I joined the Sociology Department at LSE in October 2018 as a Research Officer on Carrie Friese’s project ‘Care as Science: The Role of Animal Husbandry in Translational Medicine’. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, this five year project began in 2015, with initial quantitative research being conducted prior to my arrival. My role, entering the project at this point, is to conduct qualitative analysis of the historical development of concepts and practices of care in British animal science and their wider social context. My background is in history and philosophy of the life sciences, with a strong sociology of science component to my work. I am particularly interested in the theme of animal and plant domestication, in which practices of care and husbandry play a pivotal role, and in the role of domesticatory practices in scientific knowledge production.
Prior to coming to LSE, I completed my doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Exeter’s interdisciplinary Egenis Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences. My thesis, ‘Domesticating the Wild Type: A Historical Investigation of the Role of the Domestic-Wild Divide in Scientific Knowledge Production’, offered a longue durée history of the wild type concept in classical genetics, situating the development of this concept within the longer and broader history of debates about the domestic-wild divide in science and wider western European society. Parts of my thesis are summarised and further developed in my 2017 paper ‘The wild type as concept and in experimental practice’.
Thesis:
‘Domesticating the Wild Type: A Historical Investigation of the Role of the Domestic-Wild Divide in Scientific Knowledge Production’, University of Exeter, 2016.
Papers:
‘The Wild Type as Concept and in Experimental Practice: A History of its Role in Classical Genetics and Evolutionary Theory’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 63 (June), pp. 15–27, 2017.
Book Reviews:
‘Steven Vogel – Thinking like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature’, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (11th February 2017).
'Idols of Nations', Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (19th September 2016).