Postdoctoral Fellowship: "Dangerous" Dogs and the Fuzzy Sciences of Animal Profiling

赋予动物的道德和社会品质往往借鉴动物科学;这些属性反过来又塑造了人类，包括科学家，与他们的互动。考虑到动物在当代生活中扮演的重要角色，以及在科学和其他环境中对它们的治疗存在的高风险辩论，了解如何对动物进行道德归因至关重要。然而，大多数关于这一主题的研究都将这些道德属性的科学、社会品质和伦理来源分开对待，而不是调查它们是如何形成的，以及它们是如何被科学、伦理和社会问题的交叉所塑造的。这项研究填补了这一空白，研究了一个物种的一些成员如何与相当大的公众利益和长期的科学调查的主题，狗，来被标记为危险的。这项研究取得的关键进展之一是“模糊科学”的概念，即可替代的科学，并被不同的行为者用来提出道德和伦理主张，这些主张与动物行为和动机的种族化和性别化归因相交。 主要的研究方法是参与观察，科学和其他文件的分析，和访谈。从理论上讲，这项研究提供了新的工具，用于了解广泛的科学和科学实践-正式和非正式-如何参与有关动物的社会和伦理冲突的形状，并通过社会因素塑造，并在这样做，有助于科学和技术研究，动物研究和关键的种族和性别研究领域。更广泛地说，这项研究为广泛的用户提供了有关特定动物的危险和安全归因的伦理，科学和社会基础的新知识。这些知识可以被科学家、动物园、动物收容所和公众使用。调查结果在一本书中传播给跨学科和流行的观众，在传播给教师的课程，通过公共广播的播客，通过流行的新闻文章，并通过在加州大学伯克利分校科学，技术和社会中心研讨会。

The moral and social qualities attributed to animals often draw on animal sciences; these attributions, in turn shape the interactions that humans, including scientists, have with them. Given the important role that animals play in contemporary life, and the high stakes debates that exist over their treatment in sciences and other settings, understanding how moral attributions about animals come to be made is critically important. Yet most research studies on this topic treat science, social qualities, and ethical sources of these moral attributions separately, rather than investigating how they are shaped and are shaped by the intersection of scientific, ethical and social concerns. This research study fills this gap by examining how some members of a species with considerable popular interest and long a subject of scientific investigation, the dog, come to be labeled as dangerous. One of the key advances that this research makes is the concept of "fuzzy science," or science that is fungible and used by varied actors to make moral and ethical claims that intersect with racialized and gendered attributions of animal behavior and motivation. Major research methods are participant observation, analysis of scientific and other documents, and interviews. Theoretically, the research provides new tools for understanding how the wide range of sciences and scientific practices - both formal and informal - involved in social and ethical conflicts about animals shape and are shaped by social factors, and in doing so, contributes to the fields of science and technology studies, animal studies, and critical race and gender studies. More broadly, this research provides new knowledge to a wide range of users about the ethical, scientific, and social basis of attributions of danger and safety to particular kinds of animals. This knowledge can be used by scientists, zoos, animal shelters, and publics. Findings are disseminated in a book addressed to an interdisciplinary and popular audience, in a course disseminated to teachers, via a podcast for public radio, through popular press articles and via workshops at the UC Berkeley Science, Technology, and Society Center.