Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the emergence of a “culture of care” in laboratory animal research as a form of affective work shaping multispecies relations in the lab. Drawing on interviews and ethnography, it examines affects in animal experimentation amid growing non-animal methods.

Paper long abstract

Discussions about a “culture of care” in laboratory animal research mark a shift away from framing the harm done to experimental animals as necessary “sacrifices” for advancing human health. Instead, they emphasize a mutualism connected to affective work, in which human and animal welfare are understood as interconnected.

In this paper, we identify and analyse a shift in policy advocacy, as well as in the education and training of researchers and animal care workers, toward explicitly harnessing the management of emotions, talked about by the researchers as a “culture of care.” Drawing on interviews and ethnographic research on scientific knowledge production conducted with both animal models and non-animal or alternative models, as well as interviews with animal rights experts and activists, this paper examines the introduction of explicit affective work in basic and translational bioscience research. This affective work is presented as mutually beneficial to both humans and non-human animals.

We situate these developments alongside a push toward developing non-animal or alternative models in laboratory research. The paper draws from STS scholarship on affects in scientific work and multispecies entanglements in the laboratory to theorize further the mobilization of the affective entanglements in the animal laboratory as tools to enact better more-than-human bioscience research. Nevertheless, this research still relies on the use of animal bodies, and can be seen as a justification for the continued use of animal experimentation at a time when non-animal models are on the rise.