1st Edition
Humans, Animals and Biopolitics The more-than-human condition
Human-animal co-existence is central to a politics of life, how we order societies, and to debates about who ’we’ humans think ’we’ are. In other words, our ways of understanding and ordering human-animal relations have economic and political implications and affect peoples’ everyday lives. By bringing together historically-oriented approaches and contemporary ethnographies which engage with science and technology studies (STS), this book reflects the multi-sited, multi-species, multi-logic and multiple ways in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised and possibly policed and politicized. Instead of asking only how control and knowledge are and have been extended over life, the chapters in this book also look at what happens when control fails, at practices which defy orders, escape detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together. In doing so the book problematises and extends the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics that has been such a central analytical concept in studies of human-animal relations and provides a unique resource of cases and theoretical refinements regarding the ways in which we live together with more than human others.
1. Introduction: The ‘More Than Human’ Condition: Sentient Creatures and Versions of Biopolitics
Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø and Steve Hinchliffe
2. The Practice of Fishy Sentience
John Law and Marianne Lien
3. Making Pig Research Biographies: Names and Numbers
Vibeke Pihl
4. Modifying the Biopolitical Collective: The Law as a Moral Technology
Kristin Asdal and Tone Druglitrø
5. Pastorale: Sheep Traffic in Modern Trauma Surgery
Martina Schlünder
6. The Measure of the Disease: The Pathological Animal Experiment in Robert Koch’s Medical Bacteriology
Christoph Gradmann
7. Knowing Sentient Subjects: Humane Experimental Technique and the Constitution of Care and Knowledge in Laboratory Animal Science
Robert G. W. Kirk
8. One Health, Many Species: Towards a Multispecies Investigation of Bird Flu
Natalie Porter
9. Sensory Biopolitics: Knowing Birds and a Politics of Life
Steve Hinchliffe
10. Loving Camels, Sacrificing Sheep, Slaughtering Gazelles: Human-Animal Relations in Contemporary Desert Fiction
Susan McHugh
Biography
Kristin Asdal is Professor of Science, Technology and Culture at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.
Tone Druglitrø is Postdoctoral Fellow at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway.
Steve Hinchliffe is Professor of Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Exeter, UK.
