Thanks to a grant from the British Academy, Professor Jane Desmond from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US was able to spend three and a half months on campus in Autumn 2023 as visiting professor with the Institute for Science and Society at the University of Nottingham.
Dr. Desmond is Professor of Anthropology and Affiliate Professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at UIUC, where she also directs the campus wide program in Human-Animal Studies. The research fellowship was part of a three-way collaboration between Prof. Pru Hobson-West and Prof. Kate Millar, along with post-doc Dr. Alistair Anderson and doctoral student Kathleen Salter.
The group worked on a scoping study to begin a mapping of the emergent interdisciplinary field of the “Veterinary Humanities” which also includes the humanistic social sciences. A special focus of the mapping was on the differences between how this work is emerging in the US versus the UK. A more detailed round of analysis will dive further into the main themes, and topics of the corpus of works identified, in order to identify new potentials for future research.
While on campus, Professor Desmond also gave a talk in the School of Sociology and Social Policy, focusing on issues relating to access to veterinary care as a public policy issue, and took part in a workshop at the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science, based on her clinical fieldwork in the United States. A highlight of the research collaboration was a joint presentation, featuring excellent data visualisations by Kat Salter, to share preliminary results of the scoping study with faculty and students at the Vet School. A vigorous discussion followed, with great ideas for further research and passionate engagement by both students and staff. This spring the team will move towards a preliminary publication of results so far.
Posted on Thursday 21st March 2024