The Making of the Brave Sheep or … the Laboratory as the Unlikely Space of Attunement to Animal Emotions (original) (raw)

has argued that animals, humans, and objects must be appraised together as they form various, temporary clusters of active beings. In this paper, drawing on material semiotics/ ANT insights, I will look at one such temporary cluster of animal scientists and sheep brought together in a specific experiment and a set of animal science practices dedicated to explore sheep emotions. This experiment was carried out in an animal science farm/laboratory of INRA (National Institute of Agricultural Research) in Clermont Ferrand, France, as part of a project on farm animals' emotions (EmoFarm, 2010(EmoFarm, -2015.Here, I will argue, the laboratory can be seen as an unlikely space of attunement to farm animals' emotions and the sheep body, to borrow from Latour, is what leaves a dynamic trajectory by which she learns to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of (Latour, 2004:205). By looking at this temporary cluster of active beings and what they produce, I engage in a conversation with Giorgio Agamben's theory of signatures and Ginzburg signatorial method. URL: https://mc.