Carrie Friese: "More-than-Human Humanitarianism: Bioscience, Care and the Problem of Sacrificial Logics".
Carrie Friese’s research is in medical sociology and science and technology studies, with a focus on reproduction across humans and animals. Her initial research focused on the use of assisted reproductive technologies for human reproduction in the context of infertility. She then explored the development of interspecies nuclear transfer (aka cloning) for endangered species preservation in zoos.
Building on her research, she am currently completing a book entitled “More-than-human Humanitarianism: Care, Science and Inequity.” This book asks what laboratory animals look like through the lens of humanitarianism, and what humanitarianism looks like through the lens of laboratory animals in order to analyse the benefits and limitations of the logics and practices of relating that are not necessarily visible through rights-based discourses.
Time and place: – ,
Blindern, Georg Sverdrups Hus, Undervisningsrom 1
More-than-Human Humanitarianism: Bioscience, Care and the Problem of Sacrificial Logics
This talk offers an empirical exploration of a double bind, focusing on those animals that serve as surrogate humans in biomedical research and the people who both care for and kill these animals. This double bind is not located in animal rights; nor is it looking to human rights. Rather, this talk examines an ethos of humanitarianism that is practiced at its margins: in work with laboratory animals in Britain. Care and compassion for a distant other who suffers, which is central to humanitarianism and that shapes work with laboratory animals today and historically, is both a necessary and a necessarily problematic set of practices and ideas.
The question this talk asks is: what do laboratory animals look like through the lens of humanitarianism and what does humanitarianism look like through the lens of laboratory animals? In asking this question, I build upon established arguments that the human of humanitarianism, human rights and humanism does not guarantee a freedom from violence or discrimination within the species because the very concept itself is a hierarchy, one that allows for violence and discrimination as a dividing strategy (Cubukcu, 2017; Wolfe, 2010). I also build upon critiques of the power relations that humanitarianism has been complicit in, producing and reproducing colonization, racialization and capitalism (Fassin, 2012). Where this talk diverges from this critical scholarship, however, is in the analytic approach, which works by amplifying fleeting moments of care and compassion that I experienced as part of ethnographic research to resonate more general concerns regarding inequalities, suffering and injustice. In the process, I seek to expand humanitarian concerns with biomedicine to go beyond its products (e.g., pharmaceuticals) to also include its everyday, knowledge production practices that include other-than-human species.
PublishedJuly 25, 2023 12:38 PM - Last modifiedJune 10, 2024 5:42 AM
