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- Convenor:
-
Daan Jansen
(University of York)
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- 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.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Drawing from multispecies ethnographic research conducted in New York City, I explore the ways that rats’ home-making practices pester understandings and knowledge of ownership and property, belonging, and resilience.
Paper long abstract
Through multispecies ethnographic research conducted in New York City during the summer of 2025, I explore the ways that rats’ home-making practices pester understandings of ownership and property, belonging, and resilience. Whether it’s a burrow or a borough, we are all making our homes somewhere. Rat home-making practices confuse where the NYC borough ends and the rat burrow begins, highlighting the tensions created through conflicting home-making and place-making practices. Using Kafka’s The Burrow as a speculative starting point to explore a moment in the field where a pest professional and I encountered a rat burrow built on the lawn of an apartment complex, I consider the ways that human and rat home-making practices confuse a clear demarcation of host and guest, invited and uninvited. By taking the perspective of Kafka’s burrowing creature, we are called upon to consider our responsibility to the Other – as host to rats (in our home) and as guests to rats (when we encounter rat burrows), and how we produce knowledge of these categories through ideas of private property. Next, I consider how rats’ home-making practices confuse ideas of belonging in public spaces by building their burrow within the cracks of hostile architecture. I conclude with the observation of rats making their home within bait stations, the black box that houses the poison meant to kill them, to suggest that the small acts of caring for and decorating a place that is actively trying to kill you is a form of resistance and resilience.
Paper short abstract
PSG supporters’ chant calling Marseillais “rats” draws on imaginaries of infestation and dirt. Based on multispecies ethnography in a deprived neighborhood, I explore how animalisation links rats and racialised residents, and how rethinking rats as coinhabitants challenges these hierarchies.
Paper long abstract
In the mud there are rats(#1)/In the sewers there are rats/They are everywhere, the rats/They are the Marseillais! This chant, sung by Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) supporters, not only reflects sporting hostility towards Olympique de Marseille (OM), but also refers to the idea of an invasive rat population in Marseille(#2). Intended as an insult to Marseille's human inhabitants, it is based on the process of animalisation(#3), and therefore inferiorization. It also contributes to the racialisation of certain human groups, especially in the context of a cosmopolitan city like Marseille, since the term 'ratons' was used to refer to colonised populations during French colonisation in North Africa. The very disqualification of the rat is what makes this process effective: its image is associated with dirt, sewers, contagion and danger, making it a 'harmful' animal and an undesirable presence in our spaces. Taking an environmental justice and multispecies ethnography(#4) stance, I will present my preliminary findings on the relationship between rats and humans in a deprived neighbourhood of Marseille where I live. While rats are the subject of intervention policies by city health and sanitation services (as pests to be killed), media coverage (as invasive and dirty) and scientific experimentation (as laboratory rats), they are rarely considered as inhabitants(#5), let alone as sentient beings with their own subjective experiences. How do social inequalities in housing intersect with, reinforce or exacerbate the disregard for certain species? How do these social inequalities relate to processes of animalisation that target marginalised and racialised populations?
#keywords
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how eighteenth and nineteenth century natural histories presented and understood brown rats as a species novel to Europe, as well as declining black rat populations.
Paper long abstract
Brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) arrived in Europe in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century and quickly became one of the dominant murid species on the continent, driving black rats (Rattus rattus) to local extinction in many areas. Their "invasion", although predating the concept of invasivity, did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. In this era of growing professionalisation and standardisation of natural history, many natural histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth century commented on these novel rats, and they came to be understood by some as a separate species. This period also featured many differing, competing meanings of the species concept. The arrival of brown rats troubled some definitions and confirmed others. This paper explores how brown rats featured in eighteenth century natural histories and how they challenged ideas of taxonomical nomenclature and animal behaviour. I trace how various natural historians viewed brown rats, and what stories of their spread through Europe were in circulation at the time. Brown rats' arrival cannot be understood separately from the related decline in black rat populations, and both will be considered in relation to one another.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores an invisibilised mode of knowing rats: how pest controllers learn to become sensible to urban rats’ presence. The paper thus aims to discuss epistemic diversity at play in human-rat entanglements that shape contemporary urban pest control and the ethics of animal killing.
Paper long abstract
Pest control history is closely associated with the techno-scientific project aiming to "erase" so-called pest animals from the urban experience (Biehler, 2013). Science studies have shown the tension and coexistence between ecological and chemical approaches during the 20th century, stressing the role of different forms of scientific expertise on the war on rats (Keiner, 2005). Yet, the everyday knowledge of workers who routinely perform pest control remains invisible. Following an ecological approach to the perception of the environment (Ingold, 2000), I explore the knowledge regime of pest controllers through which they sense, perceive and incorporate rats’ agency in their management practices.
From an ethnography of the municipal department in charge of rat control in Paris, I describe how workers become attentive to forms of animal presence when they inspect potential infestations, tracking material traces generated by animals' actions. I show how this selective regime of knowledge articulates with scientific modes of knowing and killing animals, and its resonances with animal tracking (Gagnol et al. 2018) and maintenance work (Denis & Pontille, 2025). Through their attunement to pests’ lively worlds, pest controllers disclose micro-geographies of urban neglect. This relation, in which pests become both targets and indicators, is mobilised to frame “urban problems” (decaying infrastructure, waste management, etc.) and reorder urban space. By exploring an invisibilised form of knowledge production on rats, I address the articulation between epistemological and biopolitical dimensions of urban ecological ordering, and offer a reflection on the troubled ethics of multispecies entanglements with proliferating animals