Poststructuralism has fundamentally jeopardised the consistency of the modern, rational, autonomous human. In its place is gradually being revealed an embodied, transient, borderless human-ish entity that is relationally achieved  (Haraway 1991; Whatmore 2002). Equally, agencies and materials once defined as non-human are becoming socialised as new kinds of political/ecological subjects (Bennett 2010). Here we focus on how more-or-less human bodies are materialised by performing relations/assemblages/ partnerships with differently capable agents (for example sentient animals, fossilised mineral, vital matter, technology). These relations, assemblages or partnerships reflect and refract the different capacities and response-abilities of all the experimental partners involved, including humans whose capabilities are differentiated by age, gender, skills, emotional vulnerabilities and prior experiences. The unique and contextualised forms such partnerships take affect how they are governed and how they come to matter legally, scientifically and commercially in diverse and multiple ways.

Therefore we place our analytic focus on what we call the ‘experimental partnership’. The experimental partnership is a concept for exploring experimentation not as an exclusively human-located capacity but as a space where experimental partners learn how to respond to and matter to each other. Two empirical examples are offered. The first traces how humans and viruses learn how to accommodate each other, producing new understandings of the common cold in a scientific research unit. The second explores how experimental partnerships take place outside the more formal spaces of the laboratory, through examining the more-or-less successful experimental partnerships formed between cattle and farm workers. Like all relationships experimental partnerships may succeed or fail. Our examples offer a resource for examining how experimental partnerships are sustained, retained and lost, and how participants are transformed and redefined (as more or less human-ish?) through experimental encounters.