Richard Twine
Edge Hill University, Social Sciences, Faculty Member
In the sociology of the body, the analysis of physiognomy is a neglected topic. The idea that one can judge the character of another from their facial or bodily characteristics is a pervasive phenomenon. However, its historical and... more
In the sociology of the body, the analysis of physiognomy is a neglected topic. The idea that one can judge the character of another from their facial or bodily characteristics is a pervasive phenomenon. However, its historical and cultural spread does not entail that we inevitably tie it to notions of human essence. This study focuses upon a particular periodic resurgence of physiognomic discourse in the West, at the end of the 18th and the entirety of the 19th century. In contrast to previous arguments, I argue that physiognomic discourse was able to exploit 19th-century phrenology as a conduit for its own perpetuation. I point out that the perception of the other that physiognomy promotes is largely based upon an atemporal view of the body. I suggest that this physiognomic perception remains an entrenched but changeable component in contemporary relations between self and other.
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This article approaches snacking from a practice theory perspective in order to understand how this reframing may afford new insights. In doing so it also contributes to sociological thinking on eating practices and their reproduction as... more
This article approaches snacking from a practice theory perspective in order to understand how this reframing may afford new insights. In doing so it also contributes to sociological thinking on eating practices and their reproduction as well as reflecting upon the ontological assertions of practice theory and its theory of social change. In particular this article argues that the re-conceptualisation serves to clarify a sociological research agenda for eating practices associated with snacking. It is argued that setting snacking within routine temporalities and spatialities and as bound up in the recursivity between practices and relations is especially important for thinking about snacking sociologically. In common with applications of practice theory in the field of sustainability transitions the aim is to move beyond individualistic assumptions of behaviour change and instead situate snacking as an eating practice with health implications that has emerged within the social, temporal, economic and cultural organisation of everyday life.
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This article reports upon research on vegan transition, which I bring into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s figure of the killjoy. Ahmed’s work on affect and the feminist killjoy is found to be apt for considering contemporary vegans and their... more
This article reports upon research on vegan transition, which I bring into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s figure of the killjoy. Ahmed’s work on affect and the feminist killjoy is found to be apt for considering contemporary vegans and their transgression of normative scripts of happiness and commensality in a dominant meat and dairy consuming culture. The decentring of joy and happiness is also found to be integral to the critical deconstructive work of the vegan killjoy. Ahmed’s ideas further complement the frame of practice theory that I draw upon to understand the process of transition especially in the sense of opposing the meanings of dominant practices. Although food and veganism are not commented upon by Ahmed, the vegan subject constitutes, I argue, a potent further example of what she terms an “affect alien” who must willfully struggle against a dominant affective order and community. Drawing upon interviews with 40 vegans based in the UK, I illustrate examples of contestation and negotiation by vegans and those close to them. The article finds in the figure of the killjoy not only a frame by which to partly understand the negotiation of relationships between vegans and non-vegans but also an opportunity for further intersectional labour between veganism and feminism.
Research Interests: Climate Change, Practice theory, Sociology of Food and Eating, Animal Studies, Critical Animal Studies, and 12 moreFood and Nutrition, Feminism, Animal Rights/Liberation, Vegetarianism, Affect/Emotion, Happiness and Well Being, Animal Rights, Ethical veganism, Veganism, Veganism as a Philosophical Belief System as Opposed to Carnism as a Dominant Philosophical Belief System, Plant based nutrition, and Sustainable Food & Farming
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The essays in this special issue emerged from a workshop held at Cardiff University in September 2010. As sociologists based at the dual-site (Lancaster and Cardiff) Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) funded by... more
The essays in this special issue emerged from a workshop held at Cardiff University in September 2010. As sociologists based at the dual-site (Lancaster and Cardiff) Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, we have both been engaged in researching ethical and social issues around animal biotechnologies for a number of years. The aim of the workshop was to address various examples of animal biotechnology and consider their potential effect on the future of human/animal relations. We employ here a broad definition of biotechnology to include various types of bioscience innovation instead of restricting ourselves to genetic modification (GM). In particular, we discern that several different types of biotechnology are bound up in a latent promissory discourse deployed by both scientists and animal advocates that perhaps surprisingly forecasts a benefit to the lives of other animals themselves through the uptake of particular technologies.
Situated, then, at the intersection of critical animal studies (CAS) and science and technology studies (STS), we are interested in the trajectories of animal biotechnology and how they may intensify or disrupt traditionally hierarchical relations between humans and other animals. Given that scientific knowledge production has been bound up in both vivisection and the commodification of farmed animals, we are interested in how new forms of knowledge could potentially reconfigure what has been an antagonistic relationship between science and social movements for animal advocacy, even though the epistemological diversity of the former has also provided much in the way of knowledge-claims for animal minds, subjectivity, and sociality via ethology and animal-welfare science.
