Beth Greenhough
Biographic Data
| ID | 176557 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Beth Greenhough |
| GIVEN NAMES | Beth |
| FAMILY NAME | Greenhough |
| SIGNATURE | GREENHOUGH B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7351-2619 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 478 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
From research method to community resource
The paper describes the development of a Body Mapping Toolkit for Long Covid Patients, co-created in collaboration with the patient-led organisation Long Covid Support. We discuss how the use of body mapping, a participatory and arts-based research method, can support a more holistic and embodied understanding of Long Covid attentive to the way illness experiences are shaped by patients' social, cultural, and economic contexts. We further demonst…
Citational Politics in Transactions
Short Abstract From now on, authors writing in Transactions will no longer be expected to count their reference lists within the 10,000‐word limit. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to lay out the reasons behind this decision, encouraging prospective authors to critically reflect on how they cite, and highlighting the role of journals, reviewers, and editors in moving towards more inclusive citational practices
Co-creating a social science research agenda for Long Covid
Introduction: Our objective was to understand how social scientific research could best address the needs and concerns of patients, families, carers, healthcare professionals, academics, private and public sector professionals, and volunteers from Long Covid charities and support groups and people with lived experience of Long Covid. We worked with different stakeholders to develop a list of research priorities that particularly focused on social…
Introduction to Special Issue
Statement on Academic Freedom in Geography
A short statement on academic freedom in the current political climate as it relates to academic geographers, from representatives of the RGS‐IBG RHE Committee and the Editors of TIBG
Haunting Biology
Emma Kowal's Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity (2023) investigates the history of biological and medical research about Indigenous peoples in Australia. This book forum invited contributors to provide nuanced insights that engage the book's central contributions to debates in medical anthropology about decoloniality and racial science. Bringing together medical historians, anthropologists, and scholars of science and technology Trevor Eng…
Amphibious ethics and speculative immersions
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 a…
When you can't find the words
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the value of body mapping in supporting patients to communicate their everyday experiences of Long Covid. Body maps are life-sized drawings of bodies and body mapping is used to discuss experiences through guided questions and answering those questions using colours, images and other prompts. This short paper focuses on the first of four body mapping workshops of this study, which was conducted in June 2023 …
Situating knowledges, making kin and telling stories
Donna Haraway has been a constant presence in geographical thought and practice over the past 30 years. From her early and very influential essay on Situated Knowledges, to her more recent engagements with the Anthropocene in Staying with the Trouble, her work has become a key reference point for questioning the production of geographical knowledge. In this commentary I trace the influence of Haraway's thought on geographical scholarship, explori…
Listening to place, practising relationality
Creating safety amidst chronic contamination
This study analyses how residents create safety in Taranto, Italy, a city located next to one of the largest steel plants in Europe. Combining long-term ethnographic research with an online-based survey, our study shows that most respondents recognise and criticise the presence of environmental risks in their daily lives but encounter such risks in complex ways. Contrary to previous scholarship suggesting that pollution can result in alienating r…
Mapping Microbial Selves
Microbes exist everywhere on, in and around us. They are both ubiquitous and largely invisible, at least until they make their presence, or absence, felt. Recent years have seen a heightened sensitivity to microbial threats in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics. At the same time, there is also a growing interest in the microbiome as a source of 'wild immunology'. From this…
What Do Scientists Mean When They Talk About Research Animals “Volunteering”
This paper examines discourses around "volunteering" in animal research. Through a qualitative textual analysis of the scientific literature using animals in behavioral and psychological research, we demonstrate that "voluntary" and related terms are used by scientists in a variety of distinct ways, which carry a range of ethical and political connotations. While any reference to volunteering might be assumed to imply free, unconstrained, and unp…
Co-producing Human and Animal Experimental Subjects
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 concentr…
A good life? A good death? Reconciling care and harm in animal research
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 dr…
