I arrived in Norway in August, 2021, a few days after the covid travel ban was lifted for international students. I had received a Fulbright grant to study and do research at the University of Oslo, with the generous support and guidance of Tone Druglitrø, a researcher at TIK. I joined Tone’s project called “Resisting Bodies (ResBod),” which investigates how knowledge about human and animal immune systems is made, understood, and regulated. Building on a longstanding interest in how human and animal health are interconnected and co-shaped by science and politics, I planned to study the emergence of an increasingly popular policy approach called “One Health.”
One Health (OH) seeks to foster collaboration across disciplines like veterinary and human medicine, in order to promote human, animal, and environmental health as interconnected. OH has gained traction in recent years among governments and institutions like the World Health Organization, who mobilize OH as an umbrella movement to target proliferating multispecies health issues, from zoonotic diseases to antimicrobial resistance. While social scientists laud One Health for “integrating animals into global health,” they have critiqued the approach for not adequately attending to the social, economic, and locally specific dimensions of the multispecies entanglements that OH initiatives intervene in (Porter 2019, 34). Suspicious of OH’s claims to “oneness” in a world of diverse people and practices, social scientists question how health is being understood and governed, whose health is being prioritized, and with what consequences in specific settings (Hinchliffe and Craddock 2015; Michalon 2020; Davis and Sharp 2020; Wolfe 2015; Porter 2017, 2019).
In pursuing research about One Health in Norway, I quickly realized that veterinarians – much like in other countries – are leading the charge, as the profession becomes increasingly integral to global and public health (Porter 2019). Realizing that many veterinarians in Norway are charged with bolstering the aquaculture industry by studying and monitoring fish health, I became interested in how veterinarians negotiate the interface between animal health and production, ecology and economy, and science and politics. Granted, after decades of intensive production conditions, farmed fish in Norway suffer from proliferating diseases that threaten welfare and profits alike. Last semester, I used what Kristin Asdal (2015) calls a “practice-oriented” approach to document analysis to analyze how these tensions were negotiated in the Norwegian Veterinary Institute’s first and latest annual reports on fish health.
To supplement my research endeavors, throughout the year I enjoyed taking master’s level courses at TIK and the Center for Development and the Environment (SUM), where I ultimately joined the DECC master’s program. My classes included SUM’s introductory courses on research methods and core literature, an elective on local and global “meat cultures,” and TIK’s specialization class in STS. Along the way, my Fulbright scholarship provided many resources and opportunities to pursue my interests and studies, while also exploring Norway’s rich culture and landscapes.
This year, I am writing my master’s thesis based on fieldwork I conducted this summer with livestock veterinarians and farmers in Northern California. Exploring very similar themes, I am studying regulations on antibiotic use that were implemented in the United States and California in 2017 and 2018, respectively. These regulations increase veterinary oversight of antibiotic use on farms and prohibit the use of certain antibiotics for “production purposes,” as opposed to “animal health.” These regulations are meant to help address the issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), whereby mobile genetic elements spread across species and environments to render antibiotics increasingly less effective. Antibiotic use in agriculture has been a major contributor to AMR since the 1950s, when these drugs became central technologies in the industrialization of livestock production. Antibiotics have been widely used to not only promote the growth of livestock but also bolster animal health in intensive production systems that foster disease (Kirchhelle 2018). Now, decades after the FDA attempted to pass similar regulations in the 1970s, farmers in the U.S. need to have an order or prescription signed by a veterinarian to obtain “medically important” antibiotics.
While the regulatory documents confidently assert that the “scientific and clinical training” of a licensed veterinarian can be mobilized to ensure the “judicious use” of antibiotics (CVM 2013), my project seeks to situate how veterinary knowledge and practices of care intervene in the economies and ecologies of dairy production in California. I hope that my master’s studies and thesis can contribute nuanced and situated insights into the effects of AMR policies that intervene in the complex social and biological worlds of antibiotic use and resistance on farms. I hope to engage with and contribute to literature across STS, anthropology, and political ecology, using diverse tools to analyze multispecies interdependence, health, and governance.
References
Asdal, Kristin. 2015. “What is the Issue? The Transformative Capacity of Documents.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16, no.1: 74-90. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1022194.
(CVM) Center for Veterinary Medicine. 2013. “Guidance for Industry #213: New Animal Drugs and New Animal Drug Combination Products Administered in or on Medicated Feed or Drinking Water of Food-Producing Animals: Recommendations for Drug Sponsors for Voluntarily Aligning Product Use Conditions with GFI #209.” U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Docket Number: FDA-2011-D-0889.
Davis, Alicia, and Jo Sharp. 2020. “Rethinking One Health: Emergent Human, Animal and Environmental Assemblages.” Social Science and Medicine 258, no. 113093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2020.113093.
Hinchliffe, Steve, and Susan Craddock. 2015. “One World, One Health? Social Science Engagements with the One Health Agenda.” Social Science & Medicine 129: 1-130. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.11.016
Kirchhelle, Claas. 2018. “Pharming Animals: a Global History of Antibiotics in Food Production (1935–2017).” Palgrave Communications 4, no. 96. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-018-0152-2.
Michalon, Jérôme. 2020. “Accounting for One Health: Insights from the Social Sciences.” Parasite 27, no. 56. DOI: 10.1051/parasite/2020056.
Porter, Natalie. 2017. “One Health, Many Species: Towards a Multispecies Investigation of Bird flu.” In Humans, Animals And Biopolitics: The More-Than-Human condition, edited by Kristin Asdal, Tone Druglitrø, and Steve Hinchliffe. Routledge Press.
Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Wolfe, Meike. 2015. “Is There Really Such a Thing as “One Health”? Thinking About a More Than Human World from the Perspective of Cultural Anthropology.” Social Science & Medicine 129: 3-11. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2014.06.018