Situated, then, at the intersection of critical animal studies (CAS) and science and technology studies (STS), we are interested in the trajectories of animal biotechnology and how they may intensify or disrupt traditionally hierarchical relations between humans and other animals. Given that scientific knowledge production has been bound up in both vivisection and the commodification of farmed animals, we are interested in how new forms of knowledge could potentially reconfigure what has been an antagonistic relationship between science and social movements for animal advocacy, even though the epistemological diversity of the former has also provided much in the way of knowledge-claims for animal minds, subjectivity, and sociality via ethology and animal-welfare science.
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It might be assumed that the application of genomics to the production of farmed animals represents a move of acceleration, a broadening and an elaboration of what might be possible in terms of the instrumental shaping of animal bodies to... more
It might be assumed that the application of genomics to the production of farmed animals represents a move of acceleration, a broadening and an elaboration of what might be possible in terms of the instrumental shaping of animal bodies to the demands of capital. However, this would be to yield too much to hubristic assumptions about the human control of science and technological innovation, and to discount alternative deployments and provocations of the molecular imaginary. Accordingly, this essay explores the potential of molecular biology to contest an already troubled distinction between wild and domesticated. Within this capability to further undermine the distinction resides a potentially important contribution to the formation of a molecular animal-liberatory imaginary. Although the technique of de-domestication has been discussed in relation to conservation projects, the essay assesses whether it could have a role in the liberation of farmed animals. Adopting a critical perspective toward the imaginary, toward de-domestication, and, indeed, toward assumptions around the meanings of liberation, the essay foregrounds various intersecting notions of temporality as vital both to the explication of biotechnological ambivalence and to the complexities of movements toward animal liberation.
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In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a... more
In this paper I revisit previous critiques that I have made of much, though by no means all, bioethical discourse. These pertain to faithfulness to dualistic ontology, a taken-for-granted normative anthropocentrism, and the exclusion of a consideration of how political economy shapes the conditions for bioethical discourse (Twine Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 8(3):285-295, 2005; International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food 16(3):1-18, 2007, 2010). Part of my argument around bioethical dualist ontology is to critique the assumption of a division between the “medical” (human) and “agricultural” (nonhuman) and to show various ways in which they are interrelated. I deepen this analysis with a focus on transnational pharmaceutical companies, with specific attention to their role in enhancing agricultural production through animal drug administration. I employ the topical case of antibiotics in order to speak to current debates in not only the interdisciplinary field of bioethics but also that of animal studies. More generally, the animal-industrial complex (Twine Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10(1):12-39, 2012) is underlined as a highly relevant bioethical object that deserves more conceptual and empirical attention.
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Research Interests: Political Economy, Animal Science, Human-Animal Relations, Animal Ethics, Critical Animal Studies, and 8 moreSustainable agriculture, Agricultural Economics, Agriculture, Environmental Sustainability, Antibiotic Resistance, Pharmaceutical industry, Antibiotics, and Philosophy and Sociology of Human/animal Relations
This paper returns to Barbara Noske‟s (1989) concept of the „animal-industrial complex‟ in order to develop and re/present it as a key organizing frame of analysis and research collaboration for the field of critical animal studies (CAS).... more
This paper returns to Barbara Noske‟s (1989) concept of the „animal-industrial complex‟ in order to develop and re/present it as a key organizing frame of analysis and research collaboration for the field of critical animal studies (CAS). In presenting various ways of refining its definition and illustrating some intersections between both different forms of animal use and with other „complex‟ concepts, the aim is also to help build CAS capacity in analyzing the role of political economy in shaping human-animal relations. Whilst keeping the permeability of the boundaries of the complex very much to the fore, this paper nevertheless focuses on farmed animals and case studies virtual methods of apprehending „livestock‟ genetics companies as one approach for potentially bringing the animal-industrial complex into a more clearly delineated space of scholarly and public critical scrutiny.
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Within social science analyses of genomics the field of animal genomics remains an under researched area. In an anthropocentric sense the field intersects with the substantial domains of food, health and environment, as well as their... more
Within social science analyses of genomics the field of animal genomics remains an under researched area. In an anthropocentric sense the field intersects with the substantial domains of food, health and environment, as well as their related economic, social and ethical elaborations. ...
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Nature; Body; Aesthetics; Physiognomy Sociology Human services Philosophy Religion Sociology Philosophy.
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The term ecofeminism, as almost every article on the subject reminds us, was first coined by the French feminist Francois d'Eaubonne (1974). However during the 1970s there was not a coherent body of ecofeminist theory. Instead there were... more
The term ecofeminism, as almost every article on the subject reminds us, was first coined by the French feminist Francois d'Eaubonne (1974). However during the 1970s there was not a coherent body of ecofeminist theory. Instead there were differing accounts that wove together a perceived interconnection between the domination of women and nature. Notably, Rosemary Radford-