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Paper short abstract:

Cows, victims and contributors to climate change, undergo scientific interventions for a greener future. Gene-editing and breed revival reshape their role, questioning about whose reproduction is valued. Through ethnographic research, I explore how science and technology shape cows life and death.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of continued environmental devastations, cows are viewed as both victims and contributors to climate change, leading to various technoscientific “remediation” projects, done in the name of the “ecological transition”. I examine how cows’ bodies become sites of intervention for environmental engineering, particularly through reproductive technologies, shaping life and death in pursuit of a greener future.

Firstly, based on my ethnographic research in a reproductive biology laboratory, I explore routine procedures involving gene-editing technologies aiming to enhance cattle resilience to heat as part of a project to “adapt” cattle to climate change. I follow two researchers who nurture gene-edited embryos made of discarded oocytes from slaughtered cows, before putting them to waste. In this “biopolitics” out of “necropolitics”, whose reproduction is valued and maintained?

Secondly, I observe a collaboration between geneticists and local farmers in Western France to “revive” a specific breed, the “Bleues de Bazougers”, which nearly disappeared due to post-World War II breed standardization policies, while being now claimed to be more “resilient”. What happens when some breeds – and not others – are forbidden to reproduce, which worlds disappear with them?

By articulating these two versions of “the cow of the future” across different sites and temporalities, I show cows’ death and loss are made and unmade through science and technology. These interventions highlight the complex dynamics shaping the ecological and agricultural landscape, as I ask whose futures they are accountable for.

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Paper short abstract:

Following the metabolic animal work performed by genetically modified organisms, this talk proposes the notion of “necrovalue” to describe a specific mode of biovalue that is concerned with death itself.

Paper long abstract:

The relationship between nature and capital has been a longstanding concern in science and technology studies. While the production of a surplus out of vitality has been explored extensively under the banner of a politics of "life itself", the appropriation of death has rarely been taken up. Discussing two cases of genetically modified mosquitoes, I will argue that advances in synthetic biology not only produce novel knowledge about life processes, but also rework death on a molecular scale. Starting from the idea that both genetically modified organisms are produced to extinguish their own species, not only is the opposition between physis and techné erased, but the relationship between life and death is fundamentally reworked as well. I will show that these organisms obliterate the boundary between the truly alive and the already dead as it is through the technoscientific hijacking of the organism’s capacity to reproduce that a genetic “off switch” is passed on to its offspring which aims at eradicating the target species. Following this line of thought, I will argue that such life can be understood as performing a sort of “death work” that not only demonstrates the disposability of nonhuman life but also the emergence of what I call “necrovalue”—i.e., a specific mode of biovalue that is concerned with "death itself". Since the raison d’être of this engineered life is to reproduce into oblivion, reproduction here functions as a form of metabolic animal work that generates both surplus value of vitality and value through absence.

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Paper short abstract:

Forensic science research that focuses on the insects that contribute most to bodily decomposition has found it necessary to discuss Climate Change – something that both unmakes the epistemic basis of their contributions to crimino-legal death investigations and remakes their modius operandi.

Paper long abstract:

The unmaking of the body after death is primarily performed by, when conditions are amenable, local carrion feeding insects. A body of research has been made over the past 60 years by forensic anthropologists and entomologists based on observations of human and non-human surrogates decomposing, the purpose of which is to aid crimino-legal death investigators with a minimum time-since-death estimation. This knowledge is dependent on prolonged observation and analysis of the relationship between microclimatological conditions of an area and the local flora and fauna on the rate of decomposition. That climate change affects the living is a given, but it also affects the dead and the knowledge about and from the dead, revealing both epistemic surprises and epistemological threats to historical- and place-based field research. Changes which disrupt place-based and species-specific knowledge concerning the rate of decomposition, such as temperature and moisture, disrupts the basis upon which human decomposition researchers construct their utility for crimino-legal death investigations while also imposing the need for new reconstructive research. This talk reviews the emergence of forensic scientists including mention of climate change as relevant to forensic decomposition research and includes observations from participator field research identifying a simultaneous disruption to – or unmaking of – the epistemic basis of forensic entomology and rejuvenation and remaking of – if not flat-out excitement at the prospects and need of ‘new’ – entomological research.

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Paper short abstract:

Reproductive technologies have created new forms of death and loss such as failed embryo implantation. Some patients, however, remake these losses by questioning the normative scripts of human reproduction. The paper adds human’s reproductive loss to the discussion about more-than-human loss.

