The Unfinished Business of Anna Kingsford – Towards an Enchanted Animal Ethic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article takes seriously the claim made by 19th century antivivisectionist Anna Kingsford that experiments on animals constitute a type of malevolent sorcery, more specifically a demonic blood sacrifice. In so doing, the paper follows the work of Pignarre and Stengers in their explication of sorcery and how to “get a hold” of its operations despite its stupefying powers. To that end, I will investigate the pragmatic potential of understanding experiments on animals in this way, and more broadly, following the work of posthuman and material feminists, as a type of onto-theological phenomenon of spacetimemattering (in Karen Barad’s terms). This understanding will pay particular attention to the intra-active exclusions that haunt the laboratory space and, following a neo-Spinozist feminist approach, I will explicate the ways in which the human-animal power relations within the laboratory inhibit the creation of joyful multispecies “common notions.” In order to respond to the ghostly presences which haunt the laboratory space, and to affirm joyful, multispecies relations for “as well as possible worlds” (Puig de la Bellacasa), I will finally argue for an affirmative multispecies politics of what Rosi Bradiotti calls “zoe-centered egalitarianism” through a posthuman politics of “grace,” or “the leaving be of nonhumans” (MacCormack) which I frame as an enactment of an enchanted animal ethic.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".