Encountering Berlant part two
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 …
Why 'cultures of care
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this record
Catching Colds with Canguilhem
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 …
Getting to grips with wildlife research by citizen scientists
Wildlife research by citizen scientists, involving the capture and handling of animals, provides clear scientific benefits, but also potential risks to animal welfare. We explore debates about how best to regulate such work to ensure that it is undertaken in an ethical manner. We focus on the UK as a case study, drawing on qualitative research and stakeholder engagement events. We show that because trapping and marking of certain species requires…
Edge cases in animal research law
This paper explores how the boundaries of the UK's Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act (A(SP)A) are constituted, as illustrative of the rising importance of legal procedures around animal research and how these are continuously being challenged and questioned. Drawing on empirical work in animal research communities, we consider how it is decided whether activities are undertaken for an "experimental or other scientific purpose". We do this by fo…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
Animal research nexus
Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of modern biomedicine, generating increased expectations for and connections between human and animal health. Animal research also remains controversial and its acceptability is contingent on a complex network of relations and assurances across science and society, which are both formally constituted through law and informal or assumed. In this paper, we …
The promises and pitfalls of specifying situatedness
In this commentary, I reflect on the promises and pitfalls of creating a more user-friendly and accessible summary of Haraway’s situated knowledges. I argue that there are clear advantages in revisiting these ideas in order to carefully consider the nature of perception and ask what is at stake in the colonization of critique. I also, however, suggest some limitations to the current reading, taking each of the gaps identified in turn and drawing …
Making the microbiome public
Recent rapid increases in the capability and affordability of DNA sequencing have enabled scientists to map the microbiome and to identify its associations with a range of health conditions. Concerns are growing that missing microbes might be behind the current rise in inflammatory disease. Microbial absence and dysbiosis have been linked to a range of hygiene practices, fuelling popular anxiety and confusion about being both too clean and the ri…
They say it's more aggressive in black women”
Recent geographical scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which the practice of public health constructs particular bodies and populations as “risky.” From a biopolitical perspective, this status of being “at risk” offers the basis for an emergent biosociality, groups brought together by a shared vulnerability to disease, which then forms the basis for both state‐led public health interventions and community‐driven advocacy and support. …
Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities
Drawing on geographies of affect and nature - society relations, we propose a radical rethinking of how scientists, social scientists, and regulatory agencies conceptualise human and animal participants in scientific research. The scientific rationale for using animal bodies to simulate what could be done in human bodies emphasises shared somatic capacities that generate comparable responses to clinical interventions. At the same time, regulatory…
Where species meet and mingle
Epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and H5N1 provide compelling arguments for restricting meetings and minglings between humans and viruses. Geographers have begun to address these spaces of bio(in)security, highlighting how epidemics actively reconfigure social and spatial relations as humans seek to respond to viral threats. This approach offers an important route for geographers to intervene in contemporary biopolitical debate, but such analyses are al…
Tales of an island‐laboratory
This paper investigates the ways in which field sites are defined in both science and science studies. Drawing on the example of how Iceland became a laboratory for both genetic science and science studies, it suggested that the spaces of science social scientists critique are also, to some extent, endorsed and reproduced through their own critical representations and practices. It is argued that this complicity between science studies and scienc…
Towards a Geography of Bodily Biotechnologies
Guest Editorial. Since Katz and Kirby (1991) noted the challenge biotechnology presented to existing understandings of the relationship between an externalised nature and the human individual, geographers have increasingly begun to venture into the complex and fascinating spaces mapped out by advances in the life sciences. The political, economic, cultural, and theoretical implications of hybrid entities, such as genetically modified (GM) foods, …
Attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories
