scholarly journals Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: Learning animal geography research skills from animal technologists

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth Greenhough ◽  
Emma Roe
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Laboratory Animals ◽  
Research Skills ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Environments ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Important Position ◽  
Human Side ◽  
Animal House

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 are keenly aware of the contested moralities which emerge in animal research environments and can offer an important position from which to understand this. Thirdly, that storytelling (exemplified by the stories told by animal technologists) is a useful resource for animal geographers to engage with complexity in human–animal relations.

scholarly journals Notes from a field: A qualitative exploration of human-animal relations in a volunteer shepherding project

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Adams ◽  
James Ormrod ◽  
Sarah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Interaction ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

There is a burgeoning interest in human–animal relations across the social sciences and humanities, accompanied by an acceptance that nonhuman animals are active participants in countless social relations, worthy of serious and considered empirical exploration. This article, the first of its kind as far as the authors are aware, reports on an ongoing qualitative exploration of an example of contemporary human–animal interaction on the fringes of a British city: volunteer shepherding (‘lookering’). Participants are part of a conservation grazing scheme, a growing phenomenon in recent years that relies on increasingly popular volunteer programmes. The primary volunteer role in such schemes is to spend time outdoors checking the welfare of livestock. The first section of the article summarises developments in more-than-human and multispecies research methodologies, and how the challenges of exploring the non- and more-than-human in particular are being addressed. In the second section, we frame our own approach to a human–animal relation against this emerging literature and detail the practicalities of the methods we used. The third section details some of our findings specifically in terms of what was derived from the peculiarities of our method. A final discussion offers a reflection on some of the methodological and ethical implications of our research, in terms of the question of who benefits and how from this specific instance of human–animal relations, and for the development of methods attuned to human–animal and multispecies relations more generally.

scholarly journals Notes from a field: a qualitative exploration of human–animal relations in a volunteer shepherding project

2021 ◽  
pp. 146879412110180
Author(s):  
Matthew Adams ◽  
James Ormrod ◽  
Sarah Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Animal Interaction ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

There is a burgeoning interest in human–animal relations across the social sciences and humanities, accompanied by an acceptance that nonhuman animals are active participants in countless social relations, worthy of serious and considered empirical exploration. This article, the first of its kind as far as the authors are aware, reports on an ongoing qualitative exploration of an example of contemporary human–animal interaction on the fringes of a British city: volunteer shepherding (‘lookering’). Participants are part of a conservation grazing scheme, a growing phenomenon in recent years that relies on increasingly popular volunteer programmes. The primary volunteer role in such schemes is to spend time outdoors checking the welfare of livestock. The first section of the article summarises developments in more-than-human and multispecies research methodologies, and how the challenges of exploring the non- and more-than-human in particular are being addressed. In the second section, we frame our own approach to a human–animal relation against this emerging literature and detail the practicalities of the methods we used. The third section details some of our findings specifically in terms of what was derived from the peculiarities of our method. A final discussion offers a reflection on some of the methodological and ethical implications of our research, in terms of the question of who benefits and how from this specific instance of human–animal relations, and for the development of methods attuned to human–animal and multispecies relations more generally.

scholarly journals Writing Radical Laboratory Animal Histories

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tone Druglitrø
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Laboratory Animal ◽  
Laboratory Animals ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

<div>In recent years historians have called for a radical historicizing to broaden the perspectives, stories and actors that are usually made subjects of historical investigations. The appeals have mainly come from scholars that have been concerned with historicizing nature and human-nature relations. But what does radical historicizing entail and why do we need it? The article presents a reflexive review of current methods and perspectives in the social sciences and humanities that have affected my own engagement with the history of laboratory animals in Norway. It presents an argument for doing historiography that reflects contemporary scholarly concerns on representation. Rather than seeking to “give animals histories of their own” I propose that radical historicizing should include writing histories of the entanglement and disentanglement of humans and other things and beings. This does not then involve a shift to writing animal stories for the sake of animals, but to write stories where humans and animals are considered mutually shaped and affected by each other, and how these interactions have world-transforming effects.</div>

Women break down the barriers to the Vietnamese social sciences and humanities

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan-Hoang Vuong
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Middle Income Country ◽  
Women In Science ◽  
Income Country ◽  
The West ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Low And Middle Income

