For the Love of Lab Rats: Kinship, Humanimal Relations, and Good ...

regarded by the latter as being key to the production of good science. I equally speak back, on the basis of rich ethnographic data, to the assumptions that are frequently made in academic work and in public opinion about the ways in which relatedness between researchers and laboratory animals does not—and cannot—occur in the laboratory context. This is a task that entails speculating on the grip of instrumental reason on modern laboratories and whether or not they are immune to contemporary ideas about nature and animals—ideas to which they instrumentally contribute.