Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Daan Jansen
(University of York)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Rats have a particularly complicated relationship with humans, being both admired and vilified. This panel invites papers that ask how rats contribute and have contributed to knowledge production, both as verminised villains and domesticated laboratory friends.
Description
Rats have long played an important role in the formation of scientific understandings of the natural and human worlds. From the description of black rats by Gessner in the seventeenth century, to the introduction of brown rats in Europe in the eighteenth century, to their domestication in the nineteenth century and their extensive use in laboratories in the twentieth century, libraries could be filled with the scientific publications published about or with the assistance of these creatures.
Studies into rats have been conducted for many different purposes, such as facilitating their eradication through the development of chemical pesticides, understanding the spread of diseases such as the plague, better understanding animal and human behaviour, advancing medical knowledge, and more. The troublesome and frequently thwarted task of rats’ expulsion has for centuries been an important and lucrative terrain for the production of rat-related knowledge. In laboratories, their position as verminised animals has allowed for the exploitation of their bodies and their minds, leading to complex entanglements of rats as the subject of admiration and vilification.
Rats have drawn growing interest both in public and academic discourses, with surging urban rat populations stimulating sensationalised accounts, and the complicated web of human-rat relationalities becoming a topic of debate among philosophers, historians, anthropologists and more.
This panel draws together scholars from a wide range of disciplines who study the production of knowledge about rats and the use of rats for the production of knowledge. It seeks to interrogate the various ways that rats have contributed to, and been subject to, scientific endeavours. In doing so, it will deepen understanding of the interspecies nature of the production of knowledge.