About

Pauline (Postdoctoral researcher) is a media studies researcher from Paris. She is currently doing post-doctoral research at the University of Liège, at Spiral Research Center, and is an associate researcher at PALOC research center in Paris (IRD-MNHN-CNRS). Her research examines the environmental relationship of surveillance and algorithmic infrastructures, and currently explores feral cows, pastoral practices, and agricultural governance in Corsica. She is a member of the Digital Ecologies research collective, and co-edits the journal Librarioli.

Roxane Gabet (PhD Candidate) joined the “Body Societal” project after an education in Political Science, followed by a Master's degree in Anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her research interests lie at the crossroads of pragmatist philosophy and Indigenous studies. She is now working on the case of the “adaptation” of cattle breeding in a context of multiple ecological ravages, looking more specifically at biologists and geneticists’ practices as they are involved in the making of this “adapted cow of the future”. She followed them in their laboratory practices in order to understand how their knowledge transforms the bodies of cows, the territories in which cows live, and the people who care for them. With a special focus on the role of reproductive technologies as they circulate from the farm to the clinic, her research approach borrows from feminist STS, anthropology of science and the environmental humanities.

Daniele (Postdoctoral researcher) holds a PhD in History of Science, Technology, and the Environment, which he obtained at KTH - Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden (2020). His doctoral project was funded by the ITN-Marie Sklodowska-Curie program in Environmental Humanities ENHANCE. In the past few years, he has been working on the interplay between human and non-human mobilities and environmental history, also touching upon critical heritage, history of memory, oral history, post-industrial landscapes, ruderal ecologies, walking methodologies, and political ecology. As part of The Body Societal Project, he is conducting research on genetics, animal husbandry, breed selection, and agricultural modernization during fascism in Italy and the Italian former imperial territories. He is a member of the European Society for Environmental History, the Italian Oral History Association (AISO), and of the political ecology collective Ecologie Politiche del Presente based in Naples.

Simon (PhD Candidate) has a background in political sciences and philosophy. He joined the project after a master thesis in philosophy on tracking techniques and extinction studies. He tried to grasp what can it mean for an animal to be present on a given territory at the age of the 6th mass extinction. His researches among the BoS project concerns the concept of gene that he tries to track and follow from its historical creation until its many avatars such as genomics, epigenetics and metagenomics. His approach combines STS and pragmatic philosophy as he seeks to fathom the concept of gene through the allowances it produces. What kind of relation toward farm animals, and particularly bovines, does that special concept create? Among others, his interests travel throughout themes such as the history of genetics, the white-blue cattle breed in Belgium, the creation and use of *biological dark matter* concept, monsters and weird biology, philosophy of the living and many other topics concerning the heterogeneity of life forms and the connections they maintain among them and with humans.

Jenske (PhD Candidate) joined the BoS project after her education in cultural anthropology and arts, science, and technology studies. She interned at the Museum for Natural History in Berlin, where she studied the practices and techniques involved in the conservation and reproduction of zoo animals. Her thesis focused on an ethnographic study of the (re)writing of infection prevention protocols in a hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the BoS project, Jenske continues to explore her interests at the intersection of conservation and reproduction. Her ethnographic research investigates the practices and techniques of cow conservation in the Netherlands. She closely follows geneticists, data researchers, farmers, breed companies, breed organisations, cows, and their environments. Her research interests include valuations, heritage, multispecies relations, datafication of nature, infrastructures, and the making of breeds.

François Thoreau is Research Associate at the FNRS, attached at the Spiral research centre at the University of Liege. He was awarded an ERC-funded Starting Grant (2021-2026) for inquiring into the making of the bovine genome and its interspecific consequences, together with a great team of researchers. François teaches Ecology & Politics in the Master of Science & Technology Studies at U Liège and is committed to several activist undertakings.