Overview |
Publications |
The visibility of animal slaughter in Denmark contrasts starkly with the modes of concealment typical of slaughterhouses in industrialised societies. Members of the public can enter a pig slaughterhouse and participate in a tour of the facility, tracking the animal from life to compartmentalised death. Interestingly, Denmark boasts one of the highest meat consumption rates in the world. This transparency of animal slaughter transcends the slaughterhouse to other institutions, such as a zoo which euthanized and publicly dissected a healthy 18-month-old giraffe in front of schoolchildren in 2014.
My ESRC-funded PhD involved 17-months ethnographic fieldwork, wherein I examined the politics and paradoxes of transparency that shed light on Danish cultural attitudes towards animals. I explored how national identity is conceptualised and reproduced through practices of openness and transparency, from dissections and carcass feeding in the zoo to slaughterhouse tours. In collaboration with a Danish zoo, I conducted participant observation as well as semi-structured interviews with staff. I carried out a significant ethnographic study of a Danish slaughterhouse using multimodal research methods. |
Mc Loughlin, E. (Forthcoming) Slaughterhouse Tours in Denmark: Affective Nationalism in the Making of Citizen-Consumers and the Industrial Slaughter of Happy Pigs. American Anthropologist.
Mc Loughlin, E. (2023). Dissecting the ethics of choreographed encounters with animal death in the zoo: A posthumanist lens on dark pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 1-15. Mc Loughlin, E. (2023). Care and its discontents: Commodification, coercive cooperation, and resistance in Copenhagen Zoo. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 6(3), 1923-1939. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221125227 Mc Loughlin, E. (2023) Being existed by another through the sensory: The ungrievable deaths of industrial pigs in slaughterhouse tours. In New Perspectives on Urban Deathscapes (pp. 162-179). Edward Elgar Publishing. Mc Loughlin, E. (2023) Transparency, Accountability, and (Post) Truth in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. |