Shelly Volsche, Alexandra Horowitz, Anna Korzeniowska, and Holly Root-Gutteridge
Shelly Volsche, Alexandra Horowitz, Anna Korzeniowska, and Holly Root-Gutteridge are all researchers who received a grant for “Recognizing and Honoring Individuals in Animal Research.” They aimed to create a symposium and publish an open access journal article that contextualized past research and proposed citation methods that honor the animals who were sacrificed in order to advance human knowledge. They write:
Our mission is to shed light on these past details such that future scholars understand the research upon which they build. From there, our goal is to change the norms of practice around citing this early work so that we do not lose appreciation and empathy for the animals in future projects. By extension, we expect this project to reframe the role of animals in research as participants with agency rather than the tools of the past. Now is the time to challenge existing norms and insist upon the acknowledgment of animals as participants, not tools, in the research endeavor.
The quartet’s paper on the subject, “Centring Individual Animals to Improve Research and Citation Practices,” was published in Biological Reviews 98:2 421–433. (You can read a pre-print here.) In addition, Shelly presented a talk based upon the paper at the ASAB’s Ethics of Animal Behavior and Welfare Research conference—which is available on YouTube. Also, Alexandra was interviewed on the Our Hen House podcast (September 5, 2020). Listen to it here.