The “bander’s grip”: Reading zones of human–shorebird contact

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 732-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny R Isaacs
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Contact ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Reduction Strategies ◽  
Conservation Research ◽  
Colonial Histories ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

This article applies Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact” perspective within a multispecies ethnography of conservation encounters on the Delaware Bay. Using critical insights from decolonial feminist science studies, environmental geography, and critical animal studies, the article deconstructs technoscientific environmental knowledge production within a more-than-human contact zone. The tools, technologies, and “conspicuous innocence” of hands-on shorebird conservation research practices are described. Re-inscribing nonhuman agency and colonial histories of place, it argues that certain elements of conservation research may be fairly read as “violent” expressions of “animality/coloniality” and “anti-conquest.” It concludes by offering some harm reduction strategies for improving conservation and critical environment studies.

scholarly journals Reading Blood Work is an Art Form: Toward an Embodied Feminist Practice of Veterinary Science and Care

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Christian Gundermann
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Advocacy Network ◽  
Clinical Control

What are the advantages of a concrete, embodied relationship between human subjects and their non-human objects of care for the veterinary process of knowledge production? The scientific reductionism that frames formal studies makes much of the knowledge gained in those studies questionable or severely limited, since many important factors of real life illnesses and their causation and cure are excluded from consideration for the sake of clinical control and traditional scientific objectivity. This essay narrates my experience with my mare Lilly who suffered from a rare auto-immune disease; at the same time, it describes and analyzes the history and strategies of the world's largest internet-based equine patient advocacy network on metabolic illness, a network that supported my journey of knowledge acquisition and contribution, through our case history, to a larger alternative veterinary cause of knowledge production. Located between Feminist Science Studies and Critical Animal Studies, this project explores the notion of touch and raises questions about the biomedical field's present-day heavy reliance on visual diagnostics. What is the relation between visual technologies and the detached, disembodied knowledge "from nowhere" that conventional science believes in? How much of the alternative to this way of knowing lies in touch, embodied assistance, relationality, and intuition?And finally, in observing and documenting the relationship at the heart of this venture around knowledge, my essay also suggest that this is a queer project where queerness is understood as the careful but radical reconfiguration of kinship in the context of Haraway’s recent call to “make kin, not babies.” 

scholarly journals Foucault’s Fossils: Life Itself and the Return to Nature in Feminist Philosophy

2015 ◽  
pp. 122-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Huffer
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Philosophy ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
New Materialisms ◽  
Life Itself

This essay asks about the return to nature and “life itself” in contemporary feminist philosophy and theory, from the new materialisms to feminist science studies to environmental ethics and critical animal studies. Unlike traditional naturalisms, the contemporary turn to nature is explicitly posthumanist. Shifting their focus away from anti-essentialist critiques of woman-as-nature, these new feminist philosophies of nature have turned toward nonhuman animals, the cosmos, the climate, and life itself as objects of ethical concern. Drawing on Foucault, the essay probes the ethical meanings of the term “life itself” invoked in many of these renaturalizing projects. Focusing especially on the archival matter that guides Foucault’s thinking, I suggest that we rethink “life itself” not as a transhistorical substance but as the unstable materiality of history. I then reframe Foucault’s archival, genealogical perspective through the lens of the Anthropocene and geological time. Reconceiving our archive as a fossil record, I suggest that Foucault has much to contribute to environmental challenges to human exceptionalism and the anthropogenic destruction of other species and ourselves.

Biology is a feminist issue: Interview with Lynda Birke

2010 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg ◽  
Lynda Birke
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Karen Barad ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Feminist Technoscience ◽  
The One ◽  
Materialist Feminist

This is an interview with Professor Lynda Birke (University of Chester, UK), one of the key figures of feminist science studies. She is a pioneer of feminist biology and of materialist feminist thought, as well as of the new and emerging field of hum-animal studies (HAS). This interview was conducted over email in two time periods, in the spring of 2008 and 2010. The format allowed for comments on previous writings and an engagement in an open-ended dialogue. Professor Birke talks about her key arguments and outlooks on a changing field of research. The work of this English biologist is typical of a long and continuous feminist engagement with biology and ontological matters that reaches well beyond the more recently articulated ‘material turn’ of feminist theory. It touches upon feminist issues beyond the usual comfort zones of gender constructionism and human-centred research. Perhaps less recognized than for instance the names of Donna Haraway or Karen Barad, Lynda Birke’s oeuvre is part of the same long-standing and twofold critique from feminist scholars qua trained natural scientists. On the one hand, theirs is a powerful critique of biological determinism; on the other, an acutely observed contemporary critique of how merely cultural or socially reductionist approaches to the effervescently lively and biological might leave the corporeal, environmental or non-human animal critically undertheorized within feminist scholarship. In highlighting the work and arguments of Lynda Birke, it is hoped here to provide an accessible introduction to the critical questions and challenges that circumvent contemporary discussions within feminist technoscience as theory and political practice.

