapter 9 presents the idea that Literalism undermines current social and moral boundaries for moral status. Possession of psychological capacities, moral standing, and respectful treatment are a standard package deal. So either many more beings enjoy moral status than we now think, or the relative superiority of human moral status over other beings is diminished. It introduces the role of psychological ascriptions in drawing social and moral boundaries by examining dehumanization and anthropomorphism. It argues that in the short term Literalism does not motivate us to do more than make minor adjustments to current moral boundaries. We can distinguish the kinds of psychological capacities that matter for moral status from the kinds that best divide nature at its joints. In the long run, however, Literalism prompts us to reconsider the anthropocentric standards that govern current moral boundaries.

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