Co(w)-Producing Milk

Abstract

This thesis explores how relations between humans, animals, and technologies are enacted and negotiated within everyday practices on a dairy farm in Southern Jutland. Through ethnographic fieldwork and visual anthropological methods, specific interactions around automated technologies are examined, particularly milking and feeding robots. The analysis highlights how these technologies enforce standards of uniformity among cows, creating tensions when individual animals, deviate from robotic expectations.

Using theoretical frameworks from Actor-Network Theory (ANT), multispecies ethnography, and relational ontology, the thesis critically examines how technological demands shape both daily farm management and longer-term breeding practices aimed at creating an ideal, robot-compatible cow.

Additionally, the thesis reflects methodologically on the possibilities and limitations of visual anthropology. The camera's role in capturing, but also selectively framing, multispecies relations is critically assessed, highlighting inherent representational challenges and the partial nature of visual ethnographic knowledge production.

Ultimately, the thesis argues that understanding farm life as a dynamic network of human, animal, and technological interactions provides valuable insights into broader processes of standardisation, agency distribution, and multispecies coexistence.