Professor Jane Desmond

Social Dimensions of Veterinary Medicine: A Comparative Mapping of the Emergent Veterinary Humanities in the U.K. and U.S.

Veterinary medicine impacts almost everyone's daily lives, guiding the safety of the food we eat, caring for the pets that are part of our families, and helping control the spread of zoonotic diseases, like the current pandemic. Yet, scholarly work seeking to understand how veterinary medicine and science are shaped by and in turn impact wider social formations is dramatically absent. This absence is in contrast to that of human medicine, which is the subject of extensive studies in the fields of the medical humanities/social sciences and medical anthropology as well as studies of science and society. This project proposes a scoping study to assess the current state of interdisciplinary veterinary humanities research through a comparison of such work being done in the U.K. and the U.S., two of the global leaders in veterinary medicine. It will then describe future avenues of research to build this emerging interdisciplinary field.