Laboratory animal science represents a challenging and controversial form of human-animal relations because its practice involves the deliberate and inadvertent harming and killing of animals. Consequently, animal research has formed the focus of intense ethical concern and regulation within the UK, in order to minimize the suffering and pain experienced by those animals whose living bodies model human diseases amongst other things. This paper draws on longitudinal ethnographic research and in-depth interviews undertaken with junior laboratory animal technicians (ATs) in UK universities between 2013 and 2015, plus insights from interviews with key stakeholders in laboratory animal welfare. In our analysis, we examine four key dimensions of care work in laboratory animal research: (i) the specific skills and sensitivities required; (ii) the role of previous experiences of animal care; (iii) the influence of institutional and affective environments and (iv) experiences of killing. We propose that different notions of care are enacted alongside, not only permitted levels of harm inflicted on research animals following research protocols, but also harms to ATs in the processes of caring and killing animals. Concluding, we argue for greater articulation of the coexistence of care and harms across debates in geography about care and human-animal relations.

This paper explores what happens to care, and decisions about ending and extending life, when research animals become pets and pets become research animals. To do this, we draw on in-depth qualitative research on (i) rehoming of laboratory animals, (ii) veterinary clinical research, and (iii) the role of the Named Veterinary Surgeon (NVS) in UK animal research. We begin by exploring how (in theory and practice) the ethical, affective, and practical elements of care are split in the research laboratory. We then investigate arguments for and against ending and extending animal life via clinical research and rehoming, highlighting how these activities bring norms and dilemmas around animal death in the laboratory and veterinary clinic to the fore. We conclude by demonstrating the value of investigating borders between animal categories for understanding dilemmas around care and death, and for contributing to emerging literatures within geography around animal care, death, and categorisation. Key contributions of our work include highlighting: how care roles can be split; the importance of considering speculative and in-practice elements of care; the context-dependency and multiplicity of practices of killing in the veterinary clinic and laboratory; and the flexibility and changing nature of animal categories.

Drawing on concepts from Foucault and Agamben, we maintain that the lives of daily heroin users provide a prime illustration of bare life in the zone of indistinction that is contemporary Detroit. First, we consider the case of Detroit as a stigmatized and racially segregated city, with concrete consequences for its residents. We then present evidence from in-depth ethnographic and economic interviews to illustrate the various spaces of confinement-that of addiction, that of economic marginality, and that of gender-occupied by these men and women, as well as the indeterminacy of their daily lives, captured through their descriptions of daily routines and interactions. We examine their expressions of worth as expressed in economic, emotional and moral terms. Finally, we draw connections between the sustained marginality of these individuals, as a contemporary category of homo sacer, and the policies and powers that both despise and depend upon them. Heroin, we contend, helps to fill and numb this social void, making bare life bearable, but also cementing one's marginality into semi-permanence.

This paper initiates debate for geographers on the nature of care in relation to the self explored through the practices of aesthetic surgery. Central to debates on the meanings and relations of aesthetic surgery are a set of problematics related to the scales of care and responsibility. These are captured in the distinctions between caring for or caring about and between self-care or care of the self. Aesthetic surgery is a particularly ambivalent 'extreme care', which for many is always the expression of consent to an aesthetic hegemony or the exercise of disciplinary power. The paper draws out some of the spatial paradoxes involved in care related to the self in aesthetic surgery and proposes some routes forward. The framework of landscapes of care that enhances a temporal dimension and the concept of reworking the social relations of hegemony may help mediate the inherent tensions of scales of care and responsibility. Specifically, this combination may offer a way to allow for a limited, or bounded, care of the self without negating the networks of power within which the practices of self-care are enacted.

The pursuit of subjective well-being has become an important object of policy and personal action, which within geography has been engaged largely by those with an interest in health. But to date, geography has given little attention to the ways in which subjective well-being changes and in particular, the ways in which it may be understood as both stable and amenable to change. Similarly, the field of arts and health asserts the value of participation in the creative arts for enhancing subjective well-being, but has also hardly addressed how this may come about. The paper explores stability and change in well-being through a case study of a dance and movement intervention in an English primary school. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari's notions of assemblages and of striated and smooth space to explore how participation in the arts may enable escape from habituated practices. This exploration expands the scope of geographies of health towards capturing the moments and processes through which transitions in subjective well-being may occur. The study indicates the need for greater attention to gentler and gendered forms of transition.

