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Preface
This book is the result of a year-long ethnographic exploration of a modern scientific laboratory in which rats and mice are utilised as experimental animals by a range of scientific researchers, including the virologists, immunologists, and neuroscientists who participated in my study. In my ethnographic examination of the laboratory, I took for analysis the locations of mouse and rat animals in polar positions; as ‘animals’ to the humans in the lab, for instance, and the ways in which these animals were equally located as ambiguous and ambivalent sites of slippage and indistinction between many polar categories. The capacity of rodent research animals to simultaneously embody more than one meaning as well as to embody competing or opposed meanings in the laboratory presents the possibility that researchers and rodents may not simply relate to one another from either side of the ‘Great Divide’ that separates humans from animals, and which would see humans operate on prone mice and rats in an entirely hierarchical arrangement of differently constituted speci-al (i.e., of species) bodies. I found other possibilities for relating in the laboratory, many of which crossed the Great