Lisa Jean Moore

Among the colony: Ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intra-species mindfulness

As a part of a larger ethnographic study of urban beekeepers in New York City, this article considers the challenges of conducting multispecies participant observation – being in the field with both human and non-human informants, beekeepers and bees. Keeping in mind the intra-active nature of human/insect entanglements, we explore how to interpret and translate the actions of another species while resisting anthropomorphic descriptions. Through a decentering of the authors, the bee is reflexively rendered as a non-human informant and an actor in its own right. The embodied experiences of conducting participation observation with humans and insects are used to speculate on the possibility of an ontology of bees and the idea of intra-species mindfulness. This work is in dialogue with the field of multispecies ethnography, actor-network theory and critical animal studies, positioning the bee though networks of ethnographic data and translation.

A Day at the Beach: Rising Sea Levels, Horseshoe Crabs, and Traffic Jams

The North American Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus) spawns on Plumb Beach, a New York City and National Park Service park that borders the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, New York. This sociological research article examines my experiences of joining a biological research team studying the reproductive practices of horseshoe crabs at different shoreline habitats. This article tracks how engaging in multispecies ethnography and intraspecies mindfulness changes my everyday life considerations as a human, sociologist, commuter and resident of New York City. Using contemporary social theories, I demonstrate the crabs, humans, cars, sand, eggs, water, wind live in a mesh with connections to ecologists, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, and geomorphology. I am sharing a revelatory moment of understanding my place as a researcher within the mesh, interconnected with the site of research, the objects of research, as well as global variables that are beyond human control (and possibly understanding).

Bees, Border and Bombs: A Social Account of Theorizing and Weaponizing Bees

This chapter is an exploration into the ways in which bees have been constructed, exploited and deployed within the context of armed conflict and its aftermath. It begins with a brief overview of the militarization of bees in wartime. Next, it turns to the contemporary use of bees in critical theory as it is applied to war. It also explores how bees are unique in their relationship to human warfare humans can operationalize bees as a weapon, a weakness, a spy and/or a theory. As sociologists of culture, science and media, the chapter interprets the narratives of military scientists and entomologists, and how cuttingedge bee research has been reported in the media. It explores how bees are anthropomorphized as a reflection of global terrorism in a post-9/11 world. It concludes with thoughts about the exclusion of insects, particularly bees, in ethical considerations about animals and warfare. Keywords:bees; ethics; human wartime; military operations; military theory; sociological analysis; spy; weakness; weapons

The Geriatric Clinic: Dry and Limp: Aging Queers, Zombies, and Sexual Reanimation

This essay looks to the omission of aging queer bodies from new medical technologies of sex. We extend the Foucauldian space of the clinic to the mediascape, a space not only of representations but where the imagination is conditioned and different worlds dreamed into being. We specifically examine the relationship between aging queers and the marketing of technologies of sexual function. We highlight the ways queers are excluded from the spaces of the clinic, specifically the heternormative sexual scripts that organize biomedical care. Finally, using recent zombie theory, we gesture toward both the constraints and possibilities of queer inclusion within the discourses and practices that aim to reanimate sexual function. We suggest that zombies usefully frame extant articulations of aging queers with sex and the dangerous lure of medical treatments that promise revitalized, but normative, sexual function at the cost of other, perhaps queerer intimacies.

Ascribing Value to Non-human Animals

For many decades, theoretical and substantive work in social stratification has examined the systems of classification of human populations based on power, privilege, and prestige. While this scholarship attempts to understand the hierarchical relationships between and among humans, sufficient attention has not been paid to the non-human animal. How do humans come to assign worth and value to heterogeneous animal species? How do these evaluation projects lodge social and cultural information into the natural world, often erasing this cultural work and claiming some “original” basis for human behavior in the animal kingdom? Contemporary moves in social science to examine these cultural projections onto animals are gaining traction. Non-human animals can be read as functional objects, such as cows or horses, while others that are imbued with pet status are believed to be sentient creatures with personalities. Sociologists Arluke and Sanders (2008) argue that the animal–human divide is clearly not a simple dichotomy, as our definition of animal (pet or otherwise) itself exists on a continuum. Humans establish different institutional, interactional, and individual mechanisms for placing animals both on a continuum and within strata. One example of humans evaluating the relative worth of an animal is evident in the work of the International Union of Conservation Naturalists (IUCN) and the Center for Environmental Research and Coastal Oceans Monitoring (CERCOM). Their agenda is to summarize the progress in Red Listing of the four living species of horseshoe crabs. The Red List is IUCN’s comprehensive evaluation of global plant and animal species and their relative threat of Science as Culture, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 4, 590–594, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2014.942264

Testing Baby: The Transformation of Newborn Screening, Parenting, and Policymaking

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,