Connie Johnston is currently an Adjunct Professor of Geography at DePaul College and was a visiting fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the academic year 2012-2013. She also has a Master of Arts in Graduate Liberal Studies from Duke University. Her dissertation research examines, in the United States and Europe, the scientific construction and social negotiation of the concept of farm animal welfare through the activities of three (two US and one European) government-sponsored scientific research programs. She received a 2011-2012 National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant to support her fieldwork. As a Harvard STS Fellow, she will complete the analysis and write-up of the results of her research interviews and field observations.

Connie’s fieldwork entailed observing farm animal welfare scientific research and assessments and interviewing key farm animal welfare scientists. Her US sites were the Livestock Behavior Research Unit in Indiana and university research locations in Michigan and California that are affiliated with the Applied Animal Behavior and Welfare program. In Europe she visited locations of farm animal welfare assessment that used the EU-funded Welfare Quality® project protocols. From her research results, Connie is seeing the interplay between societal-level concerns, particular research environments, and individual human and animal actions in driving research agendas and outcomes.

More broadly than her current doctoral research, Connie is interested in human attitudes toward and relationships with the non-human world and the ways these are mediated by scientific knowledge. She is also interested in theories of ethics, social movements, and feminist theory/critiques of science.