Research Interests

Gail Davies is a human geographer, with research interests in nature-culture relations and the geographies of science and technology.  She works, often ethnographically, to explore the situated, embodied, institutional and ethical dimensions of knowledge practices in the life sciences, with a particular interest in the permeability, or otherwise, of the boundaries between expert understandings and other forms of knowing nature, biology and animals.  This work seeks to avoid naïve determinisms regarding the relationship between technology, biology, and society, often taking an historical approach to mapping the interdependencies between these spheres, in ways that retain space for considering social, environmental, and other inequalities.  Theoretically, this project has developed through engagement with work on ‘hybrid geographies’ and the ‘spatiality of knowledge’; it is broadly located within human geography, but incorporates insight from science and technology studies and the anthropology of science. Substantive past projects have explored the practices of natural history filmmaking, urban nature conservation, organ transplantation and functional genomics.  She is currently researching the changing nature of international collaborations in science, and the reconfiguration of the experimental sites and research objects of functional genomics, through charting the changing use of mutant mice as model organisms in the UK, USA and Singapore.

A summary of research themes includes:

• Geographies of science and technology: Exploring the situated practices and spatial strategies of science and technology and their implications for research governance, translational research, institutional organization, flows of value, the practice of ethics, and the increasing globalisation of science.
• Geographies of nature and nonhumans: Charting the changing relationship between ideas of nature, the place of animals, ethological practices and spaces.  Early research explored animals in natural history film-making; recent research focuses on the particular context of the post genomic sciences.
• Biological complexity and materiality: Understanding the relationships between experimental systems, biological difference and complexity, with a particular interest in the operation of justice in contemporary biomedical practices.
• Critical public engagement with science: Developing and evaluating innovative public methodologies for engagement with new technologies, including collaborations between cultural geography, science and the arts, with a particular interest in practices for locating, articulating and redistributing expertise.

For a full list of publications, see research publications.