ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Environmental/Multispecies Studies

1. Accommodating A Plurality Of Values When Engaging Emerging Technologies In Sustainability Transitions – On Designing For Safety And Security In A Warming World

Pim Klaassen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Megan Palmer, Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University

Climate change is a wicked problem [1], which many hope technological innovation will effectively resolve. Technologists themselves frequently claim their work will help pull off sustainability transitions successfully, e.g. to keep the temperature rise within acceptable limits [2] or feed the 10 billion people projected to inhabit Earth by 2050 [3].

However, many factors complicate technologists’ hopeful stories [4]. Firstly, techno-scientific developments will interact reciprocally with perceptions of societal values and needs, whether associated with climate change or not. Insofar as these perceptions diverge, so will the acceptance of technologies, affecting their potential impacts. Secondly, technological developments’ shape and direction is contingent on market and political constraints. This can compromise future technologies’ capacity to serve public interests well, irrespective of any good intentions behind them [5]. Finally, technologies that serve one specific goal – such as mitigating climate change – risk (unwittingly) justifying all means. Solving one problem then potentially means creating others [6,7].

Contributions to this session shed light on how to resolve value conflicts that arise where emerging technologies feature in sustainability transitions, e.g. to sustainable agriculture or a circular- or bio-economy [8]. While focusing on accommodating safety and security to sustainability [9], values like democracy, equality or justice are not excluded. We welcome contributions using transdisciplinary (possibly arts-based) methods geared towards bridging gaps between science, society, policy and industry [10,11]. Since technologies cannot realize sustainability transitions by themselves, we stimulate contributions presenting novel narratives of change, while refiguring the problem space of safety, security and sustainability [12].

References

[1]          Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

[2]          Keith, D. W., & Irvine, P. J. (2016). Solar geoengineering could substantially reduce climate risks—A research hypothesis for the next decade. Earth’s Future, 4(11), 549-559.

[3]          Haraway, D., & Endy, D. (2019). Tools for Multispecies Futures. Journal of Design and Science. https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/q04b4o74

[4]          Groves, C. (2019). Sustainability and the future: reflections on the ethical and political significance of sustainability. Sustainability Science, 14(4), 915-924.

[5]          Stilgoe, J. (2018). Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars. Social Studies of Science 48(1). doi.org/10.1177/0306312717741687

[6]          Van de Poel, I. (2015). Conflicting values in design for values. Handbook of ethics, values, and technological design: Sources, theory, values and application domains, pp.89-116.

[7]          Hulme, M. (2020). Is it too late (to stop dangerous climate change)? An editorial. WIREs Clim Change, doi:10.1002/wcc.619

[8]          Lynch, D., Klaassen, P. & Broerse, J.E.W. (2016). Unraveling Dutch citizens’ perceptions on the bio-based economy: the case of bioplastics, bio-jetfuels and small-scale bio-refineries. Industrial Crops and Products. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.indcrop.2016.10.035.

[9]          Millett P., Binz T., Evans S.W., Kuiken T., Oye K., Palmer M.J., Yambao K., Yu S., van der Vlugt C. (2019). Developing a Comprehensive, Adaptive and International Biosafety and Biosecurity Program for Advanced Biotechnology: The iGEM Experience. Applied Biosafety 24(2). doi.org/10.1177/1535676019838075

[10]        Klaassen, P., Verwoerd, L., Kupper, F. & Regeer, B. (in press) Reflexive Monitoring in Action as a methodology for learning and enacting Responsible Research and Innovation. In Yaghmaei, E. & I. van de Poel (ed.), Assessment of Responsible Innovation: methods and practices. London: Routledge.

[11]        van der Meij, M.G., Heltzel, A.A.L.M., Broerse, J.E.W. et al. (2018) Frame Reflection Lab: a Playful Method for Frame Reflection on Synthetic Biology. Nanoethics (2018) 12: 155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-018-0318-9

[12]        Loorbach, D., Avelino, F., Haxeltine, A., Wittmayer, J. M., O’Riordan, T., Weaver, P., & Kemp, R. (2016). The economic crisis as a game changer? Exploring the role of social construction in sustainability transitions. Ecology and Society, 21(4). https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-08761-210415

Contact: p.klaassen@vu.nl

Keywords: climate change, emerging technologies, sustainability, safety and security, transdisciplinarity

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

4. Alchemical Transformations: On Matters of Substance and Change

Bradley Jones, Washington University in St. Louis; Heather Paxson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

This panel explores transformation through the lens of alchemy. We conceptualize alchemy capaciously, emphasizing acts of transubstantiation in which matter undergoes physical and discursive change, thereby acquiring new value, vitality, or meaning. Medieval alchemists sought to transform base into noble metals through proto-scientific practices. Catholic Christians convert bread into the body of Christ though ceremonial consecration. Alchemical transformations abound. Fermentation and prescribed fire, DIY drug labs and biotech benches, compost teas and artisan cheese: everywhere are transitions of raw to cooked (Lévi-Strauss), profane to sacred, waste to worth, and rot to regeneration—not necessarily in that order, not necessarily for the good. Alchemical change occurs at the levels of substance and symbol. It is mediated by rituals, regulations, institutional regimes, and technical apparatuses. Of interest are black boxes and boundary objects—occult or opaque technologies of transformation and the mutable materials that traverse them. Alchemical transformation invites examination of matters at once ontological, political, epistemological, and ethical.

We seek papers that explore alchemical transformations, material and metaphoric, that are attentive to matters of concern as well as care (Latour, Puig de la Bellacasa). What is modern alchemy, and how might alchemical transformations inform our understanding of (alter) scientific practices, bio-capitalism, ecologies of production, intra-action, and social change? We strive to bring decolonial and feminist science studies into dialogue with “alternative” sciences to better understand processes of transformation and the agency of STS (its subjects and objects) in a time of accelerating change and emerging worlds.

Contact: bradleyjones@wustl.edu

Keywords: Alchemy, Feminist STS, Transformation, Matter, Meaning

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

8. Approaching the Digital Anthropocene

James Maguire, IT University Copenhagen; Rachel Douglas Jones, IT University Copenhagen; Astrid Andersen, Aalborg University

It is becoming increasingly more difficult to address digital questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with environmental concerns. We make the digital from the natural world, crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld forms, while powering our data through vast quantities of energy consumption. We observe and make our understandings of environments through digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. The Anthropocene is a digitally mediated and produced time.

Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, and the politics of producing (knowledge of) the Digital Anthropocene are pressing. From planetary observation and oceanic measurement to marine tailings, the appropriation of precious metals and labors of pollution, anthropogenic knowledge is deeply woven in with computation, tools, media and devices. It is also constituted through histories of colonialism, political economy, and ways of being in and knowing the world.

This panel invites scholars with an interest in the manifold interfaces and overlaps between and within the environmental and the digital. Our aspiration is to begin a conversation on how researchers can approach what we are provocatively calling the Digital Anthropocene. We invite papers from those who are already conducting research at this interface, as well as those who are interested in contributing to the generation of an ambitious and newly emerging field within STS.

Contact: jmag@itu.dk

Keywords: digitalization, anthropocene, temporality, politics, environmental knowledge making

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Big Data

Information, Computing and Media Technology

14. Borders in the Anthropocene: Transformations of Climates, Human and Nonhuman Mobility, and the Politics of the Earth

Huub Dijstelbloem, University of Amsterdam; Polly Pallister-Wilkins, University of Amsterdam

This panel engages with the matter of the border in the Anthropocene. STS studies show that networks of humans, technologies and nature form the earth where we live, but are often left out of the political representation of this world. But how do these hybrid networks affect borders and the trinity of states, territory and sovereignty? How should borders be conceived in the Anthropocene when international mobility is increasingly concerned with nonhuman entities? 

“Borders in the Anthropocene” asks attention for the emergence of new kinds of migrants and new categories of migration such as climate migration and environmental refugees as well as new categories of disasters and humanitarian and security issues related to the Anthropocene. The panel investigates the transformation of borders in landscapes and seascapes, such as the role of borders in the Arctic, border surveillance in the Sahara or the emergence of new migration routes in mountain regions. “Borders in the Anthropocene” analyzes the hybrid nature of these transformations, the way these transformations are monitored and how information systems are set up to register mobility in the Anthropocene, varying from human migration to health surveillance, travelling pathogens and the circulation of species.  

The panel aims to bring scholars together who study the transformation of borders in the Anthropocene and engage with climate change, environmental disasters, epidemics, the geopolitics of the earth and the circulation of people and all kinds of nonhuman entities. “Borders in the Anthropocene” welcomes empirical, conceptual and normative contributions as well as visual presentations, artistic work and political interventions.

