Nonhuman Innovations, Nonhuman Disruptions - II: Care & Mattering

Abstract

As STS scholars, historians, and anthropologists of science have shown, numerous fields of science and technology owe some of their most spectacular inventions to the study of nonhuman organisms. Whether in the creation of new technologies based on animal forms and movements or the discovery of pharmaceuticals from microbial bioprospecting, in fields like genetics, biotechnology, or weapons design, nonhuman life forms have been central to the innovations of science and technology in the last few centuries.
At the same time, however, nonhuman organisms have never simply been passive entities in these research projects. By becoming, rather than remaining stable and identical, these “mut(e)able” mobiles have troubled scientific and technological aspirations for sameness and repetition. Nonhuman beings have escaped cages, polluted pure substances, transmuted from expected forms, or otherwise disrupted the smooth flow of human scientific and technological work.
Building on last year’s discussions of “global” or “transnational” animals in science at 4S Sydney, this open panel will look at projects of science and technology that have constructed innovations in/with/as nonhuman organisms, while paying attention as well to forms of disruption (resistance, fugitivity, friction) that emerge in “more-than-human” technoscientific assemblages (Haraway).

Individual Presentations

• Material and Metaphorical Possibilities of Gendered Microbes - Rebecca Howes-Mischel, James Madison University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

• The Aphid Synthesizer: Un-Silencing Electropenetrography - Owen Marshall

• What are Heirloom Microbes? - Matthaeus Rest, MPI for the Science of Human History

• Wild Animal Sex: How the Study of Non-Humans Broke the Binary - Beans Velocci, Yale University

Session Organizer

• Brad Bolman, Harvard University