Christopher Bear

Insects are increasingly promoted as a sustainable and nutritious source of protein, with ‘edible insect’ sectors emerging in many countries not traditionally associated with their consumption. A number of studies have examined the attitudes of potential consumers to eating insects but the understandings and practices of farmers have largely been ignored. This article expands nature-society scholarship’s engagement with the edible insect sector by investigating how farmers make sense of their responsibilities to insects through their everyday practices. Drawing on a qualitative study of the UK’s edible insect farmers, the article contributes to wider ongoing debates within science and technology studies and animal studies around multispecies companionship involving apparently ‘awkward’ creatures, and around the relationship between ‘care’ and ‘ethical regard’ in more-than-human relations. Such debates are especially pertinent here, as insects have often been understood as lacking sentience and beyond moral considerability, resulting in their exclusion from animal welfare codes and regulation. Insect farmers are therefore faced with questions not only about how to care for their ‘minilivestock’ but also whether to care. Following an outline of the UK’s edible insect production sector, and framed by a discussion of literature on awkward creatures, attentiveness and practices of care, the article reports on: (1) the relationship between sentience and farmers’ constructions of insects’ moral significance; (2) farmers’ motives for, and approaches to, becoming attentive to their insects; and (3) how farmers respond to the actions of insects. It concludes by reflecting on the nature of attentiveness encountered in edible insect farming, arguing that it offers a promising yet unstable basis for the development of harmonious more-than-human relations.

While insects are eaten by around two billion people globally, they are a relatively new addition to the UK’s culinary landscape. A domestic production sector has begun to emerge to supply this new appetite for insects. Social scientists have been quick to explore consumer attitudes to “edible insects” but insect farmers have thus far been largely ignored. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on interviews with the UK’s current and recent edible insect farmers to explore their understandings of, and approaches to, insect death, something about which all participants expressed concern. The paper examines: 1) reasons for farmers’ concerns around how they kill their insects, ranging from anxieties around insect pain to perceived consumer attitudes; and 2) farmers’ ideas about what constitutes a “good” death for insects, and how they incorporate this in their practices.

This chapter explores the more-than-human redistribution of productive labour in Automated Milking Systems (AMS). Moving away from employing ‘nature’ as an analytical concept, we focus on practices, actions and encounters between heterogeneous actants, rather than assuming intrinsic ontological differences between (for instance) cows, humans and robots. AMS are designed to reduce the amount of human labour in dairy farming, by allowing cows to ‘choose’ when to be milked by a milking robot, and moving farmers’ management of herds from the barn to the office, as they make use of data automatically collected during milking. The chapter explores ...

This paper explores the potential for less anthropocentric approaches to researching human-nonhuman relations through visual ethnography, critically examining the conceptualization of nonhuman animals as participants. Arguing that method in animal studies has developed more slowly than theory, it proposes visual approaches as a way of foregrounding nonhuman animals’ behavior and actions in “social” research. Questioning the meaning of “participation,” this challenges underlying anthropocentric assumptions of visual ethnography. The paper presents a comparison of approaches used in studying sites, moments and movements of robotic milking on United Kingdom dairy farms: field notes, still photography, and digital video. While visual approaches are not a panacea for more-than-human research, we suggest that they offer a means through which nonhumans might “speak for themselves.” Rather than presenting definitive accounts, including video in such work also leaves the actions of nonhumans open to further interpretation, destabilizing the centrality of the researcher.

While welcoming the intervention of Winder and Le Heron (2006) as opening up a space for critical – and practical – engagement with ‘Blue Economy’ thinking, their employment of assemblage approaches could be extended. Doing so might produce a different conceptualization of the Blue Economy, while concurrently establishing new challenges for blue economic practices. In this commentary, I focus on three key areas: (1) the ontological separation of land and sea and the conceptualization of ‘marine space’; (2) the ‘liveliness’ of oceans; and (3) practical possibilities for Blue Economy policies to draw on and engage with ‘wet ontologies’. I argue that future geographical research on the Blue Economy would benefit from moving away from the categorizations of the ‘ecological’ or ‘bio’ and towards a fuller engagement with the diversity of actants and forces that contribute to the emergence of new practices, policies and (de)territorializations.

This paper positions the recent emergence of robotic or automatic milking systems (AMS) in relation to discourses surrounding the longer history of milking technologies in the UK and elsewhere. The mechanization of milking has been associated with sets of hopes and anxieties which permeated the transition from hand to increasingly automated forms of milking. This transition has affected the relationships between humans and cows on dairy farms, producing different modes of cow and human agency and subjectivity. In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from a research project exploring AMS use in contemporary farms, we examine how ongoing debates about the benefits (or otherwise) of AMS relate to longer-term discursive currents surrounding the historical emergence of milking technologies and their implications for efficient farming and the human and bovine experience of milk production. We illustrate how technological change is in part based on understandings of people and cows, at the same time as bovine and human agency and subjectivity are entrained and reconfigured in relation to emerging milking technologies, so that what it is to be a cow or human becomes different as technologies change. We illustrate how this results from – and in – competing ways of understanding cows: as active agents, as contributing to technological design, as ‘free’, as ‘responsible’ and/or requiring surveillance and discipline, and as efficient co-producers, with milking technologies, of milk.