Contact: dijstelbloem@gmail.com

Keywords: Borders, Anthropocene, Migration, Politics, Nonhumans

Categories: Technologies of Militarism/(In)Security

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

28. Commodifying environmental data: markets, materiality, knowledge

Aguiton Angeli Sara, EHESS CAK Centre Alexandre Koyré; Sylvain Brunier, CNRS – Centre de Sociologie des Organisations; Jeanne Oui, EHESS

As digital tools promise to resolve environmental problems by leveraging new sources of data and by creating new services, this panel calls for papers focusing on the market logics involved in these processes. STS research on informational infrastructures warned us not to dissociate data production and circulation, we aim to enrich this approach by considering that market and economic dimensions are not processed downstream, but that they are already at stake when environmental data are produced. In many cases, the manufacturing of environmental data and their markets is simultaneous. The panel proposes to study both the production of environmental data and services, the role of public and corporate actors, the uses of natural sciences and market knowledge, the invention of new measurement tools and their economic valuation.

Case studies could include a variety of objects such as predictive maintenance applied to water distribution networks; index insurance based on the integration of climate parameters; customized services based on global infrastructures and low-cost sensors measuring air quality or crop development; forest certification schemes by remote sensing for ecological compensation or biomass valuation; etc. We aim to grasp a broad range of questions: using infrastructures that are often fragile and labor-intensive, how do various actors develop profitable models? What are the links between the trade and circulation of data on one hand, and the associated service market on the other hand? Which types of knowledge are being used and what roles do they play in the valuation of environmental data? In what way is data labor shaped by its commercial use?

By exploring these various issues, we hope that the contributions of this panel will deconstruct the promises of the greening of public policies and industrial processes through the development of an environmental services economy.

Contact: sara.aguiton@ehess.fr

Keywords: Data, Environment, Infrastructure, Market, Commodification

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

31. Cosmogrammatics. Nature(s) in planetary designs

Johannes Bruder, FHNW Academy of Art and Design; Gökce Günel, Rice University; Selena Savic, FHNW Academy of Art and Design

Since the 1960s, the ‘environmental age’ has churned out ecologies in pursuit either of technologically controlling “nature” or of loosening the modernist grip on that which is supposed to be untamed. However, one is rarely to be had without the other: even the most romantic attempts at rewilding that which surrounds us tend to involve sociotechnical imaginaries and are typically bound to the will to and practices of design. At a time where the Earth and the living environment are conceived to be in an irreversible state of crisis, all attempts at grasping the essence of, rescuing, reclaiming, reinstating or repairing the world’s natural (dis)order have become infrastructural and involve unapologetically technical concepts such as biodiversity, equilibrium and sustainability. In fact, it seems increasingly impossible to think nature independent of its enclosing and regulating architectures and technologies.

This panel is conceived to assemble an image of nature and the natural based on contemporary planetary designs. Countering the “prevailing scholarly trend of materialist critique” (Hu 2017), we seek to emphasize the imaginary aspects of those designs instead of their physical manifestations and aim at investigating how nature and the natural have been defined through what we conceive as contemporary ‘cosmogrammatics’ – technical manuals, architectural plans and diagrams, logistical patents, policy documents, post-anthropocentric exhibitions, speculative (design) fictions etc. This panel invites contributions that are topically, theoretically, and methodologically related to the intersections of ecology, design (incl. architecture) and STS; we hope to include classic academic papers as well as alternative (e.g. practice-based) contributions.

Contact: johannes.bruder@hotmail.com

Keywords: Ecology, Energy, Design, Urban Planning, Geotechnicity

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Energy

41. Digital pollutions: resource consumption, waste and environmental problems in information societies

clement marquet, IFRIS, Costech

While digital technologies are often presented as tools that could foster energetic and ecological transitions, little studies have paid attention to the environmental consequences of the digital growth of our societies. The proliferation of data and the multiplication of digital systems in homes, offices, factories and infrastructures have yet increased the production of digital devices, relying on extractive industries, intensifying electricity consumption and multiplying digital waste. What kind of pollutions does digital development produce? What difficulties do actors face when trying to make visible digital pollutions and deal with it? This panel intends to address these questions through empirical studies investigating three lines of research. The first one focuses on the environments produced by the materiality of digital activities, exploring, for example, the pollutions generated by digital industries, through production, extraction or mining; the growing need of power for computer facilities and the production of new energy infrastructures; the local effects of the material organization of networks; the local and globalized production and management of electronic waste. The second axe is interested in the question of knowledge and ignorance production and environmental metrics, investigating the practices of actors who try to measure and make visible digital pollutions, tackling the difficult emergence of digital pollutions as public problems. The third axe welcomes studies investigating with a critical glance the various initiatives of the digital industry to prove its efforts to develop “green” activities (like the investments in non-carbon energy, the improvement of data centers and electronic devices energy efficiency, etc.).

Contact: clement.marquet@meandres.me

Keywords: environment, digital infrastructures, pollution, waste, ignorance

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Engineering and Infrastructure

45. Dilemmas in advisory science

Kåre Nolde Nielsen, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway; Sebastian Linke, University of Gothenburg; Petter Holm, UiT – The Arctic University of Norway

Interfaces between advisory science and policy are subject to a number of practical and theoretical dilemmas, inviting continuous empirical attention and conceptual refinement.

   One such dilemma concerns the separation between the respective bodies in charge of providing advice and of using it in decision-making. A close association between these bodies ensures that scientific advice is useful. However, the association can also be too close, as this may undermine the reality as well as the external perception of objective advice and legitimate decision-making.

   Another dilemma concerns accountability, e.g. when scientific advisory processes are opened up for participation by interest groups, lay experts and citizens. While there are substantive and normative reasons for stakeholder participation in the provision of relevant knowledge, this may challenge accountability and credibility of the advice.

   A third dilemma concerns tensions between complexity and transparency. Supported by model development, rising computing power and data availability, scientific advice increasingly draws on integrated model frameworks that aim to account for interactions between multiple factors. While promising more comprehensive assessments, the advice based on highly complex models may become difficult to explain and understand.

   This open panel invites studies about the relationships between scientific advice and decision-making with a particular emphasis on practical dilemmas faced by various actors at different levels (local, national, global), the steps taken to address them as well as conceptual developments on science-policy interactions.

Contact: kare.nolde.nielsen@uit.no

Keywords: Advisory science, science-policy interactions, lay expertise

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

46. Disciplining the senses

Sandra Calkins, Free University of Berlin; Marianna Szczygielska, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Many disciplines in the natural sciences still privilege the idea of an external physical reality that human sensory perceptions are mistrusted in revealing. Thus, sensual perception has been largely written out of scientific work and delegated to instruments that can produce standardized measures of physical reality. Much work in the social studies of science and technology has analyzed this whole arsenal of devices, experimental set-ups and technologies mobilized to circumvent reliance on human senses and deemed to produce “objective” data. While the focus of classic studies has been to show the ways in which experimental systems, disciplinary logics and epistemic cultures contribute to fact-making, less attention has been paid to scientists’ own sensory engagements with their research materials and resulting more-than-human affective dynamics. This holds true even as newer scholarship has grappled with sensory practices distributed across a widening array of sites, materials, and organisms. This panel addresses how the training and equipment in specific academic disciplines also “discipline” the senses and their affective potentials. It invites us to unravel the role of “disciplining” in enhancing, limiting, or distilling olfactory, tactile, gustatory, acoustic, visual and/or other multisensorial experiences in knowledge-making practices. It further asks whether and how the ways in which science is practiced in specific sites and geopolitical locations contributes to disciplining or challenging sensory perceptions. Which and whose sense perceptions are modified in the scientific endeavor? By exploring these questions, this panel seeks to drive conversations about underexplored connections between sensory experience, affect, and epistemic cultures.

Contact: sandra.calkins@fu-berlin.de

Keywords: sciences and the senses, epistemic cultures, affect, disciplines

Categories: Other

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

48. Disgust

Salla Sariola, University of Helsinki; Luisa Reis de Castro, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

A series of recent scientific and technological innovations have brought about changes over what, in popular cultures, have been distinctly categorized as objects of disgust. The current ecological crises call for novel solutions that sometimes are counter-intuitive to these cultural affects associated with cleanliness and what ‘is disgusting’.  Fecal transplantation to counter gut dysbiosis, edible insects as sustainable alternatives to animal protein, mosquitoes as helpful vectors in global health interventions against dengue and malaria, and critters thriving in polluted environments are but a few examples demonstrating changes to notions of purity and danger as they manifest in the notion of disgust.

