Animals at Work: Identity, Politics and Culture in Work With Animals By Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor

Author Interviewed by Animals & Society Institute

Animals at Work: Identity, Politics and Culture in Work With Animals
Available at Amazon
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9004235825
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-9004235823

Interview with the Authors Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor

In 2013, Lindsay Hamilton and Nik Taylor published Animals at Work: Identity, Politics, and Culture in Work with Animals in the ASI-managed Brill Human-Animal Studies Book Series. This volume applies a breadth of post-structural and post-humanist theories to establish what happens when animal-agents are brought into human networks and spaces of representation, and the artful ways in which they become integral in shared human meaning-making. As part of our Interview with the Author series, we sat down with Lindsay and Nik learn more about this earlier and important work.

ASI: Why is Animals at Work important?

At the time we wrote this book, Nik’s field of Human-Animal Studies was well established in Sociology and Sociology of Science, broadly speaking, but virtually absent within studies of Organization, Work and Management, Lindsay’s field. This book was the first major interdisciplinary work to apply the knowledge and theory of Nik’s field to an ethnographic survey of human-animal relations in commercial life, what became Lindsay’s field and analytic centre-point for the next decade. It was among the first works to argue explicitly that animals could be categorized as workers, and perhaps the first to make such a claim within Organization Studies where the concept remained quite alien – and indeed provocative – for several years afterwards. In addition to this disciplinary advance, the book also felt important from an ethical point of view – to document the various spaces where humans and animals do work, to acknowledge that animals’ work is important in and of itself, and that the human treatment of animals in workspaces was/is complex.

ASI: How does the book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

Nik had always been heavily invested in ethics and care literatures, seeking to understand and sociologically unravel the long-standing and deeply ingrained unequal power relations that infuse the interspecies relations of everyday life. She had spent years researching animal shelters, for example, the heart of her empirical efforts to unpick the ways that animals are treated (and mistreated) and how this plays out in the manifold daily interactions between different individuals. Here she focused on work processes such as washing animal fur, scrubbing cages, and walking animals outside. But she also examined the value judgements taken by shelter workers of each other and of potential adopters. All sides of this work sparked Lindsay’s interest, since it crossed over with aspects of her ethnographic work on farm veterinary surgeons, a professional group that also successfully negotiated the ‘dirty work’ of animal bodies, by-products and farmyard muck to create high prestige identities, and social recognition within agricultural communities. The overlap between in-depth empirical enquiries in humans working with animals was the core of the shared project the book embarked upon – the lighting of a ‘touchpaper’ of collaboration and mutual understanding.

ASI: How is the work situated, and how does it advance debates, within the field of Human-Animal Studies?

The work is situated firmly within the field of ethnographic investigation, being a series of glimpses of different professional and occupational interactions between humans and animals. We each conducted our own fieldwork within our own selected contexts but together investigate the same problem – power – through these differently refracted scenes of everyday life. The varied chapters provoke questions about why people choose to work with animals, how they see animals, what constitutes reward and enjoyment, and where the issues lie for understanding the exploitation and utilization of animals. Through various work settings, these complex issues are discussed but not always resolved. For example, in narrating and describing human work in the meat trade, we each had different experiences and ideas about how to best interpret the field data. For Nik, reading through Lindsay’s detailed fieldnotes, this was a highly confronting and challenging emotional experience. For Lindsay, this was a slow and intriguing process of sense-making as a result of embodied fieldwork. Lindsay’s conceptualization of what was going on was shaped by Nik’s interpretation and this forged a new reading of the value placed on animals within this complex commercial chain. Conversations took place between us to bring together the observational detail with the theorization of power and identity at work. Compromises and shared judgements were explored over several months of discourse. These experiences of joint authorship helped add nuance to the book and reveal the different readings possible from everyday experiences. Of course, the issue of how animals feature in research methods like ethnography was something we both felt warranted more analysis and they returned to methodology in their next projects.

ASI: What are some of the major messages in Animals at Work?

