Dr Rhoda Wilkie

Lecturer

MA, PhD

Personal Details Telephone: +44 (0)1224 274353 Email: r.m.wilkie@abdn.ac.uk Address: F.23 Edward Wright Building Department of Sociology School of Social Science University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, AB24 3QY

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My primary research focus is human-animal interaction from a sociological perspective.

My doctoral thesis (2002) explores the experiences, attitudes and feelings of agricultural workers (e.g. farmers, stockpeople, auctioneers, vets and slaughter workers), and hobby farmers, who work with commercial and rare breeds of livestock as part of their everyday lives.

This research addresses an under-explored and little understood area in contemporary life. It also highlights the multifaceted, gendered and ambiguous nature of people's practical relations with livetsock, and thus provides an opportunity to gain fresh insights into longstanding debates about the production, and slaughter, of food animals in modern industrialised societies.

This work was published in 2010 in the Temple University Press Book Series, Animals, Culture, and Society, edited by Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders:Livestock/Deadstock: Working with Farm Animals from Birth to Slaughter.

• Winner of the British Sociological Association's Philip Abrams Memorial Prize in April 2011; the prize is awarded for the 'best first sole-authored book within the discipline of Sociology': http://www.britsoc.co.uk/publications/PAM.htm

• Award for Distinguished Scholarship in the Animals and Society Section of the American Sociological Association, 2011

For more information about Livestock/Deadstock see:http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1908_reg.html

I remain interested in interspecies work contexts and issues.   

Finally, given the 'animal turn' taking place in the social sciences, I am beginning to consider how, and to what extent, research carried out by human-animal studies (HAS) scholars might inform, challenge and potentially revise 'mainstream' sociology. I am also exploring how sociologically-informed contributions might further augment and develop the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of HAS. This two-way process of disciplinary stock-taking not only provides an opportunity to reflect on a number of key theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges facing those involved in this innovative area of research but it also opens up the possibility of increasingly 'animalising sociology' and 'sociologising HAS'.