Posthumanism has challenged the social sciences and humanities to rethink anthopocentricism within the cultures and societies they study and to take account of more-than-human agencies and perspectives. This poses key methodological challenges, including a tendency for animal geographies to focus very much on the human side of human-animal relations and to fail to acknowledge animals as embodied, lively, articulate political subjects. In this pap…
From Ethical Principles to Response-Able Practice
Chapter 3 of When Species Meet opens with a fictional encounter between a laboratory animal caretaker and the guinea pigs he works with. The laboratory is used to research sleeping sickness in cattle. As part of the experimental process, guinea pigs are shaved and placed in tight little baskets, wire cages filled with biting flies are placed over them, and their skins are painted with poisons to see if these sicken the flies. During a discussion …
Citizenship, care and companionship
Despite a shared interest in engaging critically with biomedicine, there has been little crossover between ‘geographies of bioscience’ and ‘geographies of health’. This paper aims to bridge that gap, using the concept of ontological politics to provide a framework for making connections between geographies of bioscience and geographies of health. Ontological politics can be defined as the conviction that the material or ‘real’ world does not prec…
Exploring the Role of Animal Technologists in Implementing the 3Rs
The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory animal welfare into practice. This is the first study to explore how this is achieved in relation to their participation in implementing refinement and reduction, two of the three key guiding ethical principles--the "3Rs"--of what is deemed to be humane animal experimentation. The interpretative approach contributes to emerging work within the social scie…
A good life? A good death? Reconciling care and harm in animal research
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 dr…
Why 'cultures of care
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this record
Unsettling antibiosis
Decades of active public health messaging about the dangers of pathogenic microbes has led to a Western society dominated by an antibiotic worldview; however recent scientific and social interest in the microbiome suggests an emerging counter-current of more probiotic sentiments. Such stirrings are supported by cultural curiosity around the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, or the idea it is possible to be ‘too clean’ and a certain amount of microbial exposu…
Encountering Berlant part two
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 …
Science, Culture, and Care in Laboratory Animal Research
The principles of the 3Rs-replacement, refinement, and reduction-strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this s…
Making the microbiome public
Recent rapid increases in the capability and affordability of DNA sequencing have enabled scientists to map the microbiome and to identify its associations with a range of health conditions. Concerns are growing that missing microbes might be behind the current rise in inflammatory disease. Microbial absence and dysbiosis have been linked to a range of hygiene practices, fuelling popular anxiety and confusion about being both too clean and the ri…
Assembling an island laboratory
Three different versions of assemblage (Deleuzian, actor-network theory and Haraway's companionship) are discussed in terms of the insights they offer into spatial relations between life science, medicine and society. Using the example of a proposal to turn Iceland into an island laboratory for gene discovery research, I ask how assemblages gain friction and tenacity in the world, especially if we accept the post-structuralist insistence on the f…
Listening to place, practising relationality
Introduction
Animal research nexus
Animals used in biological research and testing have become integrated into the trajectories of modern biomedicine, generating increased expectations for and connections between human and animal health. Animal research also remains controversial and its acceptability is contingent on a complex network of relations and assurances across science and society, which are both formally constituted through law and informal or assumed. In this paper, we …
Introduction
This paper introduces the articles that comprise the themed section ‘bodies across borders’ which investigates how the social and spatial dynamics of healthcare provision are being transformed by both neo-liberalization and globalization. The articles demonstrate how the central tenets of neoliberalism: the promotion of individual autonomy as realized through the instrument of consumer choice, the privatization, outsourcing and off-shoring of cor…
Experimental partnering
This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattl…
On the agencement of the academic geographer
This commentary draws a contrast between assemblage as Deleuzian agencement, orientated towards the possibilities for re-ordering and the emergence of new orders, and the forms of assemblage emphasized by actor-network theory, which focuses on the question of how orders are practised/performed. It is suggested that while focusing on agencement offers a means of opening up ‘naturalized’ social and spatial orders and placing their entrenched politi…