The focus on identity, both human and animal forms a core of the book. It asks, what is it about certain occupational experiences and knowledges that creates the grounds for particular relationships to emerge with other species? How are these power-laden interactions cemented through the routines and repetitions of work life? That identities are messy and complex remains a focus throughout the text, despite the fact that different professional groups are explored. Throughout the varied workplaces explored is an analytic focus on ethics; the rights, experiences, practices, and capacities of both humans and animals and, importantly, how they relate to each other through these commercial settings. In the chapter on farm veterinarians, for example, there is a focus on the importance of human gender discourse (masculinity in particular), the valuation of physical and ‘dirty’ work, and the ways that animal bodies are moved and manipulated in the pursuit of optimum production outputs. Alternatively, for the vets we looked at, the connection between animal health and productivity is implicit but for those readers taking a more explicitly critical view of this relationship, it is possible to see vets as implicated in what some have called the animal-industrial complex of agricultural supply and demand. While the book doesn’t resolve any of the issues it raises regarding the power humans hold over other animals, it does evoke and describe the scenes where such issues play out. In so doing, it problematizes the relationships, behaviors and decisions taken in the field while leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.

ASI: Who is your intended audience? (Has your intended audience changed at all since publication?)

This book was originally published with students of ethnography and Human-Animal Studies in mind, but over time its main audience has actually been other academic researchers. This has led us both to some new collaborations and, particularly, a surging interest in Animal Organization Studies, a new field within the discipline of Management and Business which has emerged since 2016 and is now flourishing.

ASI: What were/are your goals of your research in terms of welfare and positive policy change?

At the outset, it is perhaps fair to say that Nik was driving hardest on informing social and policy change for animals – her lifelong passion for advocacy and care runs through the text, as does her conviction that ‘visibilizing’ often hidden unequal power relations between humans and other animals is a crucial part of animal advocacy and potential change. Lindsay, meanwhile, became attuned to this agenda through the course of creating the book and Nik’s strong values provoked her to take stock and ask herself ‘where are the animals in Management and Organization Studies?’ and ‘where are the animals in ethnography?’ These provocations made it clear that further work was vital – both in the methodological and theoretical configuration of these areas of research. It was this joint realization that actually led to our later focus on the methods used in animal studies, and ultimately to our next co-authored book, Ethnography After Humanism: Power, Politics and Method in Multi-Species Work (Palgrave, 2017).

ASI: Animals at Work was published in 2013, what changes have you seen in the field and in the world in the past 11 years related to your research?

It is exciting to see that the overlaps in our interests (ethnography, organizations, methodology, unequal human-animal relationships) that brought animals and work together has now resulted in a wealth of new research. There have been special issues in Organization Studies devoted to post-humanism and human-animal relations as well as new books and new conference streams. This exciting surge of interest has resulted in the increasing acceptance that one might study humans and animals together, rather than discretely, and that there is an ethical imperative to include animals in research even though they do not speak, make jokes or fill in questionnaires! Scholars, including us, are increasingly arguing that species does not need to be the barrier to inclusion that has kept animals out of the social sciences at large; we need new animal-inclusive methods, multispecies methods, and new forms of writing. It’s also exciting to see that the idea of animal work has become increasingly interrogated from a critical perspective with authors identifying the myriad ways animals work with and for us. And that this work is usually unacknowledged and occurs for the benefit of the humans, rarely the animals. This has led to the idea of animal work being included in advocacy for other species and various attempts to change policies to help protect animal workers around the globe.

ASI: What are you currently working on?

Lindsay is currently working on a project about the wellbeing and management of water birds on the manicured grounds of a UK university where humans and geese are often in contact. Lindsay is also working on the idea that the ethics that have driven human-animal studies might also inform new approaches to the vegetal kingdom, informing a potential plant turn that may provoke questions about the valuation and appreciation of plants as actors (rather than simply resources for commercial extraction).

Nik has an ongoing research project addressing working in the neoliberal university including a specific interest in how academics might manage the challenges of doing critical animal studies in a system that itself is embroiled in animal oppression (see Animal Studies Scholar Advocacy and https://workinginthemodernuniversity.wordpress.com/). She is also part of a collective working on a special edition of Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work that considers social work and animals (due first half of 2025). Within this her own focus is on the need for social work to embrace intersectional, feminist arguments regarding the need to include animals in their analyses of power and to consider species as a form of oppression. Finally, she is just starting a project that returns to her first interest in animal studies – animal sanctuaries – where she is considering the role sanctuaries have in modelling alternative, non-hierarchical, human relations with other species.text

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Nik Taylor, Ph.D (2000), Manchester Metropolitan University, is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University in South Australia. She has published widely on human-animal relations, including Theorizing Animals (Brill, 2011) and Animals, Humans and Society (Lantern, 2013).

Lindsay Hamilton, Ph.D (2009), Keele University, is Lecturer in Management at Keele University in the United Kingdom. She is currently a co-editor of the Sage journal, Ethnography and has published a range of ethnographic articles on work and organization.

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