Archiv für November 2012

Kommentar: Verteilte Handlungsmacht im Experiment – Von der Epistemologie zu multiplen Ontologien

Distributed Agency in Experimental Practice: Moving from Epistemology to Multiple Ontologies (Commentary). Food and feeding practices are hybrids that cut across nature/culture divides. Approaches of material semiotics and multiple ontologies offer new tools to move beyond nature/culture binaries and to historicize everyday experimental practices. Exploring distributed agency in feeding practices of experimental animals brings to the fore the hybrid epistemologies, metabolic relations, and multiple synchronizations at work in everyday research practices.

Wie die Zoologie das Füttern lernte. Die Ernährung von Tieren in der Zoologie im 19. Jahrhundert

Feeding Zoology. How Animals were Fed in Nineteenth-Century Zoology. Although feeding is an essential and existential part of animal breeding and keeping, it is an entirely neglected practice in the history of (experimental) zoology. Following the metabolic relations of colonial consumerism, acclimatization, and animal fancying, this paper reconstructs the divers origins of this practice and thus the origin of experimental zoology. As feeding in this context was and still is considered to be essentially non-epistemic, it is argued that this approach allows to reconstruct the ontologies of the respective field, i.e., the emergence of artificial environments and of a contingent set of animals from a hybrid space between animal fancying and zoology.

Füttern und gefüttert werden. Versorgungskreisläufe und Nahrungsregimes im Königlich Preußischen Institut für experimentelle Therapie, ca. 1900 bis 1910

Feeding and Being Fed. Supply Cycles and Nutrition Regimes at the Royal Prussian Institute for Experimental Therapy, 1900 to 1910. The article explores the everyday life and especially the feeding practices in the laboratories of the Institute for Experimental Therapy and the Georg Speyer House in Frankfurt, Germany, in the decade after 1900. The text focuses on the experimental animals and their entangled relationship to humans in the two institutes where life-scientists tested the therapeutic effect of chemicals and dyestuffs on pathogens and tumors. For this purpose countless animal experiments were conducted in the fields of chemotherapy and cancer research. The article focuses on the importance of animal feeding and feeding practices in the experimental processes and serum testing procedures. The behaviour of the animals, their health status, their appetite and weight were constantly monitored and deemed fundamental to the outcome of the experiment. Animal feeding was therefore an important factor within the epistemological process of knowledge production. Animal feeding was both orientated towards the needs of the experiments and governed by economic needs. Within their economic (life) cycles, the ontological status of the animals changed: they became vectors of pathogens and information, economic resources, objects of exchange, living resources and life stock for ongoing experiments, patients, and sometimes even food for other animals. Overall, feeding experimental animals played an important role in the research process.

Cakes und Candies – Zur Geschichte der Ernährung von Versuchstieren

Cakes and Candies: Historicizing the Feeding Practices of Experimental Animals. This special issue explores the history of experimental animals by studying the history of their feeding practices and nutritional regimes. Revisiting the literature of current historiographies of animals and drawing on new integrative approaches in the history of science, science and technology studies, and food history, we outline how historical ontologies and a praxeological approach in material semiotics can address the lack of research on experimental animals without reproducing the all too familiar nature/culture and subject/object binaries.

Wissens-Hunger im Stall: Die Entstehung von Knochen-Schafen als Versuchstiere in der Unfallchirurgie

Epistemic-Hunger in the Stable: The Genesis of Bone-Sheep as Experimental Animals in Orthopedic Surgery. The text explores the coming-into-being of bone-sheep as experimental animals in the field of orthopedic surgery from the 1960s onwards. Sheep replaced dogs – mainly for emotional reasons – as test subjects for newly developed implants like plates and screws, which were used for fracture care in humans and in pet animals. Utilizing a praxeographic approach in the framework of material semiotics, the history of bone-sheep is examined more closely in order to explore how different sheep ontologies (e.g. bone-sheep and meat-sheep) are intertwined. Ontologies are understood as specific modes of existence: a set of simultaneous multiple realities which are coproduced by animals and humans and which do not align into a single coherent reality. Materiality is not understood as pre-given but rather as an effect of practices of relating, connecting and cutting – thus producing – heterogeneities like bone-sheep. Those practices can be understood as a form of ’ontological politics‘, which describes the interactions between different ontological realities. By paying specific attention to the phenomenon of hunger and practices of feeding, the text examines the ontological politics of synchronization between the epistemic hunger – the data-collection or scientific hunger of the researchers – and the ontological hunger of the sheep themselves, which can be seen as crucial in the materialization of bone-sheep.

Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 4/2012

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201290003

Rezension: Descartes in Deutschland. Die Rezeption des Cartesianismus in den Hochschulen Nordwestdeutschlands von Francesco Trevisani

Quelle: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/resolve/doi?DOI=10.1002%2Fbewi.201201599

Dialogi | 7-8/2012

Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/dialogi/issue/2012-11-30.html

L’Espill | 41 (2012)

Quelle: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/lespill/issue/2012-11-30.html

The Emile Lousse Essay Prize 2013 competition

Parliaments, Estates and Representation, Volume 32, Issue 2, Page 219, November 2012.