1,720,969 research outputs found
Amphibious ethics and speculative immersions: laboratory aquariums as a site for developing a more inclusive animal geography.
Get PDFHuman capacity to sense and respond to the suffering of non-human animals is key to animal care and welfare. Intuitively these modes of relating seem best suited to interactions between humans and warm-blooded mammals who share human-like facial features and characteristics. Animal geographers and those working in animal welfare have noted the challenges that humans face in learning to care about fishes, and how this leads to welfare guidelines and regulations which are poorly suited to aquatic species. This paper draws on interviews with laboratory aquarists and biomedical researchers to explore how they have learnt to sense and respond to the needs of fishes in the laboratory. We offer two key observations. Firstly, despite significant bodily differences, humans find ways to empathise with fishes. Secondly, whilst observations of bodies and behaviours predominate in laboratory mammal welfare assessments, when working with fishes water quality serves as an important proxy for species health. We conclude that the laboratory aquarium signifies methodological and conceptual limits in contemporary animal geographies. We further argue that these barriers should be understood as cultural, and – as we demonstrate – that there is consequently scope and capacity to reach beyond them by engaging in amphibious ethics and speculative immersions
“The disadvantages of a defective education”: identity, experiment and persuasion in the natural history of the salmon and parr controversy, c. 1825–1850
Get PDFDuring the second quarter of the nineteenth century, an argument raged about the identity of a small freshwater fish: was the parr a distinct species, or merely the young of the salmon? This “Parr Controversy” concerned both fishermen and ichthyologists. A central protagonist in the controversy was a man of ambiguous social and scientific status: a gamekeeper from Scotland named John Shaw. This paper examines Shaw’s heterogeneous practices and the reception of his claims by naturalists as he struggled to find a footing on the “gradient of attributed competence” (Rudwick 1985). The case demonstrates the context-specific nature of expert-lay boundaries and identities and explores a range of material and linguistic resources available for negotiating them. Arguing for a view of Shaw’s trajectory as simultaneously one of being a “practical man” and of becoming a naturalist, the paper explores both the permeability of social hierarchies in knowledge production and their effective role in the regulation of competency
Animal welfare chauvinism in Brexit Britain:A genealogy of care and control
Get PDFThis paper uses the deployment of animal welfare as an issue during the ‘Brexit’ referendum as a lens through which to explore the mutual shaping of discourses about care for animals in Britain and the British nation, or the nationalism of animal welfare. Adopting a genealogical outlook, it uses one political advertisement in particular—paid for by the official Vote Leave campaign—as a focalising image and means of opening up the issues, leading to an empirical emphasis on the issue of live animal export as it has mediated ideas about Europe and British identity. Introducing the idea of ‘animal welfare chauvinism’, the paper suggests that animal welfare messages in the context of this constitutional debate were products of chauvinistic and caring impulses which are mutually constitutive and crystallised through discourses formed in relation to contingent historical struggles. Analytically, stress is placed on the constructive role of situated and repeated discursive exchanges, occurring between animal advocates and other national political elites, within which ‘care for animals’ as a national ideal is forged. In this light, the article concludes with reflections on the stakes of entering into an already existing conversation on the ‘national culture of care’ for animals in Britain.</p
'To assist, and control, and improve, the operations of nature' fish culture, reproductive technology and social order in Victorian Britain
Get PDFThis thesis investigates the development of fish culture technology in Victorian Britain. Fish culture included artificial propagation (breeding, incubation and rearing) of fish, as well as the other material practices, forms of regulation, social organisation and discourses that constituted freshwater fisheries conservation in Britain, circa 1830 – 1870. The approach taken is based in both the sociology of science and technology and social history. Fish culture is viewed as an innovative reproductive technology, and positioned as part of the “preHhistory” of modern reproduction. Focusing on the generative interactions of the social and piscine worlds of fish culture, empirical analyses of the social relations or social order of a technology, and its coHconstitution with the society of which it was part are conducted. Focus is also placed specifically on social conflicts of different kinds. These conflicts emerged out of existing social and economic tensions connected to the fisheries and the scientific study of fish – which were themselves connected to wider economic, demographic and political developments in British society in which social hierarchies of different kinds were being challenged and thus also defended and remade. Empirical case studies focus on these conflicts as socio-technical processes involving rivalry over scarce goods – ideal and material – and, specifically, how they were resolved or ameliorated such that social orders were achieved, modified and reproduced. The thesis is positioned as a contribution to the social studies of reproduction, to science and technology studies, and to the substantive sociological and historical understanding of a socio-technical practice of historical interest and, in the form of modern aquaculture, of growing contemporary importance
Science on social media
No full textby Reuben Message, PhD candidate at LSE Sociology I’m often intrigued and frustrated, in equal measure, by the way people react to scientific research findings in my social networks. While it is not surprising, it is especially remarkable to observe how often people choose to share stories in which findings are reported that seem to confirm their prejudices
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
'To assist, and control, and improve, the operations of nature': fish culture, reproductive technology and social order in Victorian Britain
No full textThis thesis investigates the development of fish culture technology in Victorian Britain. Fish culture included artificial propagation (breeding, incubation and rearing) of fish, as well as the other material practices, forms of regulation, social organisation and discourses that constituted freshwater fisheries conservation in Britain, circa 1830 – 1870. The approach taken is based in both the sociology of science and technology and social history. Fish culture is viewed as an innovative reproductive technology, and positioned as part of the “preHhistory” of modern
reproduction. Focusing on the generative interactions of the social and piscine worlds of fish culture, empirical analyses of the social relations or social order of a technology, and its coHconstitution with the society of which it was part are conducted. Focus is also placed specifically on social conflicts of different kinds. These conflicts emerged out of existing social and economic tensions connected to the fisheries and the scientific study of fish – which were themselves connected to wider economic, demographic and political developments in British society in
which social hierarchies of different kinds were being challenged and thus also defended and remade. Empirical case studies focus on these conflicts as socio-technical processes involving rivalry over scarce goods – ideal and material – and, specifically, how they were resolved or ameliorated such that social orders were achieved, modified and reproduced. The thesis is positioned as a contribution to the social studies of reproduction, to science and technology studies, and to the substantive sociological and historical understanding of a socio-technical practice of historical interest and, in the form of modern aquaculture, of growing contemporary importance
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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