Focusing on a global hub of aviation, Frankfurt Airport, this essay examines encounters between animals and technology in airport operation. In order to understand how airport practices constantly negotiate the borders with local environments or even produce new ones, we draw on Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of “borderlands.” Extending this notion from human to nonhuman inhabitants and passengers of airports opens up for novel possibilities to apprehend the affective dimension in the life-technology intersections at airports. In this sense, the airport is a site of multiple borderlands, producing intersections that include material and imaginative, sometimes violent, boundary drawing. We examine a broad set of multispecies borders and “borderlining” practices, their material cultures, and affective economies. What kind of local, historical legacies do airports struggle with and how do they cope with the underlying tensions of partially connected sites, sectors, and spaces? Throughout the essay, we historicize three encounters of the aviation infrastructure and its living environments and their affective economies: borderlining the airfield, borderlining the animal passenger, and borderlining the animal intruder. These examples highlight different modes of encounters, like clashes, coexistence, and care.
Epistemic‐Hunger in the Stable: The Genesis of Bone‐Sheep as Experimental Animals in Orthopedic Surgery. The text explores the coming‐into‐being of bone‐sheep as experimental animals in the field of orthopedic surgery from the 1960s onwards. Sheep replaced dogs – mainly for emotional reasons – as test subjects for newly developed implants like plates and screws, which were used for fracture care in humans and in pet animals. Utilizing a praxeographic approach in the framework of material semiotics, the history of bone‐sheep is examined more closely in order to explore how different sheep ontologies (e.g. bone‐sheep and meat‐sheep) are intertwined. Ontologies are understood as specific modes of existence: a set of simultaneous multiple realities which are coproduced by animals and humans and which do not align into a single coherent reality. Materiality is not understood as pre‐given but rather as an effect of practices of relating, connecting and cutting – thus producing – heterogeneities like bone‐sheep. Those practices can be understood as a form of ’ontological politics', which describes the interactions between different ontological realities. By paying specific attention to the phenomenon of hunger and practices of feeding, the text examines the ontological politics of synchronization between the epistemic hunger – the data‐collection or scientific hunger of the researchers – and the ontological hunger of the sheep themselves, which can be seen as crucial in the materialization of bone‐sheep.
Martina Schlünder und Pit Arens beschäftigen sich in ihrem Beitrag mit konzeptionellen und praktischen Beziehungsformen zwischen Tieren und Menschen anhand der Geschichte der operativen Knochenbruchbehandlung. Eine Gruppe schweizerischer Chirurgen entwickelte in den 1960er Jahren das Verfahren der Osteosynthese: das Zusammenfügen von Knochenfragmenten und das Heilen eines Bruchspalts durch das Einfügen fremden, anorganischen Materials - Schrauben, Platten und Drähte aus Metall. Der Beitrag untersucht die überraschenden Beziehungs-(un-)fähigkeiten zwischen Menschen, Tieren und Dingen in der Form eines Comics. Seine sequenziellen Bilderabfolgen und die ihm eigene Materialität des Textes in Sprechblasen, Textboxen und Schriftbändern eröffnen Möglichkeiten auch in der Form, Beziehungen neu zu denken und das Text-Bildverhältnis anders zu gestalten. Dabei können z.B. Textzeilen in die Bilder wandern oder den Raum zwischen den Bildern als Möglichkeit nutzen, um zu visuellen Argumenten zu werden.
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