Science Education in the Global Animal Economy: A Schizoanalytic Inquiry

• In Event: 61.044 - Big Little Lies: Contradictions, Distortions, and Fictions in Human-Animal Education

Abstract

This paper investigates the connections between science education and the animal industries through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s tool of schizoanalysis ([1972]2009), using the schizoanalytic concept of the abstract machine (Deleuze & Guattari [1980]2004) to reconfigure these connections and their implications. Two major and intersecting axes cutting across animal science education are explored: Animal capital (Shukin 2009) and the animal-industrial complex (Noske 1997). First, the paper identifies and brings forth a “missing link” of education in social science scholarship on these two topics. Second, the paper asks how a schizoanalytic approach to education research may urge us to critically rethink the so-called “animal turn” in education by situating animal science education in its wider biocommercial and biotechnological terrain.

Schizoanalysis is a mode of critical inquiry with an origin in psychoanalysis and Marxism. It analyses the relations between power and desire as a core part of critical social theory (Sauvagnargues 2016). Schizoanalysis explores the hyperactivity, contradictions and anxieties ceaselessly created around socialization and subjectivity formation processes, especially under conditions of capitalist expansion, making it particularly interesting for education research. Through schizoanalysis, education is not configured as a coherent institution, but as a set of machines forging together students and animals with technologies and discourses in shifting constellations that have consequences for the life conditions of both. The paper draws on ethnographic and interview materials from fieldwork in two vocational upper secondary programs in animal caretaking, designed to prepare students for a variety of animal-handling professions, and in a veterinary education program.

The paper concludes that the notion of the animal-industrial complex needs modification to account for the multifaceted function of education therein. In schizoanalytic terms, the animal-industrial complex is an abstract machine organizing life conditions for animals and people, in education as well as in society at large. The significance of the study is twofold: First; it contributes empirically-based knowledge of how human-animal relations in education are shaped and conditioned by commodifying forces in ways that bring forth new dimensions of “the animal turn” in education scholarship and practice. Second; it contributes to theory development in education research more generally, by empirically applying a philosophical concept – schizoanalysis – as a tool of inquiry and critique of commodification processes of education. The paper is part of a new research monograph, Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education.

Author

• Helena Pedersen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden