Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities: Comparing Relationships between Scientific Researchers and Their Human and Animal Experimental Subjects

Abstract

Drawing on geographies of affect and nature - society relations, we propose a radical rethinking of how scientists, social scientists, and regulatory agencies conceptualise human and animal participants in scientific research. The scientific rationale for using animal bodies to simulate what could be done in human bodies emphasises shared somatic capacities that generate comparable responses to clinical interventions. At the same time, regulatory guidelines and care practices stress the differences between human and animal subjects. In this paper we consider the implications of this differentiation between human and animal bodies in ethical and welfare protocols and practices. We show how the bioethical debates around the use of human subjects tend to focus on issues of consent and language, while recent work in animal welfare reflects an increasing focus on the affectual dimensions of ethical practice. We argue that this attention to the more-than-representational dimensions of ethics and welfare might be equally important for human subjects. We assert that paying attention to these somatic sensibilities can offer insights into how experimental environments can both facilitate and restrict the development of more care-full and response-able relations between researchers and their experimental subjects.

Buildingwithwildlife: project geographies and cosmopolitics in infrastructure construction

“…What is more, if realities can be constructed they can also be multiple (see e.g. Alcadipani and Hassard, 2010;Greenhough, 2011;Law, 2006;Law and Singleton, 2005;Mol, 2002;Sage et al, 2013). But, to reiterate, we certainly cannot craft realities at will (Law, 2006: 33); this is because we must work with extant realities that always already influence what we can do.…”

“…Blok, 2011;Evans and Miele, 2012;Greenhough and Roe, 2011;Hinchcliffe et al, 2005), and in various empirical practices like construction management; thus they are strategically set against those (more passive) realities of wildlife enacted by methods like EIA. As such, we purposefully set out to develop our empirical case studies as a form of ontological politics: to enact the reality of wildlife differently while working alongside extant reality producing practices like EIA.…”

“…The need for such research is further underscored by the tendency within the interdisciplinary animal studies field to largely ignore surprising encounters with animals around the construction process, choosing often instead to examine sites where animals are rather more deliberately ab/used, such as farms (Evans and Miele, 2012), zoos (Davies, 2000), laboratories (Greenhough and Roe, 2011) and homes (Wolch et al, 2000). However, this body of work is valuable to the extent that it sensitizes us to the importance of spatially and temporally specific practices in the formation of our (ethical, economic and physiological) relationship with wildlife; and thus, it challenges absolutist ethical arguments about animal welfare (e.g.…”

Caring for the Multiple and the Multitude: Assembling Animal Welfare and Enabling Ethical Critique

“…She argues this has the potential to destabilise the identities of each, returning the experimental subject to "a someone" as well as "a something", thus stalling the processes by which it is possible to forget an animal is not merely a research tool. This is exemplified in Greenhough and Roe's recent paper on the potential to amplify a somatic sensibility in both clinical trials and animal experimentation, supporting the development of the care-ful practices of nurses and animal care takers in each context (Greenhough and Roe, 2011; see also Greenhough and Roe, 2010). Yet, questions still remain around the extent to which such an opening up can culture the "radical ability to remember" outside of these contexts of care and thus address the multiple and spatial questions challenging laboratory animal welfare.…”

“…The expectation of universalising animal care through legislation underpinned in all events and in all places by scientific knowledge is challenged. This is something acknowledged in the search for alternative ethical sites and vocabularies within the social sciences (Greenhough and Roe, 2011;Whatmore, 1997) and critical bioethics (Hedgecoe, 2004), but it is also troubling animal welfare researchers, who are experimenting with ways of responding to these spatial challenges. There is a broader point too about social scientific critiques of science and technology, which are not deconstructive-in terms of attributing narrow motives, but additive-in terms of gathering generative capacities (Latour, 2004), within contexts which are multiple, uncertain and eventful (Thrift, 2011).…”