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Divide that, in Cartesian terms, has separated humans and animals from one another—a separation that has been emphasised in many academic and popular understandings of laboratory spaces.
I have described many of these possibilities in terms of kinship, as many of the scientists in this study also did. The term occurs in the book not only as an analytic frame I utilise to describe relatedness, but it also appeared in the words of scientists, who invoked it to describe the qualities and characteristics of their relationships with rodent research animals.
When I invoke the term ‘kinship’ to describe the relationships I found operating across the human-animal divide, I speak to a number of different registers of relatedness that persisted between humans and animals in the laboratory. These registers speak to the biological relatedness of rats and mice to humans that makes animal research valid and valuable in the lab. They also recognise the simultaneous giveness of animality and humanity that results in intercommunicative exchanges between humans and animals in the lab, to the extent that some researchers said they felt they could speak ‘fluent rat’. In addition, they recognise the speci-al differences that resulted in the provision of care to laboratory animals through the relations of what, following Haraway (2008), I have called ‘mundane’ kinship. This is a kind of kinship that is based on the recognition of the specifics of specie membership and the ways in which other speci-al being might be understood to be equally important as human being. Each of these kinships were recognised as operational by the scientists in the laboratory where I undertook my ethnographic study, and they necessitated the crossing of the Great Divide between humans and animals that is often assumed to be rigidly in place in the laboratory. Such crossings were regarded by the scientists in this study as critical to the production of ‘good science’.
In the text that follows, then, I question key assumptions that have been made about the ways in which animals are located in the laboratory—firmly on one side of the hierarchically arrayed human-animal divide. Although rodent research animals did occupy polar positions in the laboratory context, these were not the only positions they inhabited. They also inhabited ambiguous positions that gave rise to a series of relationships and kinships between rodents and research scientists that were