In this panel, we invite papers that reflect on disgust as a cultural specific, visceral response,  with historical attachment to ideas of impurity and pathogenicity as well as how these notions might be reversed in new technoscientific practices. By sidelining human cognitive responses to disgust, we instead want to query the processes by which ‘disgusting’ is transmorphed into acceptable, normalized, or even desirable outcomes through technoscientific endeavours. How are notions of disgust reconfigured and to what ends? What kinds of novel multi-species entanglements are drawn in these practices? What kind of new practices do these reimaginations make possible? How do scientific understandings of ‘disgusting’ non-humans intra-act with our ingrained affective experiences of them? Enquiring the changing meanings of disgust enables deeper understanding about the creativity with which new solutions are crafted during extreme times.

Contact: salla.sariola@helsinki.fi

Keywords: disgust, multi-species, visceral, affect, technoscience

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Food and Agriculture

51. Doing STS amid the Procession of Disaster

Steve G. Hoffman, University of Toronto

The procession of disaster – extreme weather events, industrial legacy hazards, and the cascading failures of sociotechnical infrastructures – is the new normal. The impact of this procession on daily life ranges from inconvenient (e.g. campus closures due to extreme weather) to catastrophic (e.g. ice storms, floods, toxic contamination, catastrophic wildfires, increasingly angry hurricanes, etc.). As the regularity of large-scale tragedy accelerates, calls for sustainability, climate adaptation, and disaster resilience are converging. This open panel invites contributions that draw out the continuities and discontinuities in this convergence, especially where the links are tense for STS scholarship. Governance practices around sustainability and climate adaptation, for example, have developed from technocratic planning frameworks that promote economic growth while trying to preserve bio-physical resources. Here we find a persistently practical if pollyannaish emphasis on human behavior change and less wasteful consumption. STS scholars of disaster, in contrast, have focused on longer term sociomaterial legacies of modernity. Here we find theoretically rich but often quite removed deconstructions of the very concepts of crisis and disaster, accounts of the unequal distribution of vulnerability, exposes of entrenched institutional power, or broad denunciations of post-colonial and/or neoliberal governance. Where can STS scholars locate a constructive engagement with the programmatic emphasis of sustainability governance, disaster and emergency management, and climate adaptation? How do we continue to raise challenging epistemological and ontological questions while also engaging practical contributions to the climate crisis and procession of disaster? How are we to live, work, suffer, mobilize, and love within the new normal?

Contact: steve.hoffman@utoronto.ca

Keywords: disaster, catastrophe, climate adaptation, climate crisis, sustainability

Categories: Science Communication/Public Engagement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

52. Dying at the Margins: Emerging Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying

Philip R Olson, Virginia Tech; Natashe Lemos Dekker, University of Amsterdam; Jesse Peterson, KTH Stockholm

This session seeks to explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. The borders between life and death are sometimes unclear. Death may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting culturally shared norms and expectations surrounding death and dying. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, technologies, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. Suddenly, what seemed coherent no longer is, in the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying but also in the way one orders worlds and afterworlds.

This session aims to identify and develop ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as: What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings? How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death? What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time? How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame? How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death?

Contact: prolson@vt.edu

Keywords: Death and Dying, Environment, Vital Boundaries, Worlds and Afterworlds, Ethics and Policy

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

56. Engineering Extinction: Prospects, Uncertainties, and Responsibilities in Planned Extinction

Josef Barla, Goethe University Frankfurt

While more and more policies are sought to be implemented and countless efforts are undertaken as immediate and urgent responses to the rapid loss of biodiversity—which is often described as the sixth mass extinction in the geological history of the planet—novel genetic strategies are becoming a technoscientific reality for vector control purposes and the containment of so-called invasive species. Aiming at the suppression, if not complete annihilation, of entire species that are considered as pest or ‘out of place’, genome editing techniques such as, for example, gene drive systems are presented as technological solution to manifold epidemiological, environmental, and economic problems. Differing from other forms of extinction—which are often understood as unintentional consequences of the reckless extraction and exploitation of natural resources—these experimental forms of extirpating entire species are raising their own pressing regulatory, ethical, and ecological questions. This panel seeks to explore the prospects, promises, and uncertainties associated with novel genomic strategies for controlling biological vectors and undesired species. To what problems are these techniques responding, and how is responsibility addressed and embedded in the narratives of a controlled species extinction? How and on what scale is risk assessed? How is life and death reworked on a molecular scale? How are these novel approaches not only irritating prevalent understandings of a linear progression of life into death, but also practices of governing life if death and even extinction becomes that which entails value?

Contact: barla@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: Extinction, Genome Editing, Bioeconomies, Governance, Vector Control

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

57. Environmentalities of Health Security

Carolin Mezes, Philipps-University Marburg; Sven Opitz, Philipps-University Marburg

Discourses of Global Health Security are saturated with buzzwords like “holism”, “comprehensive approaches”, or “systems thinking”, and increasingly push concepts that make a strong case about the ecological and environmental aspects of health, like “Planetary Health” or “One Health”. Concerns about the circulation of antibiotics through sewage systems and soils, the proliferation of vector populations due to rising temperatures, or the conveyance of “invasive species” through logistical infrastructures are just some cases that point to what we observe as a rearticulation of health threats in environmental terms. In our panel we would firstly like to deepen the understanding of such a (re-)actualized environmental orientation, and secondly do so by investigating how it corresponds with transformations of the security apparatus designed to tackle health crises. We suggest focusing on the governmental, technical and scientific means that address disease emergencies as a matter of ecology. Correspondingly, we invite papers to address the following questions: How do techno-political devices and legal protocols transcribe the changing spatio-temporal constitution of disease into an administrative topology? What calculative machineries, such as seemingly trivial paperwork technologies, sensing devices or computer simulations draw together epidemic environments and enact ecological concerns for health security? What techno-scientific interventions, from outbreak research on vaccines, over epidemiological sentinel systems to microbial engineering, are put to the field? Using these questions for investigating a broad range of phenomena, we hope to clarify whether and how contemporary apparatuses of health security intertwine with an ecosystem view on disease.

Contact: carolin.mezes@uni-marburg.de

Keywords: Health Security, Environment, Ecology, Global Assemblages

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

59. Ethea Alternativa:  Undoing Capital’s Techno-Economic, Exploitative Thrall over the Earth

Brian Noble, Dalhousie University

Contact: bnoble@dal.ca

Keywords: Ethoecologies, Counter-Capitalism, Indigenous Peoples’ Alliances, Earth Futures, Disruptive Techniques

Categories: Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

62. Extractivism Revisited: STS Perspectives

Giorgos Velegrakis, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, NKUA; Aristotelis (Aristotle) Tympas, National and Kapodistrian U. of Athens

Extractivism has been key to the emergence of climate change and the rest of the symptoms of the unprecedented environmental crisis. Extracting coal, oil, gas, uranium, as well as all kind of metals and other materials, from gold to all sorts of substances used in the manufacturing of, for example, electronic devices, was never so developed and, at the same time, so problematic. This open panel invites attention to the STS study of the co-shaping of science/technology and extractivism. Focusing on the politics, economics and ideologies embedded in (and advanced through) the science/technology of extractivism, it aims at a conversation with studies that have so far focused on the explicit political, economic and ideological dimensions of the various versions of extractive activities. We propose a closer look at the socialites privileged by the very design of the technologies that extractivism is based on, which are concealed/black-boxed by the way the artifacts involved in extractive activities -engines, motors, other machines, devices, machine ensembles, platforms, mechanical and other technoscientific processes and apparatuses- are constructed and communicated. In this context, we are further interested in the way the advance of this design interacts with the emergence of a special kind of an expert, one that is preoccupied with extractivist initiatives. Contributions that experiment with STS approaches to the integration of electronic computing and related technologies (automation, control, telecommunication, etc) to extractivist technologies are especially welcomed. By inviting attention to the scientific-technological materialities of extractive enterprises, and to the construction of the expertise linked to them, we aim at a critical revisiting of what we know about the complex workings of extractive explorations and operations worldwide. The panel welcomes contributions that attempt to open the “black box” of the technology of extractivism from any of the fields that contribute to STS (history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, policy, etc).

Contact: gvelegrakis@phs.uoa.gr

Keywords: climate change, environment, extractive activities, extractivism, technology design

Categories: Energy

Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

65. Filling the Gaps Between Observations with Data: Nature, Models and Human Agency

Catharina Landström, Chalmers University of Technology; Dick Kasperowski, University of Gothenburg

STS case studies have shown how observations and measurements of phenomena in nature are transformed into scientific data in different practices. In light of the rapid digitalisation and a growing interest in ‘big data’ it is important to continue investigating the ways in which environmental science produce scientific data for use in research and policy. This panel invites papers that discuss how environmental data generation and processing is mediated by models.

