A caring approach to knowledge production has been portrayed as epistemologically radical, ethically vital and as fostering continuous responsibility between researchers and research-subjects. This article examines these arguments through focusing on the ambivalent role of care within the first large-scale experimental beagle colony, a self-professed ‘beagle utopia’ at the University of California, Davis. We argue that care was at the core of the beagle colony; the lived environment was re-shaped in response to animals ‘speaking back’ to researchers, and ‘love’ and (...) ‘kindness’ were important considerations during staff recruitment. Ultimately, however, we show that care relations were used to manufacture compliancy, preventing the predetermined ends of the experiment from being troubled. Rather than suggesting Davis would have been less ethically troubling, or more epistemologically radical, with ‘better’ care, however, we suggest the case troubles existing care theory and argue that greater attention needs to be paid to histories, contexts, and exclusions. (shrink)

This article examines three key aetiological theories of autism, which emerged within cognitive psychology in the latter half of the 1980s. Drawing upon Foucault’s notion of ‘forms of possible knowledge’, and in particular his concept of savoir or depth knowledge, two key claims are made. First, it is argued that a particular production of autism became available to questions of truth and falsity following a radical reconstruction of ‘the social’ in which human sociality was taken both to exclusively concern interpersonal (...) interaction and to be continuous with non-social cognition. Second, it is suggested that this reconstruction of the social has affected the contemporary cultural experience of autism, shifting attention towards previously unacknowledged cognitive aspects of the condition. The article concludes by situating these claims in relation to other historical accounts of the emergence of autism and ongoing debates surrounding changing articulations of social action in the psy disciplines. (shrink)

This paper appraises the role of critical-feminist figurations within the environmental humanities, focusing on the capacity of figures to produce situated environmental knowledges and pose site-specific ethical obligations. We turn to four environments—the home, the skies, the seas and the microscopic—to examine the work that various figures do in these contexts. We elucidate how diverse figures—ranging from companion animals to birds, undersea creatures and bugs—reflect productive traffic between longstanding concerns in feminist theory and the environmental humanities, and generate new insights (...) related to situated knowledges, feminist care-ethics and the politics of everyday sensory encounters. We also argue, however, that certain figures have tested the limits of theoretical approaches which have emerged as the product of dialogue between feminist theory and environmental studies. In particular, we explore how particular figures have complicated ethical questions of how to intervene in broad environmental threats borne of anthropogenic activities, and of who or what to include in relational ethical frameworks. (shrink)

It is widely argued that the final decades of the twentieth century saw a fundamental change, marked by terms such as biomedicalization and geneticization, within the biomedical sciences. What unites these concepts is the assertion that a vast array of emerging technologies—in genomics, bioengineering, information technology, and so forth—are transforming understandings of disease, diagnosis, therapeutics, and working practices. While clearly important, these analyses have been accused of perpetuating theoretical trends that attribute primacy to the new over the old, discontinuity over (...) continuity, and the laboratory over the field. In this paper, I show that in the case of autism, the effects of genomic technologies can only be understood by simultaneously examining the role of questionnaires. Due to shortcomings in clinical diagnoses, genomic analyses could only progress once questionnaires had been developed to address a “reverse salient” within the “technological system.” Furthermore, I argue that questionnaires such as the Autism Quotient have a significance that surpasses the genomic classifications they were designed to undergird. I argue that to neglect the role of mundane technologies such as questionnaires in contemporary biomedicine is to miss complexity, bifurcate old and new, and do a disservice to innovation. (shrink)