Story-making with Pavlov’s Dogs

Activity: External talk or presentation › Oral presentation

Description

In this talk I share reflections on work undertaken for my recent AHRC Fellowship, titled Pavlov and the kingdom of dogs: Storying experimental animal histories through arts-based research. Whilst Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) is well known for the concept of 'classical conditioning' and his experiments with dogs, the detail of the lives of those dogs are rarely discussed. A visitor to Pavlov's laboratory named it the 'kingdom of dogs' for good reason. Dozens of dogs were housed in the laboratory grounds, and hundreds of dogs lived and died in Pavlov's St Petersburg (later Petrograd/Leningrad) lab complex over a fifty-plus year career. This project utilised arts-based research to examine the everyday experiences and agency of experimental animals, theoretically framed by a critical animal studies orientation, and challenging accepted understandings of scientific and psychological practice. It centred on the production of two artefacts: a graphic novel and a multi-piece diorama- based art installation (a diorama being a three-dimensional miniature scale model). Story- making was integral to the process and outcome of both artefacts, interweaving narratives of the dogs, the human co-workers, the city and wider social, political and scientific developments. The production of the artefacts involved lively collaborations with multiple arts-based practitioners, and invited multiple intersecting ethical, conceptual, strategic and technical deliberations along the way. In this presentation I share a visual summary of each artefact, reflect on the risks and challenges we encountered in making our canine, human- canine and more-than-human stories, and share our initial analysis of audience engagement with the art installation. Lastly, reflecting on our own experience, I consider the wider potential of more-than-human story-making as an interdisciplinary field of artistic research.
Period10 Jun 2025
Event titleMore-than-human storymaking
Event typeConference
LocationOxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational

Keywords

  • animal studies
  • creative methods
  • arts-based methods
  • animal history
  • multispecies
  • more-than-human
  • human-animal relations
  • psychology

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