Decontextualised? Dissociated? Detached? Mapping the Networks of Bioinformatics Exchange
The author reviews debates surrounding the Icelandic government's Act on a Health Sector Database (139/1998), which provided for the licensing of a private company to build and operate a centralised database of Icelandic medical records for use in gene-discovery research. Using the concept of the 'boundary object' drawn from actor-network theory, the author argues that, through their exploitation as bodily commodities, medical records are activel…
Room with a rhinovirus? Blurring the boundaries between research and therapeutic space
In the past, the Declaration of Helsinki insisted on a fundamental distinction between medical research (of no therapeutic benefit) and clinical research (carried out to gain insight into a patient’s condition and inform treatment). However, recent versions of the Helsinki Declaration no longer rehearse this distinction, instead recognising how experimental and clinical practices often and increasingly overlap. This paper argues that this same di…
Situated knowledges and the spaces of consent
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Introduction
Tales of an island‐laboratory
This paper investigates the ways in which field sites are defined in both science and science studies. Drawing on the example of how Iceland became a laboratory for both genetic science and science studies, it suggested that the spaces of science social scientists critique are also, to some extent, endorsed and reproduced through their own critical representations and practices. It is argued that this complicity between science studies and scienc…
Reply When response becomes responsibility
Decontextualised? Dissociated? Detached? Mapping the Networks of Bioinformatics Exchange
The author reviews debates surrounding the Icelandic government's Act on a Health Sector Database (139/1998), which provided for the licensing of a private company to build and operate a centralised database of Icelandic medical records for use in gene-discovery research. Using the concept of the 'boundary object' drawn from actor-network theory, the author argues that, through their exploitation as bodily commodities, medical records are activel…
Towards a Geography of Bodily Biotechnologies
Guest Editorial. Since Katz and Kirby (1991) noted the challenge biotechnology presented to existing understandings of the relationship between an externalised nature and the human individual, geographers have increasingly begun to venture into the complex and fascinating spaces mapped out by advances in the life sciences. The political, economic, cultural, and theoretical implications of hybrid entities, such as genetically modified (GM) foods, …
Situated knowledges and the spaces of consent
A logic of care beyond health geography
Citizenship, care and companionship
Despite a shared interest in engaging critically with biomedicine, there has been little crossover between ‘geographies of bioscience’ and ‘geographies of health’. This paper aims to bridge that gap, using the concept of ontological politics to provide a framework for making connections between geographies of bioscience and geographies of health. Ontological politics can be defined as the conviction that the material or ‘real’ world does not prec…
From Ethical Principles to Response-Able Practice
Chapter 3 of When Species Meet opens with a fictional encounter between a laboratory animal caretaker and the guinea pigs he works with. The laboratory is used to research sleeping sickness in cattle. As part of the experimental process, guinea pigs are shaved and placed in tight little baskets, wire cages filled with biting flies are placed over them, and their skins are painted with poisons to see if these sicken the flies. During a discussion …
Room with a rhinovirus? Blurring the boundaries between research and therapeutic space
In the past, the Declaration of Helsinki insisted on a fundamental distinction between medical research (of no therapeutic benefit) and clinical research (carried out to gain insight into a patient’s condition and inform treatment). However, recent versions of the Helsinki Declaration no longer rehearse this distinction, instead recognising how experimental and clinical practices often and increasingly overlap. This paper argues that this same di…
Assembling an island laboratory
Three different versions of assemblage (Deleuzian, actor-network theory and Haraway's companionship) are discussed in terms of the insights they offer into spatial relations between life science, medicine and society. Using the example of a proposal to turn Iceland into an island laboratory for gene discovery research, I ask how assemblages gain friction and tenacity in the world, especially if we accept the post-structuralist insistence on the f…
Ethics, Space, and Somatic Sensibilities
Drawing on geographies of affect and nature - society relations, we propose a radical rethinking of how scientists, social scientists, and regulatory agencies conceptualise human and animal participants in scientific research. The scientific rationale for using animal bodies to simulate what could be done in human bodies emphasises shared somatic capacities that generate comparable responses to clinical interventions. At the same time, regulatory…
On the agencement of the academic geographer
