ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Attuning to Multispecies Worlds: Farmed Animals, One Health, and Shifting Scientific Practices in Modern China

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session brings together a new historiography of agricultural technology and multispecies approaches to rethink how scientific practices emerge within China’s animal farming systems. Rather than viewing science as produced solely in laboratories or state institutions, we examine farms as situated infrastructures where humans, animals, microbes, materials, and technologies interact and generate knowledge.

Engaging the conference theme “Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences”, the session highlights non-reductionist ways of understanding risk, animal health, and biosecurity governance in the Anthropocene. Spanning Mao-era veterinary labour, reform-era industrialisation, and contemporary digital farming, the papers in this session chart how scientific practices arise through entanglements and co-productive relations in animal husbandry, echoing Pickering’s notion of a dance of agency. Together, they reveal how everyday animal care, feed technologies, and shifting regulatory regimes shape multispecies relations that underpin livestock production in modern China.

Grounded in China as a specific historical and political setting, the session also situates its narratives within global food and health regimes. The papers show how farms function as nodes in transregional knowledge circuits, domestic biopolitical management, international breeding networks, and One Health infrastructures. By examining draft animals in collectivised communes, feed innovations and antibiotics in reform-era poultry farming, and digital disease control tools in contemporary livestock operations, the session demonstrates how scientific practices are made, contested, and negotiated in multispecies worlds.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Meng Zhang, University of Manchester

Individual Presentations

• Draft Animals and their Taskmasters in Mao-Era Communes - Jongsik Christian Yi, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

• From Mixed Grain to Compound Feed: The Making of Modern Animal Production in Reform-era China - Yixuan Li, University of Manchester

• Modelling Life: How AI Reconfigures Disease, Labour, and Multispecies Relations in China’s Pig Corporates - Kin Wing Chan, Royal Agricultural University

Session Organizers

• Yixuan Li, University of Manchester

• Jongsik Christian Yi, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

• Kin Wing Chan, Royal Agricultural University