Parallel Session 1:
Wednesday 7 June 11:00 - 13:00
Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups hus
Terje Finstad, Norwegian University of Science and Technology: The Domesticated Ocean – Mariculture and the Construction of Marine Environments for Food, Energy, and Climate, 1970-2000s
Ellinor Bogen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology: Negotiating Institutional Knowledges in the Case of Land-Based Salmon Farming
Charlotte Wrigley, University of Stavanger: Geese, Guns and Ghosts: Following the Barnacle Goose Along the Solway Firth
Eeva Nikkilä, University of Turku: A Point of View of Historical Pigs? Breeding Pigs and Experiences of Nest Building in Human-Built Spaces in Finland, ca. 1920s–1930s
Parallel Session 2:
Wednesday 7 June, 14:00 - 15:30
Undervisningsrom 2, Georg Sverdrups hus
Kathrin Friedrich, Bonn University: From Wires to Interfaces – Infrastructures of Herding in Livestock Farming
Sophia Efstathiou, Norwegian University of Science and Technology: MEATaphysics - The found science of meat alternatives or how food biotech is creating new meat ontologies
Oliver Moore, University of Exeter: Feeding and the Enactment of Zoo Animals: Aye-Ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis) in Human Care
Abstracts
Negotiating institutional knowledges in the case of land-based salmon farming
Ellinor Bogen, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet (NTNU)
Before salmon farming there was Atlantic salmon. Now there is wild Atlantic salmon and farmed Atlantic salmon. One is depicted as natural and in need of protection, the other as unnatural and a threat to biodiversity (Lien and Law 2011; Lien 2015). The construction of this binary has had and continues to have consequences for how the salmon farming industry is regulated and developed, especially when it comes to sustainability. Policy has made salmon lice the sole sustainability indicator for the Norwegian salmon farming industry (Bailey and Eggereide 2020). This combined with the development of new domestication technologies has led to discussions about the benefits of land-based salmon farming, which would protect wild salmon from escaped farmed salmon and limit the spread of salmon lice. In 2018, Tromsø municipal council adopted a resolution to not issue new salmon farming licenses and to not renew existing licenses unless they were in closed facilities such as land-based facilities. The resolution was abandoned in 2019. This paper will use the process surrounding this resolution as a case to examine the construction of institutional knowledges about salmon, technologies, and sustainability. What knowledges are made relevant in the policy process? The resolution excludes farmed salmon from one space while inviting them into another. What effects could this have on the space farmed salmon is invited into? Salmon are implicated actors in this policy development process as they are only discursively enacted. How are salmon and their ideas about a good home constructed in the process?
MEATaphysics - The found science of meat alternatives or how food biotech is creating new meat ontologies
Sophia Efstathiou, NTNU
This paper proposes that emerging food biotech is creating new meat ontologies. Technoscientific work on ‘alternative proteins’ is shaking ideas of meat as animal-based.
This analysis builds on the frame of found science, defined by analogy to found art, as science which embeds or founds everyday ideas into scientific contexts (Efstathiou 2009, 2012). These new founded concepts often keep their everyday names but work as scientific ideas sustaining and generating more science. For example, when economists talk about nations’ ‘wellbeing’, they are not using some everyday idea of being well, but rather found this everyday idea in the context of economics, to make it fit for operationalisation, measurement and discussion within economics (Efstathiou 2016).
I propose that this type of creative meaning-making is happening with ideas of ‘meat’ through food science and technology practices. Biotechnology work pursued by companies like Impossible Burgerâ or Beyond Meatâ is founding everyday ideas of meat into novel plant-based or cell-based food contexts creating new founded concepts of meat as plant-, or cell-based. Founding happens through activities ranging from imitating the molecular properties of (animal-based) meat or growing tissue in a lab, to vision-statements and marketing matching the “good stuffs” of meat (Sexton 2016). The result is not only found science but found meat.
Meat founded in science re-enters culinary practices of everyday life, performing ‘meatness’ in new ways while shaking ideas about what meat really is (Efstathiou 2022). Found science thus becomes found reality. Founded meat concepts bring new meats to the plate.
The domesticated ocean – Mariculture and the construction of marine environments for food, energy, and climate, 1970-2000s
Terje Finstad, Department of interdisciplinary studies of culture, NTNU
On the 13th of January 1996, the New Scientist published “Norway’s fish plan `a recipe for disaster´”. It reported that Norway “is planning to grow more fish in the sea by spreading fertiliser over the ocean.” Maricult, a multimillion-pound research programme, aimed at growing more marine algae to encourage the expansion of fish stocks. According to the magazine the Maricult-program was built on the idea that the ocean did not produce near as much plankton as its potential.
From the 1970s onwards, similar plans to cultivate the ocean using models, understandings and research protocols stemming from agriculture were launched. In a period when the domestication of individual marine species such as salmon and trout were becoming big business, mariculture represented a conceptual shift towards domesticating marine environments. As such, it represented alternative domestication imaginaries to those presented in conventional aquaculture.
