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

赋予动物的道德和社会品质常常来源于动物科学；这些归因反过来又塑造了包括科学家在内的人类与它们的互动。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处理存在着高风险的争论，理解如何对动物进行道德归因是至关重要的。然而，大多数关于这一主题的研究将这些道德归因的科学、社会品质和伦理来源分开对待，而不是调查它们是如何被科学、伦理和社会问题的交叉影响和塑造的。这项研究填补了这一空白，它研究了狗这个广受欢迎的物种的一些成员是如何被贴上危险的标签的，而狗一直是科学研究的对象。这项研究取得的关键进展之一是“模糊科学”的概念，或科学是可替代的，并被不同的参与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归因相交叉。主要的研究方法有参与式观察、科学文献分析和访谈。从理论上讲，这项研究为理解广泛的科学和科学实践（包括正式的和非正式的）如何与动物的社会和伦理冲突有关以及如何被社会因素所影响提供了新的工具，并在此过程中为科学和技术研究、动物研究以及关键的种族和性别研究领域做出了贡献。更广泛地说，这项研究为广泛的用户提供了关于将危险和安全归因给特定种类动物的伦理、科学和社会基础的新知识。这些知识可以为科学家、动物园、动物收容所和公众所用。研究结果在一本面向跨学科和大众受众的书中传播，在一门面向教师的课程中传播，通过公共广播的播客，通过流行的新闻文章以及通过加州大学伯克利分校科学、技术和社会中心的研讨会传播。

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.