AnimalFarm Seminar Series - Fall 2026 | 2 – Camille Bellet
AnimalFarm explores the architectural history of animal farming in Europe and North America, from sixteenth-century Palladian villas until late-twentieth-century automated factory farms.
The project engages with the perspectives of critical animal studies, history of veterinary medicine, and labor history. AnimalFarm ultimately explores the historical roots of a controversial phenomenon of the Anthropocene, and it fosters an alternative aze on the spatial, material, and ethical implications of the human-animal relationship through time.
The AnimalFarm seminar series brings together scholars from different disciplines whose research intersects with architectural and animal history, as well as ethnography, critical animal studies, history of science and design theory.
All talks will be in English, unless specified.
2 – Camille Bellet, Milking rhythms: Sensing practices and multispecies relations in automated dairy farming
Since the 1950s, the industrialisation of dairy farming has sought to regulate cows’ biological processes through scientific techniques, including genetic selection, standardised feeding, and automated milking. These innovations increased productivity while reshaping the temporal and spatial organisation of interactions between farmers and cows. More recently, digital technologies and artificial intelligence have enabled continuous monitoring of cows’ biological rhythms, translating physiological signals into actionable data for farm management.
Existing research on the socio-cultural foundations of industrial farming has often taken an anthropocentric perspective, emphasising industrial regulation and production while overlooking the sensory experiences and lived rhythms of cows and humans in daily practice.
To address this gap, I adopt a multisensory, post-structuralist approach, drawing on 200 hours of ethnographic observation, 60 hours of video recordings, 43 interviews, and archival work on farms in France and the United Kingdom.
The analysis reveals that rhythms of milking and care are neither purely biological nor mechanistic. They emerge through co-constitutions of humans, cows, and technologies, and are perceived and negotiated through sound, movement, touch, smell, and sight. Industrial farm infrastructures, technologies, and materials actively shape these rhythms, coordinating practices and structuring daily management. These rhythms operate as forms of adaptive continuity, through which humans, animals, and technologies continuously adjust while sustaining the regularity required by industrial production. Yet attending to rhythm shows that these adjustments are not smooth or unidirectional; they reveal the granular texture of everyday practices that sometimes align with, and at other times constrain or rework, the industrial system.
About the speaker
Camille Bellet is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (CHSTM), University of Manchester, and a former Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Science (2020-2023).
Trained as a veterinarian and epidemiologist, she now works at the intersection of sensory studies, STS, and the medical humanities, investigating how sensing practices — seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, moving — constitute knowledge, care, and well-being in human-animal relations. Her research challenges the textual and visual biases that have long dominated more-than-human scholarship, treating the sensorium as a relational field in which humans and non-human animals attune to one another and in which knowledge is made through embodied, situated encounter.
She is the co-founder and coordinator of the Non-Human Animals in the Medical Humanities Network (NAMHN, 2022), co-investigator on a major SSHRC Partnership Grant on human-animal research and health collaborations (2026–31), and author of a chapter in An Introduction to Veterinary Humanities (Routledge, 2026).
Her current research develops a relational, sensory, and more-than-human approach to the study of human-animal relations and wellbeing, extending critical health scholarship and multispecies studies into new empirical, theoretical, and methodological territory.
PROGRAM
Monday 05.10, 9.30–11.30 – Giovanni Ferrarese, Dalla stalla razionale alla fattoria senza terra. Le trasformazioni della zootecnia intensiva italiana nel secondo dopoguerra
Thursday 22.10, 10.00–12.00 – Camille Bellet, Milking rhythms: Sensing practices and multispecies relations in automated dairy farming
Wednesday 28.10, 16.00–18.00 – Andrea Borghini, “Animal Farm”: Philosophical Perspectives
INFO
To attend online, please send an email to: animal.farm@polito.it
(197 KB)