Developing a Collaborative Agenda for Humanities and Social Scientific Research on Laboratory Animal Science and Welfare.

Improving laboratory animal science and welfare requires both new scientific research and insights from research in the humanities and social sciences. Whilst scientific research provides evidence to replace, reduce and refine procedures involving laboratory animals (the '3Rs'), work in the humanities and social sciences can help understand the social, economic and cultural processes that enhance or impede humane ways of knowing and working with laboratory animals. However, communication across these disciplinary perspectives is currently limited, and they design research programmes, generate results, engage users, and seek to influence policy in different ways. To facilitate dialogue and future research at this interface, we convened an interdisciplinary group of 45 life scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars, non-governmental organisations and policy-makers to generate a collaborative research agenda. This drew on methods employed by other agenda-setting exercises in science policy, using a collaborative and deliberative approach for the identification of research priorities. Participants were recruited from across the community, invited to submit research questions and vote on their priorities. They then met at an interactive workshop in the UK, discussed all 136 questions submitted, and collectively defined the 30 most important issues for the group. The output is a collaborative future agenda for research in the humanities and social sciences on laboratory animal science and welfare. The questions indicate a demand for new research in the humanities and social sciences to inform emerging discussions and priorities on the governance and practice of laboratory animal research, including on issues around: international harmonisation, openness and public engagement, 'cultures of care', harm-benefit analysis and the future of the 3Rs. The process outlined below underlines the value of interdisciplinary exchange for improving communication across different research cultures and identifies ways of enhancing the effectiveness of future research at the interface between the humanities, social sciences, science and science policy.

Abyssal intimacies and temporalities of care: How (not) to care about deformed leaf bugs in the aftermath of Chernobyl.

Prompted by a classroom discussion on knowledge politics in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, this article offers a reading of Hugh Raffles' Insectopedia entry on Chernobyl. In that entry, Raffles describes how Swiss science-artist and environmental activist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects, studies, and paints morphologically deformed leaf bugs that she finds in the proximity of nuclear power plants. In exploring how to begin to care about beings, such as leaf bugs, this article proposes a notion of care that combines an intimate knowledge practice with an ethical relationship to more-than-human others. Jacques Derrida's notion of 'abyssal intimacy' is central to such a combination. Hesse-Honegger's research practices enact and her paintings depict an 'abyssal intimacy' that deconstructs the oppositions between concerns about human suffering and compassion for seemingly irrelevant insects and between knowledge politics and ethics. At the heart of such a careful knowledge production is a fundamental passivity, based on a shared vulnerability. An abyssal intimacy is not something we ought to recognize; rather, it issues from particular practices of care that do not identify their subjects of care in advance. Caring or becoming affected thus entails the dissociation of affection not only from the humanist subject, but also from movements in time: from direct helping action and from the assumption that advocacy necessarily means speaking for an other, usually assumed to be inferior.

Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer): phantomatic ontologies, indeterminacy, and responsibility in toxic microbiology.

Based on an analysis of an ongoing scientific-political controversy over the toxicity of a fish-killing microorganism, this paper explores the relationship between responsibility and nonhuman contributions to agency in experimental practices. Research into the insidious effects of the dinoflagellates Pfiesteria piscicida (the fish killer) that thrive in waters over-enriched with nutrients, has received considerable attention by both the media and government agencies concerned with public and environmental health. After nearly two decades of research, the question of whether Pfiesteria can be regarded the 'causative agent' of massive fish kills in the estuaries of the US mid-Atlantic could not be scientifically settled. In contrast to policymakers, who attribute the absence of a scientific consensus to gaps in scientific knowledge and uncertainties regarding the identity and behavior of the potentially toxic dinoflagellates, I propose that an inseparable entanglement of Pfiesteria's identities and their toxic activities challenges conventional notions of causality that seek to establish a connection between independent events in linear time. Building on Karen Barad's framework of agential realism, I argue for a move from epistemological uncertainties to ontological indeterminacies that follow from Pfiesteria's contributions to agency, as the condition for responsible and objective science. In tracking discrepant experimental enactments of Pfiesteria that have been mobilized as evidence for and against their toxicity, I investigate how criteria for what counts as evidence get built into the experimental apparatuses and suggest that the joint possibilities of causality and responsibility vary with the temporalities of the objects enacted. This discussion seeks to highlight a thorough entanglement of epistemic/ontological concerns with the ecological/political relevance of particular experiments. Finally, I introduce a new kind of scientific object that--borrowing from Derrida--I call phantomatic. Phantoms don't emerge as such, but appear as traces and are associated with specific matters of concern.