Valian rightly made a case for better recognition of women in science during the Nobel week in October 2018 (Valian, 2018). However, it seems most published views about gender inequality in Nature focused on the West. This correspondence shifts the focus to women in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in a low- and middle-income country (LMIC).

scholarly journals Post-Islamism and Intellectual Production: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Evolution of Contemporary Islamic Thought

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Mohamed Amine Brahimi ◽  
Houssem Ben Lazreg
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Scientific Field ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Islamic Reform ◽  
The Social ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
Thinking Differently ◽  
Intellectual Production ◽  
Representative Samples

The advent of the 1990s marked, among other things, the restructuring of the Muslim world in its relation to Islam. This new context has proved to be extremely favorable to the emergence of scholars who define themselves as reformists or modernists. They have dedicated themselves to reform in Islam based on the values of peace, human rights, and secular governance. One can find an example of this approach in the works of renowned intellectuals such as Farid Esack, Mohamed Talbi, or Mohamed Arkoun, to name a few. However, the question of Islamic reform has been debated during the 19th and 20th centuries. This article aims to comprehend the historical evolution of contemporary reformist thinkers in the scientific field. The literature surrounding these intellectuals is based primarily on content analysis. These approaches share a type of reading that focuses on the interaction and codetermination of religious interpretations rather than on the relationships and social dynamics that constitute them. Despite these contributions, it seems vital to question this contemporary thinking differently: what influence does the context of post-Islamism have on the emergence of this intellectual trend? What connections does it have with the social sciences and humanities? How did it evolve historically? In this context, the researchers will analyze co-citations in representative samples to illustrate the theoretical framework in which these intellectuals are located, and its evolution. Using selected cases, this process will help us to both underline the empowerment of contemporary Islamic thought and the formation of a real corpus of works seeking to reform Islam.

scholarly journals Subaltern Debris: Archaeology and Marginalized Communities

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Beatriz Marín-Aguilera
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Patricia Hill Collins ◽  
Definition Of

Archaeologists, like many other scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities, are particularly concerned with the study of past and present subalterns. Yet the very concept of ‘the subaltern’ is elusive and rarely theorized in archaeological literature, or it is only mentioned in passing. This article engages with the work of Gramsci and Patricia Hill Collins to map a more comprehensive definition of subalternity, and to develop a methodology to chart the different ways in which subalternity is manifested and reproduced.

The Distribution of Emotions: Affective Politics of Emancipation

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 580-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Bargetz
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social

Currently, affect and emotions are a widely discussed political topic. At least since the early 1990s, different disciplines—from the social sciences and humanities to science and technoscience—have increasingly engaged in studying and conceptualizing affect, emotion, feeling, and sensation, evoking yet another turn that is frequently framed as the “affective turn.” Within queer feminist affect theory, two positions have emerged: following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's well‐known critique, there are either more “paranoid” or more “reparative” approaches toward affect. Whereas the latter emphasize the potentialities of affect, the former argue that one should question the mere idea of affect as liberation and promise. Here, I suggest moving beyond a critique or celebration of affect by embracing the political ambivalence of affect. For this queer feminist theorizing of affective politics, I adapt Jacques Rancière's theory of the political and particularly his understanding of emancipation. Rancière takes emancipation into account without, however, uncritically endorsing or celebrating a politics of liberation. I draw on his famous idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and reframe it as the “distribution of emotions,” by which I develop a multilayered approach toward a nonidentitarian, nondichotomous, and emancipatory queer feminist theory of affective politics.

“*Pseudonyms Are Used Throughout”: A Footnote, Unpacked

2021 ◽  
pp. 107780042110483
Author(s):  
Janet Heaton
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Current Practice ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Textual Data

Pseudonyms are often used to de-identify participants and other people, organizations and places mentioned in interviews and other textual data collected for research purposes. While this is commonplace, the rationale for, and limits of, using pseudonyms or other methods to disguise identifying information are seldom explained in empirical works. Following an illustrated outline of pseudonyms, epithets, codenames and other obscurant techniques used in the social sciences and humanities, this paper considers how they variously frame the identities of, and position the relations between, participants and researchers. It suggests ways in which researchers might improve on current practice.

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