Good morning, BERGers!

This is your 'push notification' that we have a meeting tomorrow, 05 Feb 2020, at 5:30pm in the Psychology common room (3A94).

Sarah Kraemer will be introducing the speaker and setting-up snacks.

Our presenter this week is Megan Donald, who has recently joined the Stirling Uni Psych Dept from the University of Glasgow as a Research Assistant with Laura Scullion Hall and Hannah Buchanan-Smith. She provided us with an abstract for her paper presentation tomorrow, which is fantastic as it gives us all that extra opportunity to think about these topics!

Title:

How to work with infinite bodies: the emotional geographies of diagnosis in the Small Animal Hospital

Abstract:

The Small Animal Hospital is a site where animals and humans come together for the purposes of specialist veterinary care, diagnosis and treatment. It is here we expect our pets to undergo the most advanced diagnostic procedures, led by cutting-edge evidence-based medicine. Framed by science and technology studies (STS), and emotional and animal geographies, this paper presents an alternative, affectively-attuned investigation into the diagnostic practices of the Small Animal Hospital. It does so through the story of Tessa, a dog with a sore back: this paper takes us through the 3 sites of her diagnosis within the hospital: the office where Tessa’s medical history is read by the vet, the consultation room where the vet meets Tessa and her owners and the neurology examination room, where Tessa’s bodily symptoms are tested. Each site reveals how veterinary diagnosis is formed not only through a purely objective science but through different multispecies intimacies, body practices and affective atmospheres. The result is a distinctly sensuous science which highlights the formative role of animal emotion in veterinary medicine, recognises the animal as an actor in its own care and which allows for new avenues of human-animal relations to be explored within interdisciplinary veterinary medical humanities.

We hope you will join us in discussing veterinary medicine as a sensuous science!