How does how you feel about fish shape how fish get to feel?
How does the introduction and spread of different species and sites transform practices of ethical review, the 3Rs, animal care, and public engagement? Is it true that fish feel less and people feel less about what they do feel? If so how can we start conversations around which the public are ambivalent?
Care is complicated and hard. To paraphrase social theorist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, writing in 2011: it can feel good, it can do good, it can feel awful, it can oppress. Puig de la Bellacasa’s work was pioneering in drawing attention to how the complexities of care are entangled in ethics and politics, and formative in shaping both technoscience and different nature cultures.
Leading research organisations, such as the UK’s Wellcome Trust (2020), recognise there is a need to create a more care-full and supportive working environment in the UK research sector.
Talking about the history of animal research can be tricky: the subject remains divisive, and using images poses further challenges. Scientific photographs of procedures can be very upsetting; antivivisection materials, often designed to confront their readers, might prove even more difficult. Yet images are an important source of historical evidence, and have played key roles in communicating animal research to diverse audiences, and occasionally in seeding controversy.
In part 1 of this blog series, we introduced the idea of a ‘spectrum of visibility’ in animal research, with some animals – such as those whose lives are affected by research, but not research subjects – found towards the less visible end of the spectrum.
A lot of guidance has been written about how to actively involve patients and the public in clinical research, and evidence is growing about the value of this. But there’s very little that is specifically aimed at researchers who work mainly in a laboratory, with very little or no contact with people affected by the condition they are studying.
In AnNex projects Species and Spaces (S&S) and Markets and Materials (M&M), we have devoted much of our attention to animals present but “not used” in research: those that are not research subjects, yet whose lives and welfare are bound up with animal research.
On the 3rd December, 2020, Keble College’s Middle Common Room hosted a book launch for Ethical Debates in Orangutan Conservation, authored by Ally Palmer, a Keble Research Associate and postdoctoral researcher with the Animal Research Nexus.
Rich Gorman’s secondment to the RSPCA explored the social relations shaping the use of horseshoe crab blood within pharmaceutical endotoxin testing. This involved 13 stakeholder interviews, and has resulted in a stakeholder report alongside a peer-reviewed journal publication. Rich has also presented the research at industry conferences and academic seminars.
This year the Oxford AnNex team, supported by Keble College and ably assisted by the wonderfully organized Hibba Mazhary, was delighted to host the autumn meeting of the British Animal Studies Network. BASN is a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary forum for thinking about human-animal relationships and the role, place, perception, and representation of animals.