Science and animals - or, why Cyril won\u27t win the Nobel Prize

There have always been animals in my life. I have long had a love affair with horses; dogs, too, feature strongly in my emotions and in my house. And not only companion animals, but also the wild creatures that surround us all. Even in London, in the postwar devastation I witnessed while growing up, I learned the joy of watching the birds in the trees. In what sometimes seems another life, I trained as a scientist. Ambivalent though I was about doing biology (surely I could not bear the thought of cutting up dead animals?), I ended up studying just that. For years, I agonized over the fate of animals in the laboratories, and my own role as a student of biology in that fate. Here, I want to tell something of my own story - how I survived doing science, but how my relationships with animals finally persuaded me that science was too disrespectful

Book review / book notes

Rogers, Lesley, Minds o f Their Own: Thinking and Awareness in Animals, 212pp., Allen and Unwin, St.Leonards, New South Wales, 1997 / Dennett, Daniel, Kinds o f minds, x + 244pp., Phoenix, London, 1996 / Hoeg, Peter, The Woman and the Ape, 229pp. Harvill Press, London, 1996 / Carruthers, Peter and and Smith, Peter K, editors, Theories o f theories o f mind, xv + 390pp., Cambridge Univesity Press, Cambridge, 1996

Mutual Rescue: Disabled Animals and Their Caretakers

In this paper, we explore how caretakers experience living with disabled companion animals. Drawing on interviews, as well as narratives on websites and other support groups, we examine ways in which caretakers describe the lives of animals they live with, and their various disabilties. The animals were mostly dogs, plus a few cats, with a range of physical disabilities; almost all had been rehomed, often from places specializing in homing disabled animals. Three themes emerged from analysis of these texts: first, respondents drew heavily on the common narrative of disabled individuals as heroes, often noted in disability rights literature – while simultaneously drawing on, and challenging, ideas of disability as incapacity. The second theme was love and empathy. Several of our interviewees spoke of empathy being enhanced thro We discuss these caretakers\u27 stories of animal disability in relation to both studies of human-animal relationships, and to disability rights, as well as to ideas about what constitutes care. What these narratives emphasize is a particular sense of sharing and reciprocity, felt through the body, especially when caretakers spoke of their own ill-health. They saw disability – the animals\u27 or their own – not as limiting, but as enabling both to flourish within caring relationship

Project Re•center dot Vision: disability at the edges of representation

The representational history of disabled people can largely be characterized as one of being put on display or hidden away. Self-representations have been a powerful part of the disability rights and culture movement, but recently scholars have analysed the ways in which these run the risk of creating a ‘single story’ that centres the experiences of white, western, physically disabled men. Here we introduce and theorize with Project Re•Vision, our arts-based research project that resists this singularity by creating and centring, without normalizing, representations that have previously been relegated to the margins. We draw from body becoming and new materialist theory to explore the dynamic ways in which positionality illuminates bodies of difference and open into a discussion about what is at stake when these stories are let loose into the world

Nonhumans in participatory design

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines the role that nonhumans play in participatory design. Research and practice concerned with participatory design mostly focuses on human participants, however nonhumans also participate in the design process and can play a significant role in shaping the process. This article focuses on how nonhumans participate in the design process. An empirical case study is used to illustrate how humans and nonhumans assemble to form networks in order to effect a design. Nonhumans increase the level of participation in a design process. The case study reveals how nonhumans help to maintain, destroy or strengthen networks by substituting, mediating and communicating with humans and often, in doing so, making human actors more or less visible in the process. Nonhumans play a part in configuring the social. Revealing the presence and roles of nonhumans is an important means through which to increase the democracy within the design process

Hybrids, rights and their proliferation

Working out the concept of rights is a complicated business, which at least keeps philosophers occupied. Not so long ago, one of us would have been denied the right to vote, on the grounds of her gender. Yet now, at the turn of the millennium, she is far from sure that we have come very far on the question of women\u27s rights. And if women, or minorities, or anyone else who is human can sometimes be denied rights, then how much more likely that non-humans will be? Yet extending the concept of rights to non-human animals is increasingly being taken seriously. It is debated in academic journals, and forms the basis for a growing activism. The publication of books arguing in favour of extending rights to at least some animals has proliferated.1 But the idea also has its critics. Some criticisms come from those who simply wish to keep nonhuman animals out of any moral or political agenda.2 The starting point of this article is the critique of the idea of rights, from the perspective of those who are animal advocates3; in particular, we start from the premise that the concept of \u27rights\u27 is too rooted in idealisation of the individual and autonomy. Such idealisation can be found in claims about nonhuman animals. But, we would argue, this marginalises any concept of relationality. In discussing relationality, we aim to address the ways in which relations between human and nonhuman animals are embedded in broader networks of inter-relations (that range from the evolutionary to the local and cultural). Those relations are also a product of the heterogeneous forms of communication between individual human and animal, especially in the case of companion animals