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Human capacity to sense and respond to the suffering of non-human animals is key to animal care and welfare. Intuitively these modes of relating seem best suited to interactions between humans and warm-blooded mammals who share human-like facial features and characteristics. Animal geographers and those working in animal welfare have noted the challenges that humans face in learning to care about fishes, and how this leads to welfare guidelines and regulations which are poorly suited to aquatic species. This paper draws on interviews with laboratory aquarists and biomedical researchers to explore how they have learnt to sense and respond to the needs of fishes in the laboratory. We offer two key observations. Firstly, despite significant bodily differences, humans find ways to empathise with fishes. Secondly, whilst observations of bodies and behaviours predominate in laboratory mammal welfare assessments, when working with fishes water quality serves as an important proxy for species health. We conclude that the laboratory aquarium signifies methodological and conceptual limits in contemporary animal geographies. We further argue that these barriers should be understood as cultural, and – as we demonstrate – that there is consequently scope and capacity to reach beyond them by engaging in amphibious ethics and speculative immersions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the thought of the historian of science, Georges Canguilhem, to explore how the practice of making medical knowledge brings into question accepted understandings of (ill)health and contagious disease. Drawing out how the lively materialities of both humans and viruses shape human experience of viral infection, the analysis focuses on written and oral histories of the UK's Common Cold research Unit (CCU), associated scientific papers and correspondence between 1961 and 1965, and press cuttings and visitors' books from the CCU archives, in order to offer multiple readings of the relationship between humans and cold viruses at this site. These alternative post-natural histories challenge our preconceptions about the costs and benefits of living-with-viruses and the role of infection and associated symptoms in drawing lines between the normal and the pathological. The archives of the CCU offer new ways of encountering viruses and their histories, and evidence that that infection can be, as Canguilhem suggests, a "positive, innovative experience," while at the same time questioning the novelty of recent posthumanist accounts of human-virus relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preclinical (animal) testing and human testing of drugs and vaccines are rarely considered by social scientists side by side. Where this is done, it is typically for theoretically exploring the ethics of the two situations to compare relative treatment. In contrast, we empirically explore how human clinical trial participants understand the role of animal test subjects in vaccine development. Furthermore, social science research has only concentrated on broad public opinion and the views of patients about animal research, whereas we explore the views of a public group particularly implicated in pharmaceutical development: experimental subjects. We surveyed and interviewed COVID-19 vaccine trial participants in Oxford, UK, on their views about taking part in a vaccine trial and the role of animals in trials. We found that trial participants mirrored assumptions about legitimate reasons for animal testing embedded in regulation and provided insight into (i) the nuances of public opinion on animal research; (ii) the co-production of human and animal experimental subjects; (iii) how vaccine and medicine testing, and the motivations and demographics of clinical trial participants, change in an outbreak; and (iv) what public involvement can offer to science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Part 2 of Encountering Berlant amplifies the promise of Lauren Berlant's influential concept of 'cruel optimism'. Cruel optimism names a double‐bind in which attachment to an 'object' holds out the promise of sustaining/flourishing, whilst simultaneously harming. The lines between harming, sustaining, damaging and flourishing blur, sometimes collapsing entirely. By holding together opposites the concept exemplifies and performs the centrality of ambivalence to Berlant's thought, as well as their orientation to overdetermination and incoherence. Geographers and others have found in the concept a way of understanding the intersection between affective and political economies in the crisis‐present following the 2008 financial crisis. Together with Berlant's linked concepts such as 'crisis ordinariness' and 'impasse', cruel optimism has offered a way of understanding why detachment can be so difficult and how damaging conditions endure. Contributors begin from these starting points, amplifying the concept's promise: a new way of researching and writing about the reproduction of ordinary damage and harm. By writing from diverse encounters with Berlant's work, they move the concept in multiple directions, juxtaposing it with other optimisms across a variety of empirical scenes and locations. The result is a repository of what cruel optimism, and Berlant's mode of thinking‐feeling more broadly, offer geographers and others. In Part Two of Encountering Berlant, contributors engage with the promise of Lauren Berlant's most influential concept – 'cruel optimism'. By writing from multiple locations and empirical scenes, they find in the concept a new way of understanding the reproduction of everyday harms and damages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Also embedded in these institutional cultures were ideas about the responsibility for self-care, which often failed to recognise the impact of infrastructures of care on the "capacity to care" for the self (E. R. Power, [37]). Academic discussions of care have stressed the complexity of the concept of care (Fisher & Tronto, [13]), and the difficulty of defining care "needs" and "good care" (Engster, [11]; Held, [20]; J. Tronto, [55]). Caring for those who care: Towards a more expansive understanding of "cultures of care" in laboratory animal facilities. The Covid "lockdowns" impacted the informal "cultures of care" within families and communities through significant reductions in, or withdrawal of, services providing care or benefits enabling care, for (amongst others) children, people with learning difficulties and people with physical disabilities, or who are frail. [Extracted from the article]

Laboratory animal science represents a challenging and controversial form of human-animal relations because its practice involves the deliberate and inadvertent harming and killing of animals. Consequently, animal research has formed the focus of intense ethical concern and regulation within the UK, in order to minimize the suffering and pain experienced by those animals whose living bodies model human diseases amongst other things. This paper draws on longitudinal ethnographic research and in-depth interviews undertaken with junior laboratory animal technicians (ATs) in UK universities between 2013 and 2015, plus insights from interviews with key stakeholders in laboratory animal welfare. In our analysis, we examine four key dimensions of care work in laboratory animal research: (i) the specific skills and sensitivities required; (ii) the role of previous experiences of animal care; (iii) the influence of institutional and affective environments and (iv) experiences of killing. We propose that different notions of care are enacted alongside, not only permitted levels of harm inflicted on research animals following research protocols, but also harms to ATs in the processes of caring and killing animals. Concluding, we argue for greater articulation of the coexistence of care and harms across debates in geography about care and human-animal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]