Paper short abstract:

This paper tracks how methods and devices for biomonitoring chemical environments using mollusk behavior were developed using dreissenid mussels —icons of biological invasion— after the 1970s. Mussel-monitoring’s intimacies usefully refigure multispecies relations athwart invasion discourses.

Paper long abstract:

Zebra mussels (Dreissena spp.) are small, gregarious bivalve mollusks that have, in the past few decades, become discursive icons of biological invasion. Although biological invasion has been problematized across the environmental humanities, zebra mussels have received little critical attention. Due to the renewal of nativist politics combined with enhanced species detection technologies, zebra mussels are increasingly engaged with and reconfigured. Drawing from methods in the history of science and critical science studies, I focus on one particular technoscientific engagement with these controversial mollusks — their use as biomonitoring sentinel technologies. After the 1970s, freshwater pollution fueled fears of potable water contamination and environmental degradation. Costly and imprecise physical-chemical monitoring necessitated the innovation of biological methods for detecting chemical contamination. Mussel enrolled in monitoring systems proved sensitive to broad varieties of contaminants at low doses, and displayed easily interpretable stress behaviors. Focusing especially on one system, the Dreissena-monitor, this paper tracks how dreissenids and other mussels became entangled with projects of active and passive biomonitoring. Practices of mussel-monitoring were developed in local Dutch and German contexts before being circulated among diverse global sites over the late-20th century, even motivating a complex aspirational project of worldwide passive mussel-monitoring. As biomonitors, mussels like dreissenids augment human sensation of chemical environments and, in the process, suffuse our relations with shared environments with varied hopes and anxieties. And, remade in these technoscientific frames, dreissenids join other organisms in provoking a broad vision of biological invasion by tracking shifting expectations of multispecies and other more-than-human relations.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores three instances where technology made giant squid comprehensible to the public: an 1873 photograph, a museum taxidermy display in 2000, and submersible camera footage captured in 2004. It sheds light on the interplay between science, technology, and our perception of marine life.

Paper long abstract:

Our centuries-long fascination with giant squid has been fueled by scientists’ limited observations of these elusive creatures. Only recently have technological developments allowed researchers to study these animals in greater detail. This paper investigates three instances in which technology was used to make giant squid more comprehensible to the public. In the first, Rev. Harvey Moses' 1873 photograph of a giant squid captured near Newfoundland provided tangible proof of its existence. In the second, a giant squid caught off New Zealand's coast was preserved and displayed in a Paris museum in 2000. In the third, in 2004, Japanese scientists captured the first images of a living giant squid in its natural environment using submersible cameras. This paper explores how accidental encounters and technology have shaped public perception of giant squid and their habitat, informing changing narratives about them, and transforming their image from “monstrous kraken” to a species in need of conservation. It provides a fresh perspective on the role of marine animals in developing public understandings of the depths of the ocean, and on the interplays between science, technology, and the natural world. This account aims to contribute to animal and more-than-human history, showing how unintentional human-squid encounters, as well as changing technological instruments, influence public perceptions and narratives of the marine environment. In the case of giant squid, emotive characteristics continue to be assigned to these animals, often anthropomorphizing them in ways that reflect human fears, hopes, and curiosities.

Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the role of animal navigation research and animals in the making of the postwar global communication nexus. It shows that animal researchers were not just active users of satellite technology. Animal behavior also served as sources of inspiration for navigation engineers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper highlights the role of animal navigation research - and to some degree animals - in the making of the postwar global communication nexus. In the historiography on globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, the emergence of global communication and positioning networks, increasingly based on satellite technology, has played a dominant role. Historians of global environments, too, have tapped into this narrative. Authors such as Sabine Höhler, Jennifer Gabrys, or Sebastian Grevsmül have discussed how global technological interconnections contributed to the emergence of planetary thinking that compared life on Earth to that on a carefully maintained space vessel. In this context, animals and biologists have mostly been studied as users of globalized technological systems, for instance in the case of animal tracking by satellite, a practice that has become increasingly important in wildlife management in the 1970s (Benson, 2011).

