Choose the right methodological tools to answer your research question and know how to use them with this anthology of textual analysis approaches.
Each chapter provides not only relevant theoretical background behind each methodology, but also its advantages and challenges, its potential applications, and its relationship to studying social phenomenon. Through step-by-step worked examples of real-world data, you get an in-depth window into each method in action and learn how to apply the same techniques successfully and confidently in your own research.
Methods include:
The book under review offers a novel approach to politicizing the “animal issue.” Drawing on liberal citizenship theory, the authors argue that key concepts of international justice such as “citizen,” “denizen,” and “sovereignty” may be mapped onto human–animal relations in order to protect individual animal rights as well as ecosystem integrity. The ambition is also to overcome some well-known problems of traditional animal rights theory in relation to ecological concerns. Yet the argument that ecosystems, like human states, ought to be seen as sovereign communities entails problematic concept-stretching that may undermine the individual rights it was meant to protect.
Maxim Fetissenko (2011) argues that the animal rights movement needs a new rhetorical strategy focusing on human health benefits and environmental preservation rather than on moral argumentation. Against this, I claim that the movement has not overused but rather has downplayed moral argumentation. Instead of promoting its real agenda, the movement has often diminished the issue of animal oppression and implicated itself in the reproduction of speciesism. If our goal is to abolish speciesist oppression, we should work consistently to make alternative identities and values available to people rather than opting for illusory shortcuts that do not disturb the speciesist social order.
Vanliga människor är för obildade och inkompetenta för att vara med och fatta politiska beslut. Dessutom gör själva demokratin dem ännu dummare. Det menar den amerikanske statsvetaren Jason Brennan. Per-Anders Svärd har läst hans bok Efter demokratin och förutspår att den kommer att användas som testballong av nyauktoritära samhällskrafter.
This article deals with the debates over animal protection in the Swedish riksdag of estates 1844-1858. The focus is on the political problem representation: What or whom was considered the cause of animal cruelty? From the standpoint of post-Marxist discourse theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article offers an interpretation of the mid-nineteenth debates as attempts to depoliticize speciesist norms and uphold social control. This was done by pointing out certain groups from the lower classes as typical perpetrators of animal cruelty. At the same time the vast bulk of animal use exercised by society in general was elided from view, rendering systematic animal exploitation invisible and beyond political critique.
Animal experimentation is a contentious ethical issue. In many countries, the debate over the morality of animal research has led to the institution of ethical review systems for animal experiments. This article discusses and problematizes the current regulations, policies, and recommendations governing the ethical review of animal experiments in Sweden. It is argued that the ongoing paradigm shift in society’s view of animals prompts a serious re-evaluation of the values underpinning the routine use of sentient nonhuman animals in research. Following from this, two lines of argument are pursued in the article. First, it is argued that the organizational and administrative exigencies of the current ethical committee system in Sweden are likely to work to the animals’ disadvantage and undermine a fair assessment of their interests. Second, and more importantly, the article reconstructs the utilitarian principles that the ethical review is supposed to be based on and argues that the reasons given for choosing utilitarian standards are underdeveloped and indicative of a speciesist bias. Moreover, it is held that even if we should accept these principles, the existing ethical review system would fail to meet the demands of a consistent utilitarian calculus due to its outdated understanding of how animal models work and what they allow us to predict.
Denna artikel ger en historisk överblick över riksdagsdebatterna om slakt i Sverige 1887–1937 och erbjuder en kritisk tolkning av de problemformuleringar som låg bakom synen på dödandet av djur. Särskilt uppmärksammas framställningen av ”de Andras” slakt, det vill säga de slaktmetoder som brukades på landsbygden, av etniska minoriteter som judar och samer, samt den slakt som utfördes för export till andra länder. Slutsatsen är att dessa slaktformer fick oproportionerligt mycket uppmärksamhet på ett sätt som normaliserade majoritetssamhällets köttkonsumtion och beskar utrymmet för kritik av den speciesistiska ordningen som sådan. Den framväxande svenska djurskyddsideologin byggdes delvis av element från nationalistiska och rasistiska diskurser – element som på ett fördolt sätt ofta är aktiva ännu i vår tids djurskyddsdebatter.
Despite growing academic interest in the human–animal relationship, little research has been directed toward the political regulation of animal treatment. Even less attention has been accorded to the emergence of the long dominant paradigm in this policy area, namely, the ideology of animal welfare. This book attempts to address this gap by chronicling the early history of animal politics in Sweden with the aim of producing a critical, deconstructive genealogy of animal cruelty and animal welfare. The study ranges from the first political debates about animal cruelty in 1844 to the institution of Sweden’s first comprehensive animal protection act in 1944. Taking a post-Marxist and psychoanalytically informed approach to discourse analysis, the study focuses on how the “problem” of animal cruelty was articulated in the parliamentary debates and government documents throughout the period: What was the problem of animal (mis)treatment represented to be? What kinds of animal (ab)use were rendered uncontroversial? What kind of affective investments and ideological fantasies underpinned these discursive constructions, and how did the problematizations change over time? The book contains six empirical chapters that deal with the most important legal revisions in the period as well as the parallel debates about animal experimentation and slaughter. Two major discursive regimes—an early “anti-cruelty regime” and a later “animal welfare regime”—are identified in the material, and the transition between them is theorized in terms of discursive antagonism and dislocation. Focusing on the conflict between competing discursive logics, the study charts a century of ideological struggles through which our modern attitudes toward animals were born. The book also offers a critical reinterpretation of the success story of animal welfare. Against the assumption that modern animal welfarism progressively grew out of the preceding anti-cruelty regime, the central claim of this book is that the “welfarist turn” that took place in the 1930s and 1940s also functioned to re-entrench society’s speciesist values and de-problematize the exploitation of animals for human purposes.
Following demands to regulate biomedicine in the post-war period, Sweden saw several political debates about research ethics in the 1970s. Many of the debates centered on fetal research and animal experiments. At stake were questions of moral permissibility, public transparency, and scientific freedom. However, these debates did not only reveal ethical disagreement—they also contributed to constructing new boundaries between life-forms. Taking a post-Marxist approach to discursive policy analysis, we argue that the meaning of both the “human” and the “animal” in these debates was shaped by a need to manage a legitimacy crisis for medical science. By analyzing Swedish government bills, motions, parliamentary debates, and committee memorials from the 1970s, we map out how fetal and animal research were constituted as policy problems. We place particular emphasis on the problematization of fetal and animal vulnerability. By comparing the debates, we trace out how a particular vision of the ideal life defined the human-animal distinction.