Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: I'm deeply honored by this special issue and impressed by the analytically richness and ethnographic depth of the five contributions.By taking us into different worlds of bioscience and care, building on years of engagement with specific fields and thick ethnographic descriptions, the papers add important layers to my concepts of nearness and substitution.As Iben M. Gjødsbøl, Mie S. Dam, and Laura E. Navne compellingly outline in the Introduction, the five papers explore practices and experiences of distance and difference implied in being near, but not the same (Gjødsbøl et al. 2026).This juncture between nearness and distance was exactly what propelled my own research into the moral arrangements and material and intimate practices through which research piglets are turned into substitutes-near-human infantswithin experimental science.From my first day of fieldwork at the Newborn Pig Facility in Copenhagen, I was struck by the way experimental practices were oriented towards making both the clinical environment and the piglet bodies as close as possible to the clinical set-up and the prematurely born bodies of human infants in neonatal intensive care units.Because of the biological alikeness between piglets and human infants, yet profound moral difference, piglets could be brought into this world, made to suffer, and ultimately killed at the end of the experiment in the name of improving care for human infants.This tension between being near, but not the same and thus different, is at stake across all papers in this special issue.Together, they invite us to consider how difference, distance, borders and movements operate in practices through which the near human and the near self are enacted in experimental bioscience and intersubjective care.By immersing us in practices and experiences of nearness, the contributions render palpable both the political economy of present-day experimental bioscience and the tactile moral experiences of human actors striving to care for different life forms.
Source: BioSocieties
Author: Mette N. Svendsen
Institution: University of Copenhagen
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,990
OpenAlex ID: W7130822975