Working with Models of Ageing: Entanglements of Human and Animal Health and Wellbeing (co-authored with Carrie Friese, LSE)

Description

This paper offers a case study of how human and animal health becomes entangled as animal models are used in biology to understand human ageing. We draw on ethnographic observations undertaken at a prestigious UK institute of life and molecular sciences. We focus on care and practice in their mouse house, and extend our analysis to how scientists’ and animals’ bodies become entangled in the day-to-day practices of doing the science of ageing. We explore these entanglements within the interdisciplinary scholarship on modelling and animal models. We focus on the ways in which human and animal health becomes entangled through the specific and local practices of animal modelling, but in ways that exceed the designed forms of experimentation. In other words, we explore the nonscalable elements involved in the scalar practice of animal modelling in biomedical research particularly in terms of the material doings of matters of care (Puig 2011).

Period	24 Oct 2017
Held at	Life Sciences & Society Lab, Centre of Sociological Research (CeSO), KU Leuven, Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven, Belgium, Belgium
Degree of Recognition	International