Abstract
Animal research remains a practice marked by controversy and moral dilemma. However, UK science-society dialogues on the issue are increasingly managed via one-way transmissions of information which construct publics as passive and attribute their concerns to a lack of ‘correct’ knowledge. Challenging such assumptions, this paper questions how and why people actively manage their interactions with animal research through entangled practices of knowing and caring. Based on an analysis of writing from the UK Mass Observation Project, this paper explores difficulties and discomforts associated with animal research which can cause strategic withdrawals from engagements with the topic. In doing so, it extends existing concepts of ‘uncomfortable knowledge’ (Rayner) and ‘strategic ignorance’ (McGoey) to develop novel concepts of ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘strategic’ care. Finally, in examining desires to respond to animal research, I engage with Haraway’s notion of ‘response-ability’ to introduce the concepts of ‘responsive caring’ and ‘responsive knowing’
Highlights
Dominant modes of examining the views of publics on animal research have tended to concentrate on assessing ‘what’ publics know about the issue, weighing this against the scientific ‘facts’, and judging civic contributions as either scientifically congruent or not
This paper has argued that relating to animal research is a process of both knowing and caring
The concept of ‘uncomfortable care’ was used to discuss why animal research can be an acutely uncomfortable topic, touching on the competing tensions it raises between different care relations
Summary
Dominant modes of examining the views of publics on animal research have tended to concentrate on assessing ‘what’ publics know about the issue, weighing this against the scientific ‘facts’, and judging civic contributions as either scientifically congruent or not. Despite the thorough critique levelled at this ‘deficit-model’ approach to lay understandings of techno-scientific issues (Millar and Wynne, 1988), which, often concern more than just the ‘technoscientific’, such an approach persists in UK science-society dialogues around animal research. Seeking to address this situation, this paper instead explores the practices of knowing and not-knowing and caring and notcaring about animal research, asking how knowledge of the topic is perceived and negotiated and what role care plays in interactions with it. In seeking to regain control over societal opinion on animal research the Concordat encourages bioscience institutions to better communicate with ‘the public’ about how and why they use animals
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