CFP: Animals in Public: Care, Charisma and Knowledge

Animals in Public: Care, Charisma and Knowledge

CFP for a panel at Science in Public (10-12 July 2017):

This panel focuses on questions of how knowledge about animals is communicated, constituted and utilised in the public sphere. Animals have often played significant yet under-examined roles in engagements between science and wider publics. From ongoing historical traditions of amateur-professional collaboration, to the contemporary spectacles of natural history filmmaking, a mutual fascination with animals and their worlds has brought scientists and publics together since before the professionalization of the sciences.

Animals have also been the focus of lively (and often fraught) debates between contrasting worldviews, often based upon radically different ways of knowing and caring about the world, on topics as varied as animal experimentation; pests and culling; genetically modified animals; and conservation controversies. What are the connections between scientific, experimental, empirical, theoretical, skill-based, visual and emotional knowledges about animals? What happens when these ways of knowing work in synergy and/or are in conflict with one another?

The panel invites paper submissions included, but not limited to, the below themes:

• Research collaborations involving scientists, other professionals, publics and animals

• Questions of care, knowledge, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in public science.

• Nonhuman and human charisma in science communication.

• Animal controversies in science that are hidden or made public.

Please send submissions and enquiries by 18 April 2017.

The panel is part of Science in Public 2017, University of Sheffield, 10-12 July: https://scienceinpublic.org/science-in-public-2017/

Conference keynotes include Professor Sarah Whatmore and Professor Steven Shapin.