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Paper short abstract

The paper examines how veterinary expertise is assembled under bioeconomic constraints as the Danish pig industry enacts its visions of a specific pathogen-free future. It foregrounds vaccine practices in veterinary work and how they blur conceptions of porcine health.

Paper long abstract

Intensive pig production exacerbates not only the scale and scope of health problems that veterinarians must respond to but also entails volatile markets and production contingencies that further complexify veterinary work. This paper explores how veterinary expertise is assembled in practice under such complexities. By engaging debates on immunity and veterinary expertise, I contribute empirically by sketching out new problems and strategic roles for the veterinary profession, and conceptually by advancing a veterinary bioeconomy.

The paper examines how state and corporate actors enact a specific pathogen free future in Denmark by eradicating the widespread and pernicious Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome. We foreground private vets charged with enacting this future and aligning flow of viruses, pigs and people on and, critically, between herds as coordinators. This role is imbued with compromises that arise in between responsibilities to individual farmers and their pigs on the one hand and to state and corporate actors’ obligations on the other. Here vaccination protocols emerge as a key point of contention. Empirically, we first show that vaccination differ and how this variation halts PRRS-eradication. We then explain why variations exist, by paying attention to the situated troubles that vets navigate across more-than-human mobilities, farm design and export markets.

The paper is a work in progress, but presently we are thinking about changes in the industry as radical modification. Radical modification means to capture not only sectorial conceitedness, but also the exertions and politics of making microscopic things matter within an industry characterized by ravaging bigness.