Description
Drawing on findings from my current Wellcome Trust project, this presentation explores how the everyday practice of sensing cows – visual, tactile, auditory, and beyond – is being reshaped by digital infrastructures and technologies in contemporary dairying. Far from being neutral, these sensing practices reorganise perception, amplifying some sensory engagements while silencing others, and entangling both humans and cows in broader regimes of power and inequality that extend far beyond the farm. Combining historical, ethnographic, and artistic approaches, I pursue two main aims: first, to examine how sensing practices with cows unfold along lines of power, shaping not only human-cow relations but also wider social hierarchies; and second, to experiment with sensory-analytical frameworks that might foster ethical, more-than-human relationalities. Drawing on sensory studies, along with feminist, decolonial, and more-than-human theories, I focus on three sensory dimensions – rhythms, scales, and materialities – which are transformed by digitalisation and serve both as analytical lenses and as entry points for research-creation and collective discussion. I will also introduce Portable Cow, a multimodal experimental project designed to trouble, redistribute, and reimagine the sensory relations at play in digitised dairying. Through an engagement with and through the senses, this work seeks to open new possibilities for understanding and reconfiguring multispecies relations in a world increasingly shaped by digital practices and sensing systems.| Period | 2 Apr 2026 |
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| Event title | Virtual Fences, Digital Shepherds: International Workshop on the Politics of Tracking, Herding & Controlling Animal Mobilities |
| Event type | Workshop |
| Location | Potsdam, GermanyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |