The House of Beasts’ Symposium

Sophie Davies is a first year PhD researcher at the Cardiff School of Social Science. She is exploring scientific approaches to ageing and longevity in relation to mortality and immortality, humanity and posthumanity and utopia and dystopia. She is also interested in the study of sustainability alongside alternative expressions of culture.

Karolina Rucinska is a prospective PhD student and a research assistant at Cardiff University. Her MSc thesis was on public understanding of a controversial Enviropig — a transgenic animal destined for human consumption — inspired by STS literature. Currently she works on projects concerned with meat production and animal welfare. For her PhD project she plans to engage with the literature on embodied knowing, human-animal relations and philosophy of science to further explore understanding of transgenic animals destined for food.

Gareth M. Thomas is a PhD student in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. He is currently conducting an ethnographic study of antenatal care with a particular focus on screening for Down’s syndrome. His research interests lie broadly across the fields of disability studies, medical sociology, health and illness, the body, ethnography, human-animal relations, and virtual worlds.