This paper aims to shift the focus back to animals and animal researchers as actors in postwar and Cold War processes of technological globalization. It shows that animal researchers were not just active users of technology. Their work on animal navigation also served as sources of inspiration for engineers. While the concrete biological mechanisms underlying various animals’ navigation skills are still debated amongst biologists, hypotheses, and visions for their potential applicability to global human navigation, as well as the perceived need for cross-disciplinary coalitions on the issue of navigation, have been tenacious in both the animal navigation and engineering literature.

Paper short abstract:

Bird vagrants are individuals that end up in the migratory flock of another species. This paper follows a red-breasted goose vagrant to the small Norwegian island of Herøy, whose appearance amongst a flock of barnacle geese troubles normative categories such as species, habitat, and migration.

Paper long abstract:

At some point during the barnacle goose’s 2023 springtime migration to their breeding grounds in Svalbvard, they picked up what is known as a vagrant amongst ornithologists. On the island of Herøy in Norway, locals began reporting sightings of a red-breasted goose amongst the flock that were stopping to feed for several weeks. Breeding in Arctic Siberia and wintering in Azerbaijan, the red-breasted goose was a long way off course, and his colourful markings amongst the barnies’ sea of black and white meant he stood out. Herøy itself has long been a site of tension between locals and geese, with the agricultural community employing scaring tactics – including the school brass band – to drive the barnies from their crops. Yet the red-breasted goose became a cause for celebration, with locals expressing delight at sightings, and many heading out with binoculars for the very first time.

Leg ringing remains the most common method for tracking bird migrations. Goose counts take place in Herøy every summer by conservation organisations seeking to balance the needs of the goose with the needs of the farmers, and reading rings is a key aspect of checking the birds are in the right place. The red-breasted vagrant was distinctly out of place, yet quickly became a local celebrity. In this talk, I will interrogate how tracking technologies such as leg ringing mediate a more-than-human sense of place, and how normative categories such as species, habitat, and migration can be troubled by a single, red-breasted goose.

Paper short abstract:

Guide dogs were one of the main mobility aids developed for disabled veterans after the First World War. The interactions at the first guide dog schools (1916-1939) show how trainers, guide dogs and visually impaired people related and how agency shifted between them.

Paper long abstract:

Guide dogs have been part of human history for a long time, but only were trained systematically from 1916 onwards as a result of the many German soldiers that were blinded during the First World War. The years after the war were a key period for the development of mobility aids, including guide dogs and the white mobility cane. In guide dog training, issues of dependency, agency and materiality come together that play a role in both disability and animal history, making it productive to combine both fields. I used praxiography to answer the question how visual disability was enacted in the specific practices of guide dog training from 1916 until 1939 in the guide dog schools of the Deutscher Verein für Sanitätshunde, the Verein für deutsche Schäferhunde, L’Oeil qui Voit, the Nederlands Geleidehonden Fonds and the Institut für Umweltforschung. The interactions that took place ‘on the ground’ between the trainer, visually impaired person and dog in the coming into being of the guide dog as a mobility aid are the focus of the research. The attribution of agency over the three main actors I study shifted over the course of the interbellum. From a passive presence, the visually impaired person became an active participant of guide dog training. Simultaneously, the dog was considered a living being with personality rather than a well-trained machine. Visual disability continued to be a problem, but it became an obstacle to overcome instead of a fact of life to work around.

Paper short abstract:

With a focus on the North American West, this paper explores how fences, erected for the purpose of livestock agriculture, became sites of multispecies encounter, as birds, insects, and small mammals adapted to technologies of animal confinement in different environments.

Paper long abstract:

Scientists recognize that animal agriculture is a leading contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. But animal agriculture has affected the environment in other, less direct ways than through emissions, and farmed animals are not the only animals to be impacted by technologies of livestock confinement. The spread of animal agriculture was attended by the spread of technologies of animal confinement; these technologies transformed environments and animal habitats in consequential, and underexamined, ways.