This paper traces such alternative marine domestication imaginaries from the 1970s to today. By doing this, the paper discuss how domestication as understood in STS can be said to contain an environmental component that is often overlooked
From wires to interfaces – infrastructures of herding in livestock farming
Kathrin Friedrich, Bonn University
The industrial sector of livestock farming faces several challenges – ecological crises, economic pressure and not least animal welfare considerations have spurred various technological developments. In particular the field of precision livestock farming promotes a data-driven and media-induced vision of human-animal entanglements. Also the cultural technique of herding animals becomes a focus of technological optimization if not solutionism. Core to imagining and developing more ‘precise’ and effective herding techniques are so-called virtual fencing applications. Conceptually, the function of virtual fencing is to herd livestock, e.g. cattle, on the basis of digital technology and no longer by established techniques of domestication like barbed wire of electric fences. For virtual fencing a collar is attached to the individual cattle and fed with GPS-data that farmers determine within an application’s visual interface. By virtually drawing a fence, the farmer constitutes the boundaries of available grazing ground in a remote location. This position data is continuously aligned with the position of the cattle respectively the collar. If the cattle approach a virtual fence, the collar emits an audio cue which – if the animal won’t stop – transforms into an electrical shock.
From a media studies and STS perspective, the paper traces current transformations of the cultural technique of herding by analyzing exemplary virtual fencing applications and their infrastructures. It focuses on design concepts and particular media operations to address the question of how these delineate (new) agencies of both animals and farmers as well as their adaptive relations within emerging multilayered physical-virtual spaces of ‘domestication’.
Feeding and the Enactment of Zoo Animals: Aye-Ayes (Daubentonia madagascariensis) in human care
Matthew Holmes, University of Stavanger; Oli Moore, University of Exeter
Primates in zoos exist in a classification limbo: neither truly wild, nor domesticated. Whilst primates in human care live within controlled domesticated environments, over time their human managed care has evolved to become an enactment of what they are not – wild. Modern scientific zoos coalesce in-situ and ex-situ knowledge of species to inform their care and husbandry techniques for animals in human care. These care processes are based on traditional and scientific expertise that enact the animal’s body, internally and externally, from knowledge of what they are, to enable the in-care animals’ body to do what wild animal bodies would possibly also do.
This paper will discuss the enactment and lived experiences of the endangered aye-aye as it becomes present in the work of Dublin Zoo. Described as “ugly-cute” (K1) the aye-aye is a unique and complicated animal. This juxtaposition of the wild in a culturally created environment has led to technological devices and scientific processes being implemented to encourage natural behaviours of the aye-aye. The paper will present the experiences of the aye-aye and their human carers in formulating and providing managed diets that mimic their percussive foraging behaviours but also the nutritional provision to survive in a human cultural environment.
The findings will be conceptualised to elicit discussion on human-animal relations through the de-centering of humans and re-centering of the bodies of wild species within non-wild landscapes. The paper invites discussion on these changing dynamics between human- carers and the animals under their care.
A Point of View of Historical Pigs? Breeding Pigs and Experiences of Nest Building in Human-Built Spaces in Finland, ca. 1920s–1930s
Eeva Nikkilä, University of Turku
This paper explores the potential experiences of the early twentieth century breeding pigs by analyzing qualities and materiality of human-built piggery spaces designed to support the pig breeding practices of the early 1900s. It will especially focus on the interior design of the piggery buildings, mainly pig pens, as pens were by far the most common places pregnant sows (female pigs) gave birth in. By investigating different aspects and relations that affect the qualities of pen space, e.g., materials used in walls and floors, bedding, the size and placement of pens, and the behavior of the sows themselves, this paper shows that it is increasingly possible to develop historically situated understanding of nonhuman agency in human-built spaces. I use nest-building behavior as an example of how pigs themselves experience pen space and its qualities, and I argue that we cannot fully grasp the meanings of piggery spaces if we only focus on the meaning-making processes of the human species. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze historical piggeries as spaces experienced by pigs and see them as individuals creating their own places in human-built piggery spaces.
Geese, guns and ghosts: Following the barnacle goose along the Solway Firth
Charlotte Wrigley, University of Stavanger
By the end of the Second World War, the Svalbard barnacle goose population had dwindled to a couple of hundred individuals. Flying in from the Arctic to spend the winters on the Solway Firth (the estuary that separates England from Scotland), she was a favourite target of wildfowlers in the area. Since then, a ban on shooting and the Solway goose management scheme that pays farmers to maintain a goose friendly habitat has seen the barnacle goose numbers massively increase. Today, an uneasy truce has formed between conservationists, farmers and wildfowlers who have different and often conflicting interests in the goose. Adding to that is the Solway’s rich military history: once host to huge munitions factories during WW1 and WW2, this now derelict infrastructure of war curates the tidal landscape through awkward access zones, barbed wire fences and secretive burial sites.
Environmental military history usually concerns itself with battlegrounds and warzones. In this talk I argue that the military infrastructure of the Solway, particularly that of the explosive propellants produced in the factories, have left resonances that not only inflect the land itself, but also the trajectory of the barnacle goose. Explosive propellants are used in different ways by the goose’s stakeholders: cannon nets by conservationists, bird bangers by farmers, and explosive shot by wildfowlers. This scenario creates a particular military landscape: not one of battlefields, but rather of a spatiality that organises goose life along the flyway.
Organizers
Matthew Holmes and Charlotte Wrigley, University of Stavanger