There is a wide range of data collection practices in environmental science, ranging from remote sensing, to scientific field work, to citizen science observations. Data generation can also involve new mobile applications, or DIY counter monitoring, or computer model simulations. Papers analysing the many ways in which environmental data is collected by humans and non-humans are welcome.

Regardless of the starting point, data must be processed to become useable in scientific analysis. As the increasing digitalisation produces a deluge of data to order in scientific classification schemes, the human ability to discern and judge is delegated to models. Modelling of environmental data also enacts human agency when filling the gaps between empirical measurements or observations. Data processing algorithms perform imagined epistemic subjects. The consequences of the merging of numbers representing nature, machine calculations and scientific skills in the generation of environmental data are important issues for STS investigation and we invite presentations of ongoing research into the relations between nature, models and human agency.

Contact: catharina.landstrom@chalmers.se

Keywords: big data, environment, computer modelling

Categories: Big Data

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

67. Fossil Legacies – Re-Assembling Work, Gender and Technology in the Coal Phase Out

Jeremias Herberg, Leuphana University Lüneburg; Thomas Turnbull, Max Planck Institute For the History of Science

The certainty of climate change and the availability of alternative pathways have not brought about post-fossil societies. In the Czech Republic, Australia, Germany and many other regions, coal is still continuously extracted. In this context, the prospect of a just energy transition is being disrupted by ‘fossil legacies’: Be it the technological cultures of fossil fuels, the populist distortion of worker interests, male worker pride and culture, or the corporatist alliances of democratic parties – these and other legacies jeopardize the economic livelihood of some, and the survival of others.

STS contributions to energy research have focused on transformative dynamics, innovations, and engagements. In the present context, STS can also trace and reconfigure the relational ties that fossil legacies engender. The coal phase out in particular is a process that involves re-assembling inherited technologies, businesses, worker identities, and political alliances. Transformative openings and practices are re-distributed and the role of science and technology must be re-assessed.

– How do involved actors dis-/associate themselves with/from coal-related notions of work, gender, or technology?

– What connections emerge when fossil legacies are challenged by political movements or climate diplomats?

– How does right-wing mobilization intervene in the (dis-)association of fosil-fuel associated work, gender and capitalism?

The contributions in this session historically trace, sociologically map or philosophically question the re-assembling of gender, work, technology and capitalism in the process of the coal phase out. Contributors theorize the transformation of fossil assemblages and reflect on their role in transforming fossil legacies.

Contact: jeremias.herberg@iass-potsdam.de

Keywords: coal phase out, assemblages, gender, work, populism

Categories: Energy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

72. Grotesque Epistemologies

Lee Nelson, RPI; Joanna Radin, Yale University

Decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot. These phenomena/processes have always been an important and vital part of organic and inorganic existence, but have often been neglected as unseemly, abject, or grotesque. When they have been scientifically engaged with, they tend to be framed as problems to prevent or managed away into disavowal. Recently, some scholars, such as Caitlin DeSilvey in Curated Decay (2017), have addressed these phenomena ‘head on,’ asking “what happens if we choose not to intervene? Can we uncouple the work of memory from the burden of material stasis? What possibilities emerge when change is embraced rather than resisted” (p. 4)? Similarly, Lucinda Cole, in her introduction to the 2017 Configurations edition on putrefaction, explains that while putrefaction is “regarded as both a process and a stage in organic decomposition” (p. 139), the inattention to such omnipresent phenomena provides historic possibilities for questioning “how to theorize rot and decay in ways that are attuned to the material and political consequences of the discourse” (p. 140). These phenomena, beyond any disruption to the senses, disrupt categories of thought by “thinking ontologically in reverse” (Radin) and insist on a ‘trans-corporeal’ (Alaimo) recognition of material existence. This session seeks submissions from scholars working in part to re/habilitate an appreciation for decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot, and others, for their unique and significant epistemological, ontological, and political a/effectiveness that are affirmatively grotesque – not for their abjection, but rather for how the grotesque “frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities” (Bakhtin).

Contact: lee.lcnelson@gmail.com

Keywords: grosteque, decomposition, putrefaction, decay, rot

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Other

78. Histories And Ecologies of Therapeutic Places

Markus Rudolfi, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Franz Kather, Bielefeld University

A study by Japanese toxicologists reveals the healthy effect of a practice called “forest bathing”. People walk through forests and “shower” in aerosols such as Terpenes that are supposed to reduce stress, to name but one beneficial effect. Framing ecosystems like forests, sea shores or mountains as places that possess therapeutic capacities, medical knowledge rediscovers exogenous factors of human recovery, mirroring the beginnings of clinical therapeutic practices since the 18th century. Early clinical medicine began as a technology marked by concern about the regulation and manipulation of environmental impact.

Conversely, minding the ongoing loss of biodiversity and increase of environmental pollution, the possibility of therapeutic environments such as forest or sea shores is now cast in different lights — where technologically altered environments used to harbour promises of perfection, they now convey much more dire connotations. How does ecosystem change affect the concept of, for example, “forest bathing” if forests are threatened by a changing climate and species diversity?

We propose, therefore, to engage on the history and genealogy of therapeutic places and the technical translation of medical knowledge into technologies and architectures of therapy as a conceptual and epistemological starting point to current rediscoveries of environmental therapy — while minding the transformations and shifts that offset them.

The panel invites historical, empirical and speculative papers that discuss how “therapy” is related to “healthy ecosystems”, therapeutic technologies and infrastructures, and/or the challenge of defining such therapeutic places given the possibly troubling underlying assumptions of what “therapy”, “forest”, or “health” may be.

Contact: m.rudolfi@posteo.de

Keywords: therapy, ecologies, sanatorium, medical history, ecosystem service, naturopathy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

80. Hormonal paradoxes: circulations, access, exposures

Mariana Rios Sandoval, Centre de Recherche Médecine, Sciences, Santé, Santé Mentale et Société (cermes3), Paris; Olivia (Roger) Fiorilli, IFRIS, Cermes3

Synthetic hormones, as well as hormone-like chemicals, impregnate our everyday lives. “Sex” hormones are among the most sold molecules on the pharma market, while endocrine disruptors can be found in virtually every other household and industrial product. These chemicals do not stay put, but circulate, react, transform, bind, break, agglomerate, accumulate, dislodge, and endure, and in doing so they transform tissues, bodies, relations, lives and ecosystems. They travel from labs, through human and non-human bodies, through membranes, sewage systems and bodies of water, and often back again into bodies through environmental exposures. Hormones and hormone-like chemicals circulate and accumulate, but they do so unevenly and following patterns of race, class and gender-based inequalities and oppressions defined by capitalism, binary and cis-normative gender orders, and the coloniality of power. Therefore, paradoxically, often the same molecules that are promoted or even imposed to some, are denied to others.

In this panel we ask: what can be learned by following synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals across material, social and epistemic boundaries? How do access, exposure, pollution, and hormonal balance and disruption look like if we choose such an approach? In order to attend to these questions we seek presentations exploring the uneven circulation of synthetic hormones and hormone-like chemicals, through contrasting places, organisms, social worlds, theoretical and disciplinary fields. We welcome presentations in the form of text, video, performance, and experimental formats.

Contact: mariana.riossandoval@cnrs.fr

Keywords: Synthetic hormones, hormone-like chemicals, inequality, power, multispecies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

88. Inhabiting Warming Worlds – Transforming Climate Knowledge

Celine Granjou, University Grenoble Alps; Séverine Durand, University Grenoble Alpes; Coralie Mounet, University Grenoble Alps

Climate change understandings and narratives have mostly relied so far on highly sophisticated expert knowledge measuring and assessing a ‘global’ climate, thus excluding lay knowledge and experiences of shifting patterns in local weather and environments (Jasanoff, 2010; Turnhout et al. 2016). This panel aims to unsettle this ‘de-terrestrialized’ and globalized view of climate change and to focus instead on locally embedded knowledge and ‘ordinary’ experiences of how the climate is changing in specific places, and how it impacts the local environments and everyday life of inhabitants.

Following recent attempts to redefine environmental knowledge and politics away from regimes of official expertise, international negotiations, and public, front-of-stage controversies, and to look instead into the forms of ‘slow, intimate activism’ that take place in everyday, ordinary practices of knowing and inhabiting warming worlds (Liboiron et al. 2018), we aim to address the capacity of lived experiences for ‘re-terrestrializing’ climate knowledge and politics (Latour, 2019) and fostering new practices of attentiveness, care and local adaptation in a time of climate disturbance.

