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Paper short abstract

This untold story addresses the ethnographer’s difficulty in recognising octopuses as interlocutors during fieldwork in oceanographic labs, while navigating ethical dilemmas of studying the controversial case of octopus farming and imagining how to share these dilemmas with non-human actors in STS.

Paper long abstract

This presentation stems from ongoing PhD research focusing on the ethical controversies surrounding octopus welfare that have emerged from recent techno-scientific innovations enabling octopus farming.

Adopting the form of a confessional tale, it reflects on a dimension of fieldwork—based on ethnographic research in oceanographic laboratories in Galicia and Catalonia (Spain)—that revisits a persistent concern in STS (Latour, 2004; Haraway, 2006): the challenge of recognising non-human actors, in this case the octopus, as interlocutors.

This tale narrates how such difficulty restricts the possibility of establishing reciprocal relations with octopuses, even though they remain the ethical centre of this research. Thus, while relationships with human actors, such as bioscientists, open spaces for exchange where the ethnographer’s ethical dilemmas—concerning how to embody a research that speaks of an ethical controversy—can be shared, the absence of genuine encounters with octopuses generates a specific form of methodological vulnerability. This vulnerability, which has not been made explicit in previous academic disseminations of this work, points to the difficulty of situating the ethnographer’s ethical positioning alongside the non-human beings encountered in the field.

By bringing this untold story to the foreground and making explicit the researcher’s ethical dilemmas during fieldwork, the presentation also invites a reimagining of methodological practices, emphasising the need to attend to the absences and silences between octopuses and the ethnographer as a way of recognising shared vulnerabilities, transforming them into matters of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2014) and into strategies of resilience in STS ethnography alongside the non-humans.