This commentary draws a contrast between assemblage as Deleuzian agencement, orientated towards the possibilities for re-ordering and the emergence of new orders, and the forms of assemblage emphasized by actor-network theory, which focuses on the question of how orders are practised/performed. It is suggested that while focusing on agencement offers a means of opening up ‘naturalized’ social and spatial orders and placing their entrenched politi…
Where species meet and mingle
Epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and H5N1 provide compelling arguments for restricting meetings and minglings between humans and viruses. Geographers have begun to address these spaces of bio(in)security, highlighting how epidemics actively reconfigure social and spatial relations as humans seek to respond to viral threats. This approach offers an important route for geographers to intervene in contemporary biopolitical debate, but such analyses are al…
Experimental partnering
This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattl…
Introduction
This paper introduces the articles that comprise the themed section ‘bodies across borders’ which investigates how the social and spatial dynamics of healthcare provision are being transformed by both neo-liberalization and globalization. The articles demonstrate how the central tenets of neoliberalism: the promotion of individual autonomy as realized through the instrument of consumer choice, the privatization, outsourcing and off-shoring of cor…
Bodies Across Borders
Historically organised at a local or national scale, the fields of medicine and healthcare are being radically transformed by new communication, transport and biotechnologies creating, in the process, a genuinely globalised sphere of biomedical production and consumption. This emerging market is characterised by the circulation of bodily materials (tissues, organs and bio-information), patients and expertise across what traditionally have been re…
Conceptual multiplicity or ontological politics
Simon and Randalls’ piece does an excellent job of highlighting how resilience is divergently articulated across multiple sites, however the article is characterized by an oscillation between an examination of contrasting discourses of resilience (reflected in the ways it is defined and conceptualized) and an attention to specific empirical incidents of its enactment (offering a basis for ontological politics). I argue this limits the analysis in…
Evaluating a DVD promoting breast cancer awareness among black women aged 25–50 years in East London
BACKGROUND: The mean age of presentation for breast cancer among black women is substantially earlier than their white counterparts. Black women also present with adverse prognostic factors that have major clinical implications, including lower survival. To pilot the use of a 6 min DVD on breast cancer in young (under 50 years) black women, to raise awareness and examine the impact of the DVD on increased consultation and referral rates among the…
Actor‐Network Theory
Actor‐network theory (ANT) is an approach to research developed within the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). ANT is a constructivist approach, and asserts that phenomena should be understood as emerging from and sustained by networks of relations between heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors. Within geography ANT has been influential in: (i) advocating a “flat ontology,” which refuses to divide the world up hierar…
Fear, family and the placing of emotion
Unsettling antibiosis
Decades of active public health messaging about the dangers of pathogenic microbes has led to a Western society dominated by an antibiotic worldview; however recent scientific and social interest in the microbiome suggests an emerging counter-current of more probiotic sentiments. Such stirrings are supported by cultural curiosity around the ‘hygiene hypothesis’, or the idea it is possible to be ‘too clean’ and a certain amount of microbial exposu…
Exploring the Role of Animal Technologists in Implementing the 3Rs
The biomedical industry relies on the skills of animal technologists (ATs) to put laboratory animal welfare into practice. This is the first study to explore how this is achieved in relation to their participation in implementing refinement and reduction, two of the three key guiding ethical principles--the "3Rs"--of what is deemed to be humane animal experimentation. The interpretative approach contributes to emerging work within the social scie…
Science, Culture, and Care in Laboratory Animal Research
The principles of the 3Rs-replacement, refinement, and reduction-strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this s…
The promises and pitfalls of specifying situatedness
In this commentary, I reflect on the promises and pitfalls of creating a more user-friendly and accessible summary of Haraway’s situated knowledges. I argue that there are clear advantages in revisiting these ideas in order to carefully consider the nature of perception and ask what is at stake in the colonization of critique. I also, however, suggest some limitations to the current reading, taking each of the gaps identified in turn and drawing …
Sociology (36 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (24 works) · Political science (24 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Biology (12 works) · Engineering ethics (12 works) · Environmental ethics (12 works)