Critiquing imaginaries of 'the public' in UK dialogue around animal research: Insights from the Mass Observation Project

Between animal research and animal welfare: Analysing the openness practices of UK Named Veterinary Surgeons

The use of animals as scientific models is argued to be crucial for producing new scientific and medical knowledge and clinical treatments. However, animal research continues to raise socio-ethical concerns. In recent years, there has been a push for openness amongst the life science community, with the aim of increasing the transparency of animal research to wider publics. Yet, how this push for openness is experienced by those responsible for the care and welfare of research animals requires further study. This paper draws upon qualitative interviews with Named Veterinary Surgeons (NVS) in the UK and explores how they practise openness, avoid openness, and, at times, challenge the way their role is represented within openness agendas. Overall, this social scientific analysis reveals that the current openness agenda has the potential to create tensions for professionals, as they seek to manage regulatory and public imaginaries of the veterinary identity alongside the animal research controversy. The paper concludes by arguing for a culture of dialogue, where openness includes allowing those with responsibilities for animal welfare to express ambivalence or concern about their own role. Finally, the paper calls for sustained academic work on relations between the veterinary profession and wider society, particularly areas that involve contested practices in which care and harm may coincide.

Two Worlds in One: What 'Counts' as Animal Advocacy for Veterinarians Working in UK Animal Research?

The concept of advocacy is of increasing importance to the veterinary profession internationally. However, there are concerns around the ambiguity and complexity of acting as an advocate in practice. This paper explores what 'animal advocacy' involves for veterinarians working in the domain of animal research, where they are responsible for advising on health and welfare. In focusing on the identity of veterinarians working in an arena of particular contestation, this paper provides empirical insights into how veterinarians themselves perform their role as an 'animal advocate'. Analysing interview data with 33 UK 'Named Veterinary Surgeons', this paper therefore examines what 'counts' as animal advocacy for veterinarians, considering the way their role as animal advocate is performed. Focusing on the themes of 'mitigating suffering', 'speaking for', and 'driving change' as three central ways in which veterinarians working in animal research facilities act as animal advocates, we draw out some of the complexities for veterinarians working in areas where animal care and harm coexist. Finally, we conclude by calling for further empirical exploration of animal advocacy in other veterinary domains and for more critical attention to the wider social systems which produce the need for such advocacy.

Negotiating the necessity of biomedical animal use through relations with vulnerability

In the UK, claims are often made that public support for animal research is stronger when such use is categorised as for medical purposes. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of writing from the Mass Observation Project, a national writing project documenting everyday life in Britain, this paper suggests that the necessity of using animals for medical research is not a given but understood relationally through interactions with inherent vulnerability. This paper stresses the ubiquity of ambivalence towards uses of animals for medical research, complicating what is meant by claims that such use is ‘acceptable’, and suggests that science-society dialogues on animal research should accommodate different modes of thinking about health. In demonstrating how understandings of health are bound up with ethical obligations to care for both human and non-human others, this paper reinforces the importance of interspecies relations in health and illness and in the socio-ethical dimensions of biomedicine.

Writing the worlds of genomic medicine: experiences of using participatory-writing to understand life with rare conditions

The diagnostic and treatment possibilities made possible by the development and subsequent mainstreaming of clinical genomics services have the potential to profoundly change the experiences of families affected by rare genetic conditions. Understanding the potentials of genomic medicine requires that we consider the perspectives of those who engage with such services; there are substantial social implications involved. There are increasing calls to think more creatively, and draw on more participatory approaches, in evoking rich accounts of lived experience. In this article, we discuss our rationale for, and experiences of, using 'participatory-writing' to understand the diverse, variable and multilayered everyday lives of families and how these correspond with the emerging, rapidly changing and complex field of genomic medicine. Participatory-writing has many benefits as a method for social inquiry. Writing can be expressive and self-revelatory, providing insight into personal and sensitive topics. Writing together produces new conversations and relationships. Pieces written by participants have the potential to affect readers, evoking and enlivening research and prompting professional change. Working with a writing tutor, we organised a participatory-writing programme for families touched by genetic conditions. This involved a series of workshops with an emphasis on building confidence in expressing lived experience through experimenting with different writing techniques. Afterwards we arranged reflective interviews with participants. We drew on dialogical narrative analysis to engage with participants' written pieces, and highlight what everyday life is like for the people who live with, and care for, those with genetic conditions. The stories produced through our writing-groups unfold the implications of new genomic technologies, illuminating how genomics acts to (and likewise, fails to) reconfigure aspects of people's lives outside of the clinic, while simultaneously existing as a sociotechnical frame that can eclipse the wider contexts, challenges and liveliness of life with rare genetic conditions.