Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust, Expertise and Responsibility (SPIDER)

Houses in the UK are frequently home to an assortment of unwanted companions, including rats, mice, bedbugs and wasps. Warming temperatures and changing pesticide responses are intensifying these infestations, and there is growing political, legislative, and ethical debate about how they should best be managed. Domestic infestations wreak economic damage and trigger psychological distress, but their effects are unevenly felt, rendering pests not just a public health concern, but also an issue of socio-economic injustice. While costly for some, infestations are lucrative for others, and the professional pest management (PPM) industry is rapidly expanding. Yet despite its significance for public health, its growing economic clout, and the vast scale of the routine animal suffering and death that is integral to its work, the PPM industry is largely absent from social science literature. Particularly lacking are analyses that address the lived impacts of domestic infestations for residents, the embodied expertise of professional pest controllers, and methods which allow researchers to explore the lifeworlds of the pests themselves. The PPM industry is also in urgent need of data that can address public misconceptions about pest control and highlight the social and economic significance of the industry's work.

In response, 'Situating Pests: Impacts, Disgust, Expertise and Responsibility' (SPIDER) aims to:

Advance ethically grounded and effective responses to pests.
Establish the Project Lead as a leading early career scholar in human geography, providing them with experience of project management and research leadership, and springboarding them into the next stage of their career.
SPIDER's research objectives are:

To document the lived experiences of infestation and of working in PPM, including everyday challenges and decision-making practices
To develop novel creative methods for representing and understanding pests' geographies of the home
To critically evaluate different ways of killing and living with pests as unwanted others
Using qualitative methods the project breaks new ground, interrogating animals' claims to urban space; the entanglement of care, killing and disgust; and the home as a site of encounters and conflict between species. Focused on the private rental sector in London as a case study, it combines interviews with affected residents, participant observation with PPM technicians, and experimental creative methods for mapping rodent movements and placemaking practices. Given the patterns of infestation recorded nationally, it will produce findings that are generalisable across the UK.

SPIDER's scientific contributions will include three open-access journal articles (making empirical, conceptual, and methodological contributions respectively), leading to a proposal for a monograph that will advance interdisciplinary debates surrounding housing inequality, public health, and multispecies ethics. Wider public engagement will be achieved via designing and delivering schools' workshops themed around 'Ecologies of the Home'. Moreover, SPIDER will produce two detailed and accessible reports tailored to the project's primary external collaborators (a housing justice network, and a PPM association), addressing the collaboratively developed research questions. These reports will act as databanks of scientific evidence that the external collaborators can repurpose in their policy, advocacy, and education work to directly impact decision-makers. Consequently, SPIDER will indirectly benefit UK residents who experience infestations, through proposing clear recommendations for ethically grounded and effective responses to pests.