Project Workshops

The Economic and Social Research Council funded three workshops as part of interdisciplinary and user engagement for this fellowship.  These workshops develop dialogue around key research themes.  The first of these, on the 'Science and Social Science of Animal Welfare', was held in December 2008.  The second, exploring the 'Spaces of Transbiology', was held on the 18th of January 2010.  The third, featuring conversations around how artistic engagement with the location and changing materiality of science can open up spaces for public reflection and discussion, was held in summer 2010. 

Workshop 1: The Science and Social Science of Animal Welfare  17th December 2008, Department of Geography, UCL

Programme

Understanding and implementing animal welfare is an increasingly interdisciplinary issue.  The demand of measuring animal welfare has facilitated debate between different natural sciences, such as veterinary studies, physiology and applied ethology.  There is also a long history of exchange between applied ethics and debates about animal welfare.  There is now, additionally, an emerging exchange between scientists and social scientists, which is seeking to locate different forms of ethical decision-making within the complex cultural, social and political contexts relevant to understanding and implementing animal welfare.  The aim of this workshop was to explore the emergence of this interest and the opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange between scientists and social scientists.  The workshop focused on recent work on the welfare of animals in laboratory and farm settings.

The workshop explored notions of welfare in different contexts, exploring why and how animal welfare has emerged as a key question in different disciplinary trajectories and the different methodologies used for understanding animal welfare and its implementation.  Presentations focused on explorations of animal welfare in the following empirical arenas:

1.  Public attitudes and political processes – the research and role of public beliefs and attitudes; political priorities in regulation; animal welfare in a global economy.
2.  Institutions, expertise and ethical review – exploring changing contexts of ethical review; local and lay representation on institutional review panels; global gatekeepers and international journals; harmonisation and comparative bioethics.
3. Understanding research practices – studying encounters between animals and humans; the relationship between ethology and ethnography; the use of video in recording animals and researching humans.

The introductory presentation for this workshop is available online.  A short workshop report is posted here.

Workshop 2: The Spaces of Transbiology 18th January 2010, Wellcome Collection, Euston Road, London.

Programme

The prefix ‘trans’ increasingly dominates the landscape of the biosciences.  Whether referring to the material transfer of properties between species (in the case of transgenics or the transbiological properties of cyborg embryos) or the passage of knowledge between institutional contexts (in the case of transdisciplinary and translational research), trans draws attention to the shifting material entities and terrains of biomedical science.  Early work by Haraway mobilises the concept of trans to describe the shape-shifting categories by which new hybrid entities challenge natural limits in biology.  Writing in 2006, Franklin, takes this term forward into the contexts of post genomic biology, whilst also looking back to histories of the genetics/embryology interface, to suggest entities ‘made to be born’ are increasingly the norm rather than the exception.  Both have examined how the locatedness of knowledge production matters, yet the complex shifts in location that accompany the bodily transformations of transbiology remain to be drawn.

This workshop sought to bring these insights together, through attention to the changing spatialities of transbiology.  Current biomedical policy evokes a host of spatial metaphors, drawing attention to movements between sites as well as the speculative geographical imaginaries of knowledge practices involved in translating research (for example ‘bench-to-bedside’ or ‘scaling up’).  Taking trans to refer both to the bodily transformations and to the changing terrains of knowledge production and application, we seek to map, trace, and articulate these two shifting dimensions.  The aim of this workshop was to interrogate the changing cartographies of transbiology through a plenary, short case study papers, and discussion.  The workshop drew comparative insight from case studies exploring a wide range of nonhuman-human and other entities used in biomedical research.  It sought to take the locatedness of knowledge production seriously, attending to how the in-between states of being of transbiological entities might facilitate or challenge the way things move in biology and with what implications.

A short workshop report is posted here.  The draft workshop paper on humanized mice is available here.

Workshop 3: Experimental Ruins 6th July 2010, Department of Geography, UCL.

This workshop was an event on the boundaries between two ongoing projects.  Experimental practices and the changing geographies of science and technology are key objects of enquiry for this fellowship, using ethnography to explore the local and global issues in the production, circulation and regulation of genetically modified organisms.  In this context, the workshop provides a provocation to the individual practices of ethnographic research, seeking the basis on which such practices can be expanded to incorporate the experimental experiences of the larger constituent of publics affected by and interested in these changing geographies of experimentation.  The second is the Dark Places exhibition and associated Overt Research Project by artists Neal White and Steve Rowell.  The exhibition was commissioned by The Arts Catalyst and co-curated by Office of Experiments, John Hansard Gallery and SCAN in 2009-10 and the Overt Research Project website was publicly launched on 13th December 2010.  Connecting the two is an interest in the sites of experimentation, the temporalities of experimental practices and the possibilities of fieldwork.  Workshop participants bought many other issues to the day’s discussion from the disciplines of geography, science and technology studies, art, history and archaeology. This report is a record of the day and brief exploration of outputs.