Sexual Difference, Gender, and (Microscopic) Animals: A Commentary on Ebeling’s “Sexing the Rotifer”

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-322
Author(s):  
Cecilia Åsberg
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Human Animal

AbstractIn this commentary, the microscopic animals of the genus Rotifera, or “rotifers,” emerge as a theory-provoking nonhuman animal. Rotifers embody otherness in ways that may intrigue scholars within both Human-Animal Studies and feminist science studies. In their encounter with rotifers, such fields of research (and others) might also engage each other in new, unexpected, and fruitful ways, as is here argued.

Intimate Bureaucracies: Roadkill, Policy, and Fieldwork on the Shoulder

Hypatia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 651-669 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Koelle
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Road Ecology ◽  
Painted Turtle ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
The World ◽  
Tribal Governments

Over the last twenty years, wildlife biologists and transportation planners have worked with environmental groups and state and tribal governments to mitigate the effects of human transportation arteries on animal habitats and movements. This paper draws connections between this growing field of road ecology and feminist science studies in order to accomplish two things. First, it aims to highlight the often unacknowledged roots that the interdisciplinary field of animal studies has in feminist theory. Second, it seeks to contribute to conversations in the humanities and social sciences on roadkill and on wildlife biology by steering us into a world of practice that foregrounds mundane details. I approach this topic through interdisciplinary methods, including interviews with tribal and state wildlife biologists and participation in fieldwork on a western painted turtle tagging project. Although engaging in science and formulating policy are often understandably regarded by nonspecialists as practices that distance observers from their topic, in the world of roadkill prevention, I argue that the opposite is the case. What I call “intimate bureaucracies” are formed: arrangements of papers, policies, and people that bring a world of counting, and accountability, into being.

Troubling Figures

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Logan Natalie O'Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Science Studies ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Careful Examination ◽  
Environmental Toxicants ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Feminist Science Studies ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Do So

This essay examines the figure of the pesticide-exposed intersex frog, a canary in the coal mine for public endocrinological health. Through feminist science studies and critical discourse analysis, I explore the fields that bring this figure into being (endocrinology, toxicology, and pest science) and the colonial and racial logics that shape these fields. In so doing, I attend to the multiple nonhuman actors shaping this figure, including the pesky weeds and insects who prompt pesticides’ very existence, “male” frogs who function as test subjects, and systemic environmental racism that disproportionately exposes people of color to environmental toxicants. I encourage careful examination of galvanizing environmental figures like this toxic intersex frog and I offer a method to do so.

scholarly journals Including the animal standpoint in critical public relations research

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-161
Author(s):  
Núria Almiron ◽  
Laura Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Critical Animal Studies ◽  
Essential Step ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Discourse Studies ◽  
Theoretical Paper ◽  
Short Explanation

In this paper we argue that adopting critical animal studies perspectives in critical public relations can not only be very fruitful, but that it is also a necessity if the aims of the latter are to be achieved. To this end, this text introduces the challenges and opportunities that the field of critical animal studies brings to critical public relations studies. First, a short explanation of what critical animal studies is and why it can contribute to critical public relations studies is provided. Then the main fields of research where this contribution can be most relevant are discussed, including ethics, discourse studies and political economy. The final aim of this theoretical paper is to expand research within the field of critical public relations by including a critical animal studies approach. Eventually, the authors suggest that embracing the animal standpoint in critical public relations is an essential step to furthering the study of power, hegemony, ideology, propaganda or social change and to accomplishing the emancipatory role of research.

Scientific Reforms, Feminist Interventions, and the Politics of Knowing: An Auto‐ethnography of a Feminist Neuroscientist

Hypatia ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 755-773 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Giordano
Keyword(s):  
Science Studies ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Scientific Practices ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
Doctoral Work ◽  
Cultural Contingency

Feminist science studies scholars have documented the historical and cultural contingency of scientific knowledge production. It follows that political and social activism has impacted the practice of science today; however, little has been done to examine the current cultures of science in light of feminist critiques and activism. In this article, I argue that, although critiques have changed the cultures of science both directly and indirectly, fundamental epistemological questions have largely been ignored and neutralized through these policy reforms. I provide an auto‐ethnography of my doctoral work in a neuroscience program to a) demonstrate how the culture of science has incorporated critiques into its practices and b) identify how we might use these changes in scientific practices to advance feminist science agendas. I critically analyze three areas in current scientific practice in which I see obstacles and opportunities: 1) research ethics, 2) diversity of research subjects and scientists, and 3) identification of a project's significance for funding. I argue that an understanding of the complicated and changing cultures of science is necessary for future feminist interventions into the sciences that directly challenge science's claim to epistemic authority.

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