The panel will gather together empirical investigations and theoretical reflections focusing on peoples’ experiences of warming environments (including, for instance, heat waves, warmer winters, retreating glaciers, changing seasons, as well as of changing patterns regarding plant growth, soil, animal behaviors or sea levels) in order to examine the epistemological, political and ethical work at play in the ordinary, situated practices of noticing, story-ing and living in warming worlds.

Contact: celine.granjou@irstea.fr

Keywords: climate change, climate expertise, situated knowledge, lived experience, environment

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

102. Making chemical kin

Emma Garnett, King’s College London; Angeliki Balayannis, University of Exeter

This panel aims to generate space to plot, evoke, and tell stories about chemicals. Research with chemicals is often approached through late industrial landscapes of exposure, however this often results in negating the new relations, material attachments, and shared pleasures which emerge through chemical encounters. As an entangled method and form of representation, stories offer ways to think and act with chemicals differently. By focussing on ‘making’ we will collectively imagine what different relationships with chemicals could entail. Inspired by efforts in STS to resist the all-encompassing concept of the anthropocene that beckons total and permanent exposure, we seek to capture the instability of ‘the chemical’ in ways that activate efforts to find better ways of governing, managing, and living with these materials.

Attending to relations that matter for the stories we tell, reorients chemical concerns from toxic politics to chemical kinships (Agard-Jones 2016; Murphy 2018). Stories of chemical kin are not necessarily affirmative, kin after all can be both enabling and harmful. We encourage papers to consider the full spectrum of chemical encounters; moving beyond pollution and toxicants, while at the same time maintaining a commitment to the violent legacies which shape how chemicals are distributed – even if their material connections are difficult to conjure. By thinking with and beyond the ‘villainous object’, we invite contributions that expand understandings of chemical entanglements, particularly those engaged in artistic, experimental, and ethnographic work.

Contact: emmargarnett@gmail.com

Keywords: chemical, kin, making-doing, experiment, stories

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

103. Making Futures by Freezing Life: Ambivalent Temporalities of Cryopreservation Practices

Thomas Lemke; Sara Lafuente-Funes, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Ruzana Liburkina, Goethe-University Frankfurt; Veit Moritz Braun, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main

The preservation of biological matter at extremely low temperatures has gained increasing prominence in medicine, plant breeding, and wildlife conservation over the last decades. Stored at temperatures of down to -196°C, cells and tissues are frozen in time. Oocytes, stem cells, germplasm, and sperm endure while the world keeps on changing. However, cryobanks are not simply stockpile facilities or archives. The (possibility of) storing organic materials creates potentialities and contingencies. Frozen cells become vital deposits, valuable backups, options to be considered.

Contrary to the prevalent idea of freezing as stabilizing, fixing, and containing bio-objects, this panel seeks to explore the generative dimensions of cryopreservation as a way of modifying relations and turning biological matter into things-to-become (Stephens et al. 2018). Putting organic materials ‘on ice’ shapes and redefines present socialities, politics, moral economies, and infrastructures. By the same token, it changes the ways in which futures are anticipated and enacted. Frozen matter alters existing and creates new temporalities.

We are looking for contributions that trace notions such as “anticipation”, “suspension”, “spaces of as-if”, “hope”, or “expectation” in the realm of cryopreservation. Participants are invited to ground these concepts in empirical insights into practices of cryo-banking and the materialities of frozen tissue.

More at https://cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de/work/cfp-easst/

Contact: braun@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: cryopreservation, time, biobanks, future, biology

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

110. Modes of Futuring between Care and Control: Engaging with the Conservation of Endangered More-Than-Human Life

Franziska Dahlmeier, Hamburg University; Franziska von Verschuer, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main; Markus Rudolfi, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt

The accelerating loss of biodiversity is one of the central contemporary ecological crises that challenge the foundations and conditions of current forms of life on Earth. In the wake of this development and the associated threats, projects of environmental conservation that seek to care for the ongoingness of life have gained momentum. Exploring these from an STS perspective, we contribute to an important discourse about and intervention in the technoscientific politics of life and death in times of ecological crises.

We want to discuss how practices and technologies of conservation engage with endangered more-than-human life and what future worlds they bring to matter; how they account for the entanglement of fatal ecological developments with extractive naturalcultural forms of (human) life. In this context, we are interested in the notion of care: Who are the recipients of conservational care? What is the relation between care and control? How are conservation practices directed at the sustainability of more-than-human life embedded in power relations? We specifically want to discuss dis/continuities to humanist forms of controlling nature in conservational practices of care. Finally, we want to explore modes of futuring in conservational care. How does the temporality of urgency of ecological crises affect practices and politics of conservation and more-than-human forms of life? What could it mean for practices of conservation to (re)think ecological vulnerability and precarity, maybe even extinction, as part of (techno)ecological processes of worlding? How can a notion of living and dying well together help us craft new modes of caring?

Contact: franziska.dahlmeier@uni-hamburg.de

Keywords: conservation; care; more-than-human life; ecological crises; futures

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

113. More-than-Human Ethnographies of Global Health

Luisa Reis Castro, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

Global Health initiatives are a productive site to reflect on the role of non-humans as driving research and technology on health around the world. Non-human creatures are often framed as a (future) threat causing pandemics and pestilence. Movement of pathogens, insects, and pollutants that defy national borders are but some examples of non-humans that animate much of the Global Health research and policy today. STS scholars have examined the role of non-human entities in biomedicine as either functional assets (e.g. mice in labs), or outright detrimental to public health, a target to be controlled (as vectors of disease). Instead, this panel invites scholars to reflect on the role of non-human entities as analytically central to the ways in which Global Health collaborations are organized, where the non-human entities are at times symbiotic, at times commensal, and even parasitic.

In this panel, we invite papers to reflect on how universalist Global Health is problematized by non-humans in the particular policy and scientific spaces where global health programmes are implemented. This highlights the differentiated multi-species entanglements that make visible infrastructural divergences, unequal power dynamics, and different rationales of global health projects. How are non-humans considered to be limiting or enabling these kinds of projects? How are different ways to know and live with non-humans rearranged or erased in the implementation of these initiatives? The discussions will allow us to investigate: how might an analysis attentive and attuned to the more-than-human entanglements offer a new perspective on global health collaborations?

Contact: luisarc@mit.edu

Keywords: health; global STS; non-human; multispecies; postcolonial

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

114. Multispecies Rhetorics in Microbial Worlds: How do Microbes and Humans Affect Each Other?

Erika Amethyst Szymanski, Colorado State University; Anna Krzywoszynska, University of Sheffield

Microbial identities are shifting, aggregating, and becoming more complex. Microorganisms have become social, as foregrounded in microbiome studies, and engineerable, understood as modular machines. Recognizing essential functions for microbes in nearly every environment, microbe-human relations become important not only in terms of bodily health, but in terms of co-working, ecological, and other “productive” relationships. Simultaneously, microbes are being “harnessed” to do more and different work.

In this context, we ask: how do humans and microbes communicate? How do microbes affect humans, how do humans become capable of being affected, and vice-versa? We invite critical exploration of how microbes and macrobes become attuned to affect and be affected in productive multispecies environments. We particularly invite attention to microbial agency at scales other than the individual cell—indeed, how the communicative agency of “the individual” as a material legacy of modernity may be challenged through microbe-human interactions.

We look for this conversation to connect theory and practice around how humans and microbes (may) work together and, more broadly, open up possibilities for multisensory communication across species bounds. We offer that in these times, “we” must consider who we are, who speaks, who intervenes, and who listens broadly to include even the smallest creatures involved in sustaining the environments “we” all share.

Krzywoszynska, A. (forthcoming May 2020) Nonhuman labor and the making of resources: Making soils a resource through microbial labor, Environmental Humanities

Szymanski, E, & Calvert C. 2018. Designing with living systems in the synthetic yeast project. Nature Communications 9 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-05332-z.

Contact: szymanskiea@hotmail.com

Keywords: multispecies studies, multispecies rhetorics, microbes, microbiomes, co-production

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

115. Mutagenic Legacies and Future Living

Paul Wenzel Geissler, University of Oslo; Noemi Tousignant, University College London; Miriam Hanna Ancilla Waltz, Aarhus University

Modernist projects – e.g., ‘green revolutions’, disease eradication campaigns or power generation – have been rearranging molecular relations in the name of “better living,” as a chemical firm famously advertised. Lives improved by technology are and were imagined as a source of private comfort, security and profit. But abundant food, cheap energy, lucrative resources and controlled pathogens have also been hinged to societal ambitions for collective prosperity and protection.

