Project overview
Oxford University Press John Fell Fund Award (£6,366.67).
Domestic infestations of rats, bedbugs and mice continue to proliferate in UK homes. Urban pests wreak economic damage and trigger psychological distress, but their impacts are unevenly felt. Their distribution and management reflect wider issues of socio-economic injustice. While costly for some, infestations are lucrative for others. The multi-billion-dollar professional pest control industry is economically consequential, integral to public health and mired in everyday animal death and suffering, yet this 'dirty work' is academically overlooked. This research addressed this critical analytical and empirical gap. I explored the academically neglected expertise and epistemologies of professional pest controllers. Laying the theoretical, empirical, and practical foundations for a larger forthcoming project: 'Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust, Expertise and Responsibility' (SPIDER), in this project I: 1) enhanced my technical literacy, enabling me to conduct ethnography with professional pest managers; 2) built relations with pest managers to enable research collaboration, and 3) identified recent trends in infestations and pest management practices and situated these within wider academic literatures.
Domestic infestations of rats, bedbugs and mice continue to proliferate in UK homes. Urban pests wreak economic damage and trigger psychological distress, but their impacts are unevenly felt. Their distribution and management reflect wider issues of socio-economic injustice. While costly for some, infestations are lucrative for others. The multi-billion-dollar professional pest control industry is economically consequential, integral to public health and mired in everyday animal death and suffering, yet this 'dirty work' is academically overlooked. This research addressed this critical analytical and empirical gap. I explored the academically neglected expertise and epistemologies of professional pest controllers. Laying the theoretical, empirical, and practical foundations for a larger forthcoming project: 'Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust, Expertise and Responsibility' (SPIDER), in this project I: 1) enhanced my technical literacy, enabling me to conduct ethnography with professional pest managers; 2) built relations with pest managers to enable research collaboration, and 3) identified recent trends in infestations and pest management practices and situated these within wider academic literatures.
Staff
Lead researchers
Collaborating research institutes, centres and groups
Research outputs
Hannah Fair,
2024, Progress in Environmental Geography
Type: article