Team
Vanessa Ashall
I am a senior veterinary clinician and interdisciplinary health researcher. I was awarded a clinical fellowship by the Wellcome Trust in 2014 for Doctoral research which demonstrated the significance of contemporary veterinary decision making to increasing understanding of human health and medicine.
In 2017 I joined the Wellcome Trust collaborative award The Animal Research Nexus as a clinical postdoctoral researcher where I have played a key role as the only clinician within a team of 14 humanities and social science researchers exploring changing constitutions of animal research from across 5 UK Universities.
I have published key papers relating to both empirical and normative aspects of my research on donation, consent, ethical decision making and the regulation of animal research. I have presented my work nationally and internationally to multiple academic and professional audiences, engaged the public with my research findings via YouTube, radio interviews and Blog posts, and influenced professional policy and practice through the provision of expert opinion and the design of practical ethical decision making tools.
As Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Science & Technology Studies Unit (SATSU), University of York, I am currently developing the scope and impact of my pioneering interspecies and interdisciplinary doctoral research approach towards critical questions surrounding clinical end of life care for both humans and animals.
Conversations from the clinic; bringing together medical and veterinary healthcare professionals to share their experiences of animals & humans becoming ‘entangled’ during end of life care
Joanna Latimer
Joanna Latimer is Professor of Sociology, Science & Technology & Director of the Science & Technology Studies Unit (SATSU), University of York, UK.
Having studied English Lit. as an undergraduate, I then trained and worked as a nurse, and won a fellowship to do a PhD about older people, diagnosis, and care in acute medicine at Edinburgh University.
Joining Keele as Senior Research Fellow in Nursing in 1994, I moved to being Research Officer in the Keele Centre for Social Gerontology and honorary research fellow in Sociology in 1996. I then took up a lectureship in Sociology at Cardiff in 1999, progressing to chair in 2009.
My research focuses on the cultural, social and existential effects and affects for illness and disability, and of how science, medicine and healthcare are done. In addition I have researched and theorized human-non-human animal relations. I work ethnographically, examining everyday processes of inclusion and exclusion.
Making contributions at the leading edge of social theory, I have written extensively about affect, care, ageing, animals, dementia, older people, dwelling, the politics of imagination, body-world relations, and class. I have published many articles and books, including The Conduct of Care (2000), (Un)knowing Bodies (2009), The Gene, The Clinic and The Family (2013), awarded the 2014 FSHI annual book prize, and Intimate Entanglements (2019 with Dani López Gómez).
Currently I am writing up my study of ageing and biology as a new book for Routledge, Naturecultures at The Limits to Life: Ageing, Biology and Society, as well as co-editing a special issue on contemporary developments in Alzheimer’s research (with Richard Milne & Shirlene Badger) for New Genetics & Society.
A new form of transdisciplinary end of life care research