One such technology of confinement is the fence. Wildlife ecologists have explored how fences have disrupted animal migration routes, and historians have examined fences as legal artifacts. But as physical and technical artifacts, fences have received relatively little scholarly attention. This paper considers fences as sites of multispecies encounter; assemblages of wood and metal that prevented farmed animals from roaming, fences were also sites where insects burrowed, birds perched, and small mammals nested.

The multispecies nature of fences was addressed in trade literature, publications by the US Forest Service, and by wood preserving organizations. Drawing on such sources from the Forest History Society in Durham, North Carolina, this paper demonstrates that technologies of animal agriculture were as much concerned with managing non-human life along the fence line as with managing the bodies of “livestock.”

Paper short abstract:

Reindeer fences have been a revolutionary innovation in herding, more than that of snowmobiles. This presentation aims to explore changes and transitions in the use of fences in Sámi herding, and compare these historic developments with current developments in the Háldi Transboundary Area

Paper long abstract:

Reindeer fences have been the most significant innovation in reindeer herding, rather than the introduction of snowmobiles (Pelto 1973). With the building of fences around their pastures, Sámi reindeer herders adapted to the enforcement of national borders as well as Finnish administrative requirements (Reindeer herding co-operatives law) and in so doing, established a new reindeer herding management system. This transition facilitated the continuation of reindeer herding livelihood under a new management regime. This presentation aims to explore the economic changes and social transitions that the introduction of fences has brought to Finnish Sámi reindeer herding, and compare these historic, partly continuing developments with current developments, where the building of fences has so far been marginal, as in Norway. In the context of transboundary conservation parks, as with the Háldi Transboundary Area (FIN-N), the diverse herding management regimes and their use of fences inside the parks may play an important role in the parks’ aim to preserve wilderness and biodiversity.

Paper short abstract:

The presentation examines loose housing in milk production in 1950s Finland. Loose housing was celebrated as a technological innovation in which the habits of cows were integrated into the structure and techniques of dairy farming.

Paper long abstract:

The post World War Two era in agriculture is usually regarded as detrimental to farm animals. The ethos of rationalization, efficiency and increasing volumes turned animal production into factory like processes where the agency of the animal diminished. However, in the 1950s Finnish rationalizers of agriculture strongly promoted loose housing as the most efficient way to produce milk. The idea was that barns and farms should be designed to make use of the agency of the cows rather than restrict them. This idea had originated in the United States, but it found especially strong resonance in the 1950s Finland, with loose housing heralded as the agricultural innovation of the decade.

By examining the loose housing enthusiasm in the 1950s Finland, this presentation shows how the technology produced by the logic of rationalization and efficiency of modern agriculture was not straightforwardly oppressive of animals. Loose housing was celebrated as a technological innovation in which the habits of cows were integrated into the structure and techniques of dairy farming. It was regarded as a solution both to the large workload of farmers and poor living conditions of cows in conventional barns. The example suggests that the technological development of modern animal production should not be seen merely as brutality of efficiency and rationalization. This same logic could bring out relationships between animals and technology that were markedly different from the well-known factory farming facilities.

Paper short abstract:

In 1867, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace drew an analogy between the nests of birds and human dwellings. This paper argues that birds' nests and their study (the science of caliology) were an important part of human-animal relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

In an 1867 essay titled ‘The Philosophy of Birds' Nests’, British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace drew an analogy between the nests of birds and human dwellings. Both birds and people, he argued, drew on the materials around them to build their homes and learnt how to improve these structures by experience and imitation. Scholars have documented numerous cases in which non-human animals have become part of human technological systems. Less work, however, has been done on animal technology and how structures like birds' nests were understood. This paper argues that birds' nests and their study (the science of caliology) were an important – if short-lived – part of human-animal relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing upon ornithological archives, books, and periodicals, this paper explores how and why the comparison between birds' nests and human dwellings was made. Wallace and his supporters recognised that nests were not static constructs and were often integrated into human dwellings and infrastructure. This flexibility suggested that birds possessed reason and did not operate on instinct alone. However, the attempt to construct a comparative psychology based on the technological sophistication of homes led to the replication of the colonial era divide between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ peoples. Drawing closer to animals meant rehashing racial stereotypes.