Lagomorph Lessons: Interdisciplinary Feminist STS Through the Lens of the American Pika

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - III

Abstract

This paper draws from a commitment to cross-disciplinary and multimodal approaches for Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS), as well as to the concerns of a more-than-human world. It mobilizes a collaborative research project conducted with an evolutionary biologist as a case study for doing research differently. Specifically, it proposes how FSTS can continue to move beyond critiques of science towards a feminist working-with science, suggesting generative epistemic models, practices for situating research, and methods for thinking through non-human/human/technological knots.

The American pika (Ochotona princeps), a small relative of rabbits living in the mountains of western North America, is widely accepted as a climate change indicator species due to its narrow range of thermoregulation options. Taking pika thermoregulation as a jumping off point, the collaborative research project proposed a new classification for thermoregulation—one designated specifically to technologically-based thermoregulation—as the only mode which has the capacity to change not only local, individual temperatures but global ones as the result of climate change. The project complicates the relationships between the American pika, human animals, and the technologies affecting both, in order to examine shared articulations of temperature and climate change. In addition to a research paper, the project’s outputs include a short film integrating footage from a steerable online camera used by pika researchers, to enrich research entry points and activate them both across and outside of academic settings. This paper reflects on the methods operationalized in the project, and suggests new avenues for FSTS.

Author

• Maya Livio, University of Colorado