Molecular rearrangements are mutagenic in a broad sense: vast volumes of substances have been synthesised or released by sociotechnical interventions, accumulating in bodies and environments, where they might alter genetic processes, foster cancerous cell proliferation or resistant microbes, and engender broader ecological reordering and novel interspecies relations. Yet past modernist projects can also be politically mutating and mutagenic. They exert durably transformative effects on and across changes in the values of life and the conditions of living, for variously positioned humans as well as nonhumans (defined as food, parasites, wildlife, etc.).     

This panel invites participants to examine modernist legacies through the lens of their biological and social mutagenicity. We welcome contributions that attend to past futures of better living, as imagined and embedded in modernist projects, and seek to discern their enduring presence, mutations and mutagenic effects in current possibilities for future living. We seek in particular to reflect on how mutagenic effects are exerted across changes in political regime and ideology (post-colonial, post-socialist, post-welfare, post-developmental) and the unequal relations of production and consumption they foster and seek to moderate.

Contact: miriamwaltz@cas.au.dk

Keywords: Modernity, Toxicity, Residuals, Environment

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

123. Nonhuman Vision: How Technologies and Animals See and Make Sense

Adam Fish, University of New South Wales; Michael Richardson; Edgar Gomez Cruz, University of New South Wales

Seeing—and the sense making that follows—is usually conceived as something humans alone do. Anthropocentric vision has been radically decentered by both computer vision and by multispecies ontologies, even if all-too-human biases stain the former and the latter is anything but surprising to indigenous people. And yet nonhuman vision remains under-examined and under-theorised in disciplines cognate to STS, where image and sense-making often remain the privilege of the human. This panel offers a corrective by advancing vivid case studies in non-human vision that center technologies and animals as agents of meaning-making.

From analogue photography to computer vision, technologies of vision see in nonhuman ways (Mackenzie and Munster 2019, Zylinska 2017). Photons are processed into computer readable code, filtered by algorithms, and correlated by machine learning to build so-called artificial intelligence. Animals, too, can see beyond, differently, and better than RGB, the human visual light spectrum (Barad 2007). While the chasm separating human vision from other animal vision is vast, efforts towards remembering and forging inter-species companionship are essential to responding to the species extinction and climate crisis (Haraway 2016). Seeing as non-human–technological or animal–uniquely challenges key concepts in media studies: who or what makes sense of symbols.

Across the assembled papers, this panel explores some of the crucial technical, affective, multi-species and multi-modal ways in which nonhuman vision figures in the contemporary moment. In doing so, it brings expertise in STS, new materialism, visual culture, media arts, and cultural studies to the study of communication and technology. Collectively, we question the politics of vision: who or what sees who? What, how, and when? What or who can avoid being seen, provide consent, and avoid the gaze? Awareness of how vision technologies and non-human animals see and sense–or avoid such efforts–in uncanny and alien ways not only challenges but should transform human relationships to others, both technical and animal.

Contact: mediacultures@protonmail.ch

Keywords: vision, animal, drone, visual, seeing, gaze

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

147. Reproduction in the Post-genomic Age

Jaya Keaney, Deakin University; Sonja Van Wichelen, University of Sydney

This panel will bring together scholars working on the intersection of reproduction and post-genomic science, also called the new biologies. Encompassing fields such as epigenetics, microbiome research and immunology, post-genomic science offers new biological theorisations that complicate the agency of the gene in determining human individuality. Reproduction—and pregnancy in particular—is a privileged site in this research, with transmissions between foetus and gestator offering biological models that challenge dominant ideas of personhood as gene-centred and separate from gestational and non-human environments. The reproductive body is so central to these fields that, as Mansfield and Guthman (2015, 3) write of epigenetics, we can conceptualise them as a ‘reproductive science’.

The collision of post-genomic research and constructions of reproduction contains both substantial potential and risk. In foregrounding how reproductive and nonhuman environments shape the distribution of life outcomes, the new biologies can validate through scientific discourse a concept of reproduction as a more-than-human milieu. Such a conceptualisation has long animated reproductive justice approaches, and is at the heart of a recent social sciences turn to ‘environmental reproductive justice’ (Lappé, Hein and Landecker 2019). At the same time, in practice post-genomic studies often construct pregnancy and motherhood as coherent, natural processes that translate easily across cultural and species boundaries, naturalising maternal care and longstanding discourses of responsibility that stratify reproduction across raced, classed and geographic axes (Martin 2010; Warin et al 2012). Seizing these rich tensions, this panel welcomes papers invested in questions of reproductive experience and justice in changing post-genomic times.

Contact: jaya.keaney@sydney.edu.au

Keywords: reproduction; post-genomic science; biology; pregnancy; environment

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

155. Scientists, citizen scientists, and naturalists in the “Anthropocene”

Brendon Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

In a period of rapid human-wrought changes to socio-ecological systems, an important question for STS concerns the form and purpose of scientific monitoring of environmental change. On the one hand, this data has been critical in showing the extent of change and has thereby motivated policy action; on the other hand, this data has motivated insufficient action to date – and arguably what we require is not more data but political leadership. Given this context, this panel explores the changing role of different forms of knowledge production that document nature, ranging from naturalists and citizen scientists through to environmental scientists themselves. Their roles are shifting dramatically due to trends that include the following: i) a shifting baseline, whereby declining states of nature become normalized for subsequent generations; ii) increasing technological mediation of nature; iii) rapid growth of citizen science projects that rely on naturalist contributors; and iv) ongoing shifts in how scientific ‘facts’ are considered in the public domain. This panel explores questions such as the following: What does it mean to be a naturalist in the Anthropocene and is there a role for naturalists outside of centralized big data collection? How is the border between science and non-science shifting in this context? What are the implications of nature being increasingly seen as unstable? How does the hopefulness implicit in data collection endure in the face of mounting evidence of reason to despair?

Contact: blarson@uwaterloo.ca

Keywords: environmental change, citizen science, Anthropocene

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Science Communication/Public Engagement

156. Situating antimicrobial resistance (AMR): locations, spaces and borders

Catherine Marijke Will, University of Sussex; Alena Kamenshchikova, Maastricht University; Cristina Moreno Lozano, University of Edinburgh; Iona Walker, University of Edinburgh

‘Antimicrobial resistance’ (AMR) is increasingly figured as an international priority through activities by the World Health Organisation and European Union among others. A prominent slogan ‘bacteria do not respect borders’ also draws attention to the apparently global nature of the issue. In response, this panel calls for papers that situate the policies and practices of AMR – exploring how the issue and responses are framed in different institutions and locations; in different national contexts though stewardship or infection control policies and regulations; and in border regions and spaces like airports. Papers might address emerging practices for screening, surveillance, quarantine and antibiotic use in different contexts and cultures, or experiences of groups including ethnic minorities, immigrants and those with different infections.

In ethical terms it is suggested that AMR is often understood as a site of tension between the individual needing treatment in the short term and a collective interest in preserving antibiotic efficacy in the longer term, but this does not hold for all situations. In clinical medicine as in other social practices people do not have equal abilities to claim and receive treatment. Others become the focus of additional surveillance and control through the notion of potential risk. When and how are people’s vulnerabilities acknowledged or ignored in relation to antibiotic use or stewardships, and which groups are more affected by interventions? We invite scholars to discuss how AMR is shaping actions in specific locations, and how multiple framings co-exist or relate below the appeal to international standards or solutions.

Contact: cristina.moreno@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, national policy, biomedical standards

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

160. Social practices perspectives on (un)sustainable urban transformations

Marc Dijk, Maastricht University

This session sheds light on urban socio-technical transformations, its key actors and main drivers. It invites papers that draw on or combine insights from studies of sociotechnical transitions, models of urban obduracy and path dependency, actor network theory, and social practice-based perspectives on technology use and experience. We seek to contribute to understanding why and how cities may transform towards ‘less’ or ‘more’ sustainable places, due to or despite all ‘saying and doings’ around urban development.

In the past two decades, a few distinct analytical frameworks to understand socio-technical sustainability transitions have been developed, most notably the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP). However, the idea of hierarchical (micro, meso, macro) ‘levels’ has led to a neglect of the place-specific characteristics of regimes, and the dichotomy of niche and regime has been found questionable in practice (Bulkeley et al 2014). Some have noted a disregard for the role of users, a slight bias towards technology, and an over-emphasis on simple shifts from one regime to another, whereas in practice fragmentation and plural regimes seem more likely (ibid.)

This session invites papers on urban transformation (drawing on or combing insights of the studies mentioned above) and looks at ways to overcome various criticisms to the MLP.