International adoption relocates minors, and only minors, from one country to another. The centrality of age to adoptive migration may prevent us from seeing the significance of generation: the prospective parent's age is also examined and evaluated for its relationship to the child's age and what this relationship will mean for the creation of a family. Because international adoption results in children crossing borders to enter new kinship formations, the assumptions under which it operate require closer geographical analysis. Generation, or the age range that separates dependents and their caretakers, is a significant but unstated motivator of international adoption policies and practices. This article argues that a normative and biologised sense of intergenerational difference is embedded in international adoption. The presence of generational ideology in national laws and international norms regarding international adoption demonstrate a broader sense in which policies situate more privileged families as acceptable and others as inadequate. I draw material for this analysis from both legal documents and documents which aim to provide interpretation of those laws, with reference to international adoptions from Peru.

A good culture of care, empowering individuals within organisations to care and reflecting wider social expectations about care, is now a well-documented aspiration in managing practices of laboratory animal research and establishing priorities for patient and public health. However, there is little attention to how different institutional cultures of care interact and what happens to the accountabilities of caring roles and the entanglements of caring practices when institutional cultures meet. Drawing on research exploring the increasing practices of patient and public involvement (PPI) within animal research in the UK, we identify three ways in which cultures of care are changing in encounters between biomedical researchers and people affected by health conditions. Firstly, patient involvement in animal research brings additional bodies to within research facilities. Secondly, patient and public groups are seen as an increasingly important group to to. Thirdly, involvement brings opportunities for patients and publics to for both human and animals. However, more attention is required to understand how shifts towards cultures of care distribute power and responsibility to care within institutions and at their boundaries, where responsibilities to care may be disconnected from the power to effect meaningful changes.

Communication between scientists and animal technicians is considered important for creating a 'culture of care' in facilities that use animals in scientific research. For example, the Brown report, which investigated alleged failures of animal care at Imperial College London, noted the physical and social separation between animal technicians and scientists as a problem that delimited a culture of care. This paper seeks to better understand the communicative relationships between scientists and animal technicians in this context. We conducted a survey of scientists working in the UK who use animals in their research (n = 230), asking who they spoke with about various aspects related to using animals in research. We found that scientists communicated with technicians about operational issues, while they spoke with other scientists about experimental design as well as moral questions and concerns. We probe the meaning of these communicative relationships using narrative analysis of semi-structured, qualitative interviews conducted with consenting survey respondents (n = 14). Analytically, this paper seeks to bridge social network analysis with geographies of care through a shared concern with relations of power.

As researchers, institution-wide regulatory and organisational cultures guide our work. Over the past two decades, University Research Ethics Committees have been formally established across social science disciplines. However, the functioning of these committees has not been without critique. It is often argued that established ethical procedures informed by the medical sciences do not fit well with the more iterative epistemologies and unpredictable practices of doing social fieldwork. In this paper, I contribute to these discussions by considering what a further framework, a 'culture of care', might offer to university research ethics. A culture of care has evolved in contexts like the National Health Service (NHS) and animal research, and makes central claims around support, openness, collaboration and relationships. Bringing this to research ethics, I explore experiences of care through moments of friction in doing fieldwork with people living with Motor Neurone Disease. Identifying gaps between the institutional, personal and relational, I tentatively suggest some key features that a culture of care for research ethics might seek to develop. These discussions are also timely. Wider conversations emerging around reimagining research cultures in higher education provide an opportune moment to consider what a reimagined research ethics might look like and offer too.

Following the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 across the world in 2020, millions of people were reduced in their mobility to hinder the spread of the disease. The lockdown was particularly difficult for older adults, who were deemed 'vulnerable' because many felt unsafe leaving the house and often forced to self-isolate. In this paper, we interpret the lockdowns as a period of prolonged stillness: breaks from everyday practices, including withdrawnness, inefficiency, and retreat. We extend ideas of stillness by integrating the capability approach, which shows how the opportunities and challenges that arise from moments of stillness are dependent on a combination of individual agency and the role of structural or contextual factors. Using the accounts of thirty-eight older adults in the Netherlands and England, we show how the COVID-19 lockdowns established and encouraged different types of stillness which had differing impacts upon the older adults' lives. The effect of the prolonged stillness on these different areas of everyday life is based on individual agency and contextual factors, such as choosing to volunteer or having an adequate internet connection. Thus, our findings contribute to discussions around active ageing and demonstrate that slowing down, and spending more time at home, can provide respite from an otherwise active everyday life.