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Paper short abstract

This paper places itself at the margins of the self-evidently human and compares negotiations of life’s worth in a neonatal intensive care unit, an animal laboratory, and a dementia nursing home in Denmark.

Paper long abstract

This paper places itself at the margins of the self-evidently human and compares negotiations of life's worth in a neonatal intensive care unit, an animal laboratory, and a dementia nursing home in Denmark. Through ethnographic analysis we trace practices around liminal lives that cannot enact "autonomy" and are heavily dependent on others to substitute them. The comparisons we employ do not travel over great distances, but across categories of newborn and old, human and animal. This multispecies perspective not only provides a lens for investigating how worth is enacted and how interdependence conditions the worthy human. More profoundly, in moving across species and spaces we become alerted to the porosity of the category of the worthy human in time and collectivity.