Papers may address historical, contemporary or future transformations. They may focus on particular practices in cities, such as urban mobility. We encourage papers based on empirical research in cities.

Contact: m.dijk@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: urban, transformations, transition, practices

Categories: Engineering and Infrastructure

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

162. Speculative Futures and the Biopolitics of Populations: Exploring Continuities and Discontinuities Across and Beyond Crisis Discourses

Mianna Meskus, Tampere University; Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen

Falling fertility rates, ageing populations, and the resulting strains on national economies and welfare systems engender headlines of national and international crises on a daily basis across the world. Simultaneously, the human population size has been problematized in terms of the ongoing climate crisis. Taking stock of these complex material legacies of modernity, this panel aims to bring together scholars whose work examines reproduction and/or ageing and how these broad yet intertwined phenomena figure as challenges for current governance in multiple ways. We are interested in how practices of science, technology and policy become enrolled in our demographically, economically and ecologically uncertain futures.

Imagining the future is increasingly speculative, meaning that there is an increase in the circulation of uncertainty-, risk-, and crisis-based models in attempts to make sense of where the world is heading. While visions of reproductive justice, successful ageing, care for the chronically and acutely ill, and ecological sustainability are in a state of flux, historical continuities are apparent as well. Biopolitical discussions revolve around questions such as, how should the vitality of populations be governed? Who should be allowed to reproduce? Is ageing an opportunity or a loss? What role does ‘nature’ play in furthering human wellbeing? We invite papers that examine how knowledge about demographic, ecological and economic futures are shaped by and/or escape notions of crisis. We especially welcome contributions from different parts of the world that examine concerns around falling fertility rates, ageing populations and the earth’s declining biocapacity.

Contact: mianna.meskus@tuni.fi

Keywords: reproduction, ageing, population, ecology, futures

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

163. States of Planetary Environmental Knowledge

Jenny Elaine Goldstein, Cornell University; Leah Aronowsky, University of Illinois

This panel explores the politics of planetary-scale environmental knowledge production. In convening scholars from across the methodological spectrum, we seek to ask: what, and whose, politics come into play when local knowledge is scaled up or planetary/global knowledge is localized? How is difference maintained or collapsed in the making and governance of global environmental knowledge? What forms of governance and/or infrastructure emerge out of planetary/global knowledge? Possible themes may include:

Geographies/spatialities of planetary environmental knowledge

How localized environmental knowledge is scaled up, aggregated, and/or made relevant at planetary and global scales

How models about the global environment are assembled

Questions of the planetary commons and climate governance

Experiments, simulations, and models for producing planetary knowledge

The limits of knowability, certainty, and quantification

Contact: goldstein@cornell.edu

Keywords: global, environment, knowledge, planet

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

164. STS and Political Ecology: Exploring socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds

Marx Jose Gomez Liendo, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas; Maria Victoria Canino, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científicas

Our current global ecological crisis has ontological and epistemic roots. Therefore, sustainability transitions are also the design of transformative pathways to other modes of being and knowing. Living otherwise is a huge challenge, but an unavoidable one. This panel calls for proposals that explore socially just and ecologically sustainable emerging worlds through links between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Political Ecology (PE). We invite submissions focused but no limited to some of the following aspects for a STS-PE joint analysis:

– Multi-actor asymmetries and controversies related to hegemonic (capital-centered) and counter-hegemonic (eco-centered) understandings of sustainability in socio-technical changes.

– Contested temporalities (economic, ecological, political, existential, etc.) in innovation processes, farming practices, health systems, industrial production, and extractive activities.

– Intercultural dialogues and experiences in sustainability policies.

– Situated strategies and knowledges to manage a wide range of commons (water, seeds, forest, traditional practices, etc.) through different spatial scales (local, regional, global).

– Theoretical and empirical contributions to think alternative understandings (non-modern, posmodern and/or transmodern) about energy and to develop different kinds of energy transitions.

Contact: mjgl1189@gmail.com

Keywords: STS, Political Ecology, Sustainability Transitions, Ecological Crisis, Knowledge Crisis

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

170. Studying data/natures: between arts, academia and administration

Ingmar Lippert, IT University of Copenhagen; Tahani Nadim, Museum fuer Naturkunde; Filippo Bertoni, Aarhus University

Recently, nature’s increasing datafication and the politics of the resulting data/natures’ emergent sociotechnical orderings have received much attention in STS (Bowker, Edwards, Lippert, Nadim, Sullivan, Turnhout, Waterton). But, how do we engage with data/natures? And how does the answer to this question inform our understanding of these politics of nature? While all agree that the formation of data/natures clearly relies on specific kinds of digital infrastructures, different approaches have variously engaged with those involved (from natural, environmental, or data scientists, to policy makers, from technocrats, to artists, and capitalist actors) – often in implicit ways.

This panel invites papers that reflexively and critically take these different approaches as their explicit focus. What can we learn from different ways of engaging various publics, audiences, or communities that produce, handle, and populate data/natures? In attempting to respond to this question, our panel considers what kinds of politics STS analytics afford, and – in turn – suggests alternative ways to not only study, but also actively transform, repurpose, prototype, and sabotage data/natures.

Contact:

Keywords: datafication, data/natures, environmental STS, engagement

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Science Communication/Public Engagement

187. The Ontological Politics of the Anthropocene

António Carvalho, Centre for Social Studies – University of Coimbra; Ana Raquel Matos, University of Coimbra; Vera Ferreira, Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra

The Anthropocene has been described as an event in social theory (Blok and Jensen, 2019). Its manifold conceptual iterations – Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016), Necrocene (McBrien, 2016), Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015) – shed light on various tenets of this proposed geological epoch – extractivism, capitalist accumulation, multispecies engagement, the sixth mass extinction.

Aligned with longstanding concerns within STS, the Anthropocene has led to calls for relational ontologies (Jensen, 2017), collaborative engagements between artists, STSers and climate scientists (Latour, 2017; Saraceno, Engelmann and Szerszynski, 2015) and methodologies that attend to more-than-human agency. Affective and disciplinary “arts of attentiveness” (Van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster, 2016)  are entwined with an attempt to overcome the “one-world world” (Law, 2015) of dominant cosmopolitics (Stengers, 2005), characterized by modern hubris, paving the way for the emergence of what some authors have described as a pluriverse (Blaser and Cadena, 2018).

Nevertheless, the ontological politics of the Anthropocene are heterogenous, including options such as permaculture and solar radiation management (Martindale, 2015), and attempts to build a “good Anthropocene” (Bennett et al, 2016) – often aligned with relational and symmetrical ontologies – have been criticized as an “immunological biopolitical fantasy” (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, 2018: 3).

We welcome theoretical and empirically grounded contributions that problematize the ontopolitical heterogeneity of the Anthropocene, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

–              Anthropocene, depoliticization and post-politics

–              Technofixes and emerging technologies (such as geoengineering and carbon capture and storage/utilization)

–              More-than-human engagements with the Anthropocene

–              The politics of theory of the Anthropocene

Contact: antoniomanuelcarvalho@gmail.com

Keywords: Anthropocene, Ontology, Cosmopolitics, Climate Change, Emerging Technologies

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Knowledge, Theory and Method

Other

196. Title: Acknowledging residues: the (un)-making of an environmental concern

Franziska Klaas; Signe Mikkelsen, University of Oslo

Residues are reduced and transformed remnants of formerly present materials, events, or actions. Frequently associated with chemicals, pesticides, and waste, they are also the result of discard and excess, sticky – yet unruly – bordering both the visible and the invisible. A consequence of past and present material legacies, they pervade and persist in environments, humans, and non-humans alike, carrying with them potentially hazardous or toxic afterlives.

Yet, residues do not always emerge as environmental concerns – nor as bodily, political, or material ones. Rather, they are often a (non)-concern, sometimes evading recognition and response, despite their ubiquitous presence.

This open panel invites contributors to critically engage with the question of when, how, and to whom residues become a concern. It asks under what circumstances particular forms of residue might rise to levels of acknowledgement and political engagement – thereby constituting a call for action – while other forms of residues are silenced, muted, or overlooked.

Attending to the practices, politics, histories, and technologies that go into the making of residues as concerns, it wishes to remain attentive to the (potentially) hazardous materialisations of residues and their ecological and embodied outcomes. This means acknowledging past legacies as well as lasting effects and generated inequalities. This allows for a careful engagement with potential threats embedded within these issues as with political possibilities that might arise from such recognition.

