Tora Holmberg

A feeling for the animal : On becoming an experimentalist

This article deals with questions that arose during a 2-week university course in nonhuman animal laboratory science. Doctoral students and researchers take the course to acquire the knowledge necessary for future independent work with nonhuman animal experimentation. During the course, participants learn to handle animals in the laboratory, both in theory and in practice, and to do so in a humane way with a feeling for the animals. The paper analyzes how this knowledge, in other tacit contexts, is constructed and learned and focuses on two main aspects of handling rodents in the laboratory: habituation and killing. The courses focus on good handling works as a means of doing good research, as a strategy of including animal welfare as a legitimate agenda, while keeping intact traditional scientific norms—such as standardization. In this case, standardization has a wider scope than commonly assumed: Not only are the animals standardized but also the experimentalists who become standardized through courses and curricula. However, this process of standardization is not complete; thus, a feeling for the animal implies, as the case study shows, individual animal and human-animal interaction.

Secrets and lies : ''selective openness'' in the apparatus of animal experimentation

Researchers and other (human) actors within the apparatus of animal experimentation find themselves in a tight corner. They rely on public acceptance to promote their legitimacy and to receive funding. At the same time, those working with animal experimentation take risks by going public, fearing that the public will misunderstand their work and animal rights activists may threaten them. The dilemma that emerges between openness and secrecy is fairly prevalent in scientific culture as a whole, but the apparatus of animal experimentation presents specific patterns of technologies of secrets. The aim of the paper is to describe and analyse the meanings of secrets and openness in contemporary animal experimentation. We suggest that these secrets – or “selective openness” – can be viewed as grease in the apparatus of animal experimentation, as a unifying ingredient that permits maintenance of status quo in human/animal relations and preserves existing institutional public/science relations.

Trans-Species Urban Politics Stories From a Beach

The article investigates the emergence and continuation of a spatial conflict, concerning a “dog beach” in Santa Cruz, California, that led to the creation of local interest organizations and came to involve city and state authorities and regulations, local news and social media, and not least, park visitors (both humans and dogs). Through the debate, positions for and against dogs being off leash were consolidated—however, not necessarily positions for and against dogs. Several themes emerge through the analysis: safety/risk, disturbance, excrements, and “dogginess,” meaning the perceived nature of dogs. The case study is used as an example of not only how urban politics affects the bodies, practices, and movement of people and dogs but also, similarly, how this politics is constantly under the threat of civil disobedience and subversive acts of counterpolitics. It illustrates the dialectics of everyday lives—of the bodies, practices, and movement of people and dogs—and space: the liminal case of the beach. Furthermore, the collective movement of dogs and people is conceptualized as a trans-species urban crowd, threatening a certain ideal public order.

Mortal love: Care practices in animal experimentation

This article addresses the embodied nature of laboratory human—animal practices in order to understand the notions of care that take place within an institution of domination — the apparatus of animal experimentation. How is it possible to both love and harm in this context? Building on animal studies and feminist ethics, the theme of emotionality is explored in the section ‘loving animals’. Here it is demonstrated that empathy and affection for individual animals, as well as species, are strong components of an experimental ethos expressed by the informants. The second empirical section deals with the issue of ‘killing well’. The good kill is supposed to be done with care: quickly and compassionately. This is performed by way of bodily measures of care, technological refinement and personal skills and, sometimes, with the help of a division of labour. In the concluding section, the empirical findings are read through the framework, where the feminist theoretical analysis of love, dependency and care from an embodiment perspective understands the dialectics of instrumentalisation and exploitation of — and care for — animals, not as something that goes on above or outside of relations, but rather as something that can be understood from within. ‘Mortal love’ is the attempt to capture and theorise this dialectic, arguing that emotions of love and friendship are not mere justifications for the harm and killing performed, but rather intrinsic dimensions of the embodied animaling of experimental human—animal relations.

Transgenic Silences: The Rhetoric of Comparisons and Transgenic Mice as ‘Ordinary Treasures’

This article addresses how people who handle transgenic animals in practice—laboratory workers and members of animal ethics committees—talk about and handle dilemmas with transgenic animals. It is shown how dilemmas associated with transgenic animals become back-grounded through rhetorical comparisons with ‘something else’. Through these comparisons, transgenic animals are framed as normal, ordinary and thereby unproblematic on the one hand, and as valuable treasures in which are embedded hopes and expectations of future medical treatments on the other. This tension builds up to a discourse on transgenic mice as ordinary treasures. Towards the end of the article we discuss how this discourse tends to exclude possibilities of discussing specific dilemmas of genetically modified animals. Instead the discourse is contributing to certain transgenic silences. This article is based on the project ‘Dilemmas with transgenic animals’, in which notions of culture and nature, risk and safety, innovation and organism, science and technology, are investigated in the scientific production, use and ethical evaluation of transgenic animals. The project builds on case studies in two different contexts: laboratories and animal ethics committees. The methods used are interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

Questioning ‘the number of the beast’: Constructions of humanness in a Human Genome Project (HGP) narrative

