What is An "Animal" Anyways?: From Essentialism to Social Construction Through Research on ACI

Lena Ashooh, Rebecca Kleinberger.

ACI '25: Proceedings of the ACM 12th International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction, PDF, DOI

ABSTRACT

New technologies can produce changes in concepts, such as how the concept of work changed with online interfaces, money changed with new currency technologies, and cancer changed with the introduction of microscope technology. Research on animal-computer interactions (ACI) has changed concepts like user, welfare, evaluation, and participatory design, as the design of technology with animals as users, participants, and beneficiaries has required new concepts. We propose that ACI research has the potential to transform an even more fundamental concept: what an “animal” is. We hypothesize that ACI researchers have often been operating with essentialist concepts of animal categories such as species, breeds, or even categories like dog, bird, ape, and wild animal, where those grouping have aimed to reflect “biological” or “natural” groups that are fixed and unchanging. Drawing from the social philosophers Sally Haslanger’s and Ian Hacking’s methods of analyzing socially constructed categories, we propose that the essentialist concept of animal categories could inhibit ACI research and produce technologies that reinforce the existence of such categories. In turn, research on animal-technology interactions, if conducted with a social constructionist conception, could disrupt conceptions of animal categories, revealing ways in which animal categories are produced by animals’ material and social conditions, including their technological realities, and could change with changing technologies, opening new doors for ACI research and beyond.