Contact: franziska.klaas@sai.uio.no

Keywords: residues, thresholds, environment, health, monitoring

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

201. Transplanetary Ecologies

Matjaz Vidmar, University of Edinburgh; Michael Clormann, Munich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich

(Eco)systemic understanding of the patterns of interaction between life and its environment has so far been mainly limited to the Earth. However, with current epistemological and technoscientific expansions further into outer space, a new, more holistic view of our past and future presence in the Universe is required. Technomaterial heritage like artificial satellites, planetary probes and discarded rocket bodies increasingly co-habit with comet dust, rocks and high-energy cosmic particles – forming hybrid material environments of human concern beyond planetary boundaries. Similarly, in our search for liveable environments and signs of life on other planets, from looking for microbes in our Solar System to measuring the composition of atmospheres of exo-planets, we may have to re-examine the core notion of ecological symbiosis of “life” and this emerging “environment”.

Hence, in this panel, we aim to commence a systemic study of the construction of “transplanetary ecologies”, bringing together the insights from developing STS perspectives, be they about search for, and understanding of, extra-terrestrial life, or the expansion of Earth’s ecologies into outer space. We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions from colleagues conducting STS-inspired research in any related fields (astrobiology, geoscience, astronomy, space exploration, etc.). In particular, we aim to address questions along the lines of what “off-Earth” ecologies might be framed as, how they are different/similar to their Earthly equivalents, and how are they are affecting the development/understanding of the ecology as a concept.

Contact: michael.clormann@tum.de

Keywords: outer space, ecologies, Earth, materiality, planetary

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Other

204. Unpacking Food Chains: Knowledge-Making, Biotechnoscience, and Multispecies Connectivity in Troubled Societies

Mariko Yoshida, The Australian National University; Shiaki Kondo, Hokkaido University

STS scholarship has addressed a variety of topics with perspectives drawn from the intersection between political ecology of food and multispecies anthropology, such as the microbiopolitics of raw dairy consumption (Paxson 2013), food sovereignty in the aftermath of infectious zoonotic diseases (Keck 2015; Lowe 2010; Porter 2019), or/and the reconstruction of labor and domestication of industrial animals entangled with nonhuman biological agents such as viruses and parasitic microbes (Blanchette 2015). This panel aims to bring together empirical research on the implications of biotechnologies in the contemporary food industry, which unfold relationalities of ambiguous agents, a so-called “quasi-species” (Lowe 2010). We will examine how interests of actors including small-scale producers, consumers, scientific experts, and administrative institutions reconfigure the notion of ecologies and power. This panel will trace the far-reaching range of focus areas and methodological approaches that are pertinent to questions of environmental and food governance, the role of biotechnologies that achieve optimization for cost efficiency and high value-added products, and the implication for resource management. Potential topics include but are not limited to: the socio-technical imaginaries underlying food justice; knowledge practices in shaping commodity food chains; infrastructures of food risk and safety; the construction of food-related ethics surrounding genetically-modified organisms, synthetic biology, and mass DNA sequencing; multi-species networks in agri- and aquaculture systems at local, national, and global levels; the continuities and ruptures among hygiene management, scientific frameworks, and lay expertise; and intersections between modes of food production and conservation technologies.

References:

Blanchette, Alex. 2015. Herding Species: Biosecurity, Posthuman Labor, and the American Industrial Pig. Cultural Anthropology 30 (4) 640-669.

Keck, Frédéric. 2015. Liberating Sick Birds: Poststructuralist Perspectives on the Biopolitics of Avian Influenza. Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 224-235.

Lowe, Celia. 2010. “Viral Clouds: Becoming H5N1 in Indonesia.” Cultural Anthropology 25 (4): 625–49.

Paxon, Heather. 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Porter, Natalie. 2019. Viral Economies: Bird Flu Experiments in Vietnam. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Contact: mariko.yoshida@anu.edu.au

Keywords: Food safety, commodities, knowledge, multispecies, microbiopolitics

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Knowledge, Theory and Method

207. Veterinary anthropology : the impact of animal studies on medical sciences

Ludek Broz, Institue of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie socialem – CNRS

Over the last 5 years, the sub-discipline of veterinary anthropology has emerged in the wake of ethnographic and historical studies on zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, swine fever, rabies and the plague. Veterinary anthropology has been partly informed by Science and technology studies, and this panel aims to promote even closer synergy between these fields by engaging two pivotal questions: How is the body of veterinary knowledge generated? How does it travel from the centres of scientific knowledge production into bodies of normative practices nested in geographical, socio-cultural and political contexts?

These questions invite panellists to explore the relations between humans, animals and techniques in the different settings where humans care for animals and anticipate cross-species disease transmissions. Biosecurity interventions (culling, vaccinating or monitoring animals) requalify borders between territories and between species, building new collectives of humans and non-humans. We encourage investigation of different kinds of agency involved in these borderlands, be they those of pathogens or animals, of animal breeders or animal activists, and most importantly the agencies of vets as necessary and often invisible intermediaries in contemporary interactions between humans and animals.

Recognizing attention to zoonoses as a productive entry-point into veterinary anthropology we simultaneously invite panellists to engage what often stays in the shadow of “one health” concept including questions such as: Can animals be considered patients? Do they consent to their treatment? Do they evaluate the interactions that take place around their health? Who is authorized to distinguish a normal animal from a pathological one?

Contact: broz@eu.cas.cz

Keywords: veterinary anthropology, multispecies ethnography, zoonoses, biosecurity

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

208. Waste. Locating, Learning From, and Living With the Lively Afterlives of Globalization’s Distributed Materialities

Christian Peter Medaas, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology; Samwel Moses Ntapanta, University of Oslo, Dept. of Social Anthropology

Environmental toxins. Persistent organic pollutants. Microplastics. Municipal waste. Growing dumpsites. The discarded and “disposable” objects of consumer culture. Contaminated areas of space and time. Nuclear waste. One salient way in which globalization is localized and distributed (unevenly) over Planet Earth is through its various forms of waste.

While often hazardous, their accumulation and detrimental effects engendering feelings of urgency and powerlessness, many of these material wastes also constitute livelihoods to those who live and work with and amidst them – managing, remediating, scavenging, trading, recycling, repairing. A glance at these practices makes it clear that waste – often both a poison and a promise – is a contestable and unstable category, as well as one worthy of closer scrutiny.

Might an attention to people’s many material practices of relating to the wastes of globalization (or the ruins of capitalism) – in particular those which are not simply ameliorative, or for that matter economic – but which may also be described as innovative, productive, or critical – provide a fruitful way of approaching some of the broader questions and anxieties of the Anthropocene world we find ourselves in? How can we as researchers learn from waste and waste practices?

This panel invites participants interested in waste and those who work with waste to engage with the above questions and each other, paying attention to the material (as well as narrative) forms that wastes take, the places in which they occur, and the practices of co-existence through which people relate to and live with wastes.

Contact: christian.medaas@sai.uio.no

Keywords: waste, materiality, toxins, discards, innovation

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Engineering and Infrastructure

210. ‘What is the worth of a Nature-paper when the climate is in crisis?’

Thomas Franssen, Centre for Science & Technology Studies (CWTS), Leiden University; Maximilian Fochler, University Of Vienna; Sarah de Rijcke, Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS); Ruth Falkenberg, University of Vienna; Lisa Sigl, Research Pla

Researchers across the world increasingly feel the need to engage with the current climate crisis and change the practices of science. For instance communities gradually move to more web-based forms of conferencing to reduce co2-emission. Also, there is increasing critical scrutiny of the growing carbon footprints of big data centers worldwide. Scholars increasingly ask, is what we do worth it in the current climate crisis?

But how do these new practices relate to dominant forms of organization and valuation in science? How, when and under which conditions do new forms of knowledge production become possible? Do mission-oriented funding programs allow researchers to engage differently with their work and have broader impact? Or is much work funded just “mainstream as usual” with a rhetoric bow to climate relevance? Can interdisciplinary approaches speak better to the climate crisis? And if so, how do they fare in current structures of valuing scientific outputs and careers?

This panel asks how the climate crisis reconfigures (the governance of) science, when eventually not only fields that address current environmental challenges, but all research communities will be affected by it. We invite studies of these reconfigurations and the new frictions that emerge when the earth is given increasingly more agency to determine whether certain decisions (choosing a research question, booking a flight, submitting a research proposal) are warranted. Potential subthemes include, but are not limited to, effects on valuation practices (what is valued in and about research) and academic subjectivities (what kind of researcher should one be).

Contact: t.p.franssen@cwts.leidenuniv.nl

Keywords: climate crisis, valuation practices, science governance, academic subjectivities, scientific practices

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Environmental/Multispecies Studies