Linköping Studies in Arts and Science No. 700, 2016 Department of Thematic Studies – Unit of Gender Studies Linköping University
581 83, Linköping, Sweden www.liu.se
Based on one year of ethnographic studies in a Drosophila lab and the analytical approaches suggested by Karen Barad’s “agential realism”, this thesis sets out to explore ethical and political dimensions of laboratory work and its knowledge practices. Here, entanglements of posthuman performativity, hands-on lab work, technologies, humans and nonhumans, like lab animals, are brought together to diffract agential assymetries and constitutive exclusions that are part of pro-ducing knowledge on Alzheimer’s disease in basic laboratory science. In particular, the role of death and dying in the lab are studied. Human animal relations are explored through the analytical concept of a “spectrum of killability”. Further-more, practices of disposal and dealing with biowaste are also analysed. This dissertation asks how, in lab practices, death comes to matter. As a feminist technoscience study, it is also an attempt to make death matter.