The meaning of humanness, what it means to be human, is a continually rehearsed issue in science, literature, folktales and fiction. Indeed, contemporary media-scientific commentaries exemplify the pervasiveness of this question. It is as if public and scientific attention to the ‘new genetics’ of the late twentieth century has brought new life to this ancient puzzle. A recurrent issue, related to the question of what it means to be human, is that of the nature of genes. If the gene is conceptualized as essential to human (and nonhuman) life, then the matter of how many there are, of course, becomes an important issue. Central to the notion of gene number importance, is the dogma of early molecular biology: DNAmakes RNA, RNAmakes protein, and proteins make us, and the subsequent one gene–one protein model of explanation (Kay, 1993). Even though geneticists today consider the dogma outdated, the gene number issue has remained an ubiquitous constant in popular and expert discourse. In this paper, I will deal with the shift of focus in constructing humanness produced within the context of the Human Genome Project (HGP): how accounts of comparisons between human and non-human gene numbers, as well as assertions of similarities and differences in percentage, were replaced by a concern for the human specific function and the complexity of genes/genomes. Accompanying this shift is the notion of our superior place in nature: if we are portrayed and constructed as intimately connected to non-humans, then reformulations of species boundaries are urgent. The objective is thus to show how the meaning of humanness, as opposed to the discursive other, is defended by the threat of transgressing the natural–cultural order. The analysis is based on a case study of the public and scientific reporting on the HGP in Sweden. Empirically, the sources include scientific publications, popular biology books, news articles, debate contributions in the cultural pages of papers, interviews with behavioural geneticists and field notes from conferences. By following the announcement of the draft human genome, a picture of what marks ‘humanness’ will evolve. Science as Culture Vol. 14, No. 1, 23–37, March 2005

Bringing in the controversy: re-politicizing the de-politicized strategy of ethics committees

Human/animal relations are potentially controversial and biotechnologically produced animals and animal-like creatures – bio-objects such as transgenics, clones, cybrids and other hybrids – have often created lively political debate since they challenge established social and moral norms. Ethical issues regarding the human/animal relations in biotechnological developments have at times been widely debated in many European countries and beyond. However, the general trend is a move away from parliamentary and public debate towards institutionalized ethics and technified expert panels. We explore by using the conceptual lens of bio-objectification what effects such a move can be said to have.In the bio-objectification process, unstable bio-object becomes stabilized and receives a single “bio-identity” by closing the debate. However, we argue that there are other possible routes bio-objectification processes can take, routes that allow for more open-ended cases. By comparing our observations and analyses of deliberations in three different European countries we will explore how the bio-objectification process works in the context of animal ethics committees. From this comparison we found an interesting common feature: When animal biotechnology is discussed in the ethics committees, technical and pragmatic matters are often foregrounded. We noticed that there is a common silence around ethics and a striking consensus culture. The present paper, seeks to understand how the bio-objectification process works so as to silence complexity through consensus as well as to discuss how the ethical issues involved in animal biotechnology could become re-politicized, and thereby made more pluralistic, through an “ethos of controversies”.

Tail tales: how researchers handle transgenic dilemmas

This paper sets out to study dilemmas associated with transgenic mice as they appear in research practices. Transgenic mice create certain dilemmas because they are “trans” – both a product and a process – and cross over institutional as well as species boundaries. Furthermore, they transgress cultural boundaries and hybridize categories such as organism and innovation, science and technology, nature and culture. The article demonstrates how the cultural messiness inherent to the handling of transgenic mice results in “cleaning” activities, and through this unpacking suggests how these activities can be understood in terms of control. The analysis is done using a framework combining insights from animal studies, a doing ethics perspective and a rhetorical discourse tradition. The methods used are interviews and ethnographic fieldwork.

Imagination laboratory : making sense of bio-objects in contemporary genetic art

Public engagement in biotechnology has declined as cloning, genetic engineering and regenerative medicine have become socially and culturally normalized. Zooming in on existing bio-technological debates, this article turns to contemporary genetic art as sites for ethical reflections. Art can be viewed as an ‘imagination laboratory’, a space through which un-framing and rupturing of contemporary rationalities are facilitated, and, in addition, enabling sense-making and offering fantastic connections otherwise not articulated. In this article, the framework of ‘bio-objectification’ is enriched with Bennetts (2001) notion of enchantment and the importance of wonder and openness to the unusual, in order to highlight alternative matters of concern than articulated through conventional politico-moral discourse. Drawing on a cultural sociological analysis of Eduardo Kacs Edunia, Lucy Glendinnings Feather Child, Patricia Piccininis Still Life with Stem Cells and Heather Dewey-Hagborgs Stranger Visions, we discuss how the intermingling of art, science, critics, art historians, science fiction, internet, and physical space, produce a variety of attachments that this article will unpack. The article demonstrates that while some modern boundaries and rationalities are highlighted and challenged through the ‘imagination laboratory’ of the art process, others are left untouched.

Sensuous Governance: Assessing Urban Animal Hoarding

Abstract This article addresses how professional animal welfare inspectors and police officers produce knowledge about animal hoarding, and how they detect disconcern and come to conclusions about how to act. The specific aim is to contribute to a sociological understanding of the phenomenon of urban animal hoarding assessment by deploying the framework of “sensuous governance”. I will do so by focusing on the ways in which authorities use and record their senses of the emplaced situation – their visual, olfactory and auditory impressions – in order to make a judgement. The more general contribution concerns how the dimension of species adds to the long-lasting sociological interest in sensing as a mode of knowing about our environment. Using interview data along with animal welfare protocols from a Swedish study of human/animal relations in the city, the intersection of species, spaces and senses is put in focus.