Paper long abstract:

The paper is based on narrative interviews on loss and bereavement with women who had undergone fertility treatment in Switzerland. Reproductive technologies and discourses have ambivalently created new forms of loss and bereavement: due to home pregnancy testing devices early gestation can be confirmed and therefore be lost at a very early stage; some intended parents mourn the discard of their supernumerary IVF embryos (de Lacey 2017); and a multiple pregnancy created by IVF treatment may lead to fetal reduction. Accordingly, some research subjects mourn the decay of “[embryo] no. 11” documented on video by the fertility clinic or have been performing symbolic funeral rituals for expelled “tissue” after early miscarriage. Some interviewees, on the other hand, (also) grieve more abstract entities like fertility, identity, or normality. They unmake the losses during IVF-treatment by questioning the ontological and moral status of the loss object (between hope, tissue and/or a baby), the social ideals surrounding the reproductive life-course, natural parenthood, and genetic relation as well as the views, values and practices attached to human reproduction. They re-evaluate their wish for a child or plan to redirect their love and care to someone or something else in future. By sharing first data interpretation, I’d like to contrast a human-centricity of infertility treatments and pregnancy loss navigation with interviewee perspectives taking on a rather more-than-human approach.

Literature: De Lacey, S. (2017). Death in the clinic: women's perceptions and experiences of discarding supernumerary IVF embryos. Sociology of Health & Illness 39(3): 397–411.

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Paper short abstract:

Climate warming is driving significant forest changes, sparking debates on forest "loss" or "death". Drawing on ethnographic findings, this paper explores the facets of loss in the forest and examines how these losses shape understandings of forests and foster new economic valorizations of nature.

Paper long abstract:

The impacts of climate warming are driving significant changes in forest ecosystems across Central Europe. Extreme weather events, drought, and insect infestations have caused substantial damage to German forests, particularly in monoculture stands (cf. Thonfeld et al., 2022). However, the extent to which this signifies forest "loss" or "death" is fiercely debated both socially and scientifically.These transformations of forests and the "haunted landscapes" (Tsing et al., 2017) they leave behind evoke feelings of shock, grief, and uncertainty. At the same time, there are voices that view the alterations in forests as an opportunity for a new beginning and chance for a fundamental change in the understanding and valorization of forests.

In this paper, I aim to follow the manifold traces of loss and death in the forest, drawing on my ethnographic findings on the phenomenon of forest dieback in central Germany. Following Rebecca Elliott, the concept of loss can be understood as an ambivalent phenomenon, which is not only able to illuminate what is being lost and what will be lost but also what must be lost in the context of forest damages in central Germany (cf. Elliott 2018: 303f.). Against this backdrop, the paper will examine how technical, economic, and scientific interventions in nature have shaped the current condition of the forests, and how forest damage and loss foster new modes of technical and economic valorization of nature. Furthermore, the paper asks how these findings can inform posthumanist and feminist concepts of more-than-human living and dying.

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Paper short abstract:

The talk discusses an art project conserving biocultural diversity in the Arctic permafrost alongside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It challenges the biocentrism of contemporary conservation efforts against biodiversity loss and rearticulates conservation as a practice of mourning ecological loss.

Paper long abstract:

In the presently unfolding mass extinction we witness a tremendous de-diversification of more-than-human life. In globalized agriculture – a key driver of the techno-capitalist destruction of biological diversity – growing awareness of biodiversity loss comes with increased efforts to conserve ‘plant genetic diversity’ in seedbanks. The pinnacle of this ex situ approach to conservation is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), an international backup storage for the world’s seeds that promises to extend the present of a world on the brink of extinction by making agrobiodiversity loss reversible.

I critically discuss this approach to undoing past and present unmakings through an art exhibition staged in Svalbard in 2019: the ‘Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links Exhibition – Conserving Cultural Connections with Seeds.’ It allows me to question what conservation conserves as well as what for. I show that by conserving a collection of ‘biocultural diversity’ alongside the Arctic seed collection, first, the project illustrates a key reservation about ex situ conservation: its inattention to the ecological and cultural worlds biodiversity arises from, which continue to be destroyed outside the seedbank. Second, I argue that by performing a practice of commemorating and mourning endangered biocultural diversity, the project opens up a fundamentally different understanding of conservation. Insofar as mourning denotes a practice of not only beweeping and letting go of lost lives and relations but fostering new life-sustaining relations, it invites to rethink conservation as a mode of being present in worlds on the brink of extinction by simultaneously turning to lost pasts and open futures.

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Paper short abstract:

I will examine what the conservation movement and novel de-extinction projects have "made" the idea of extinction into, and explore possibilities of what may come from "unmaking" those conceptions.

Paper long abstract:

Conservation has historically been centered around the project of preventing the extinction of species (Barrows, 2009). That centering has “made” extinction into a tragedy, a conception that is reinforced by mournful rhetoric that often blames humanity for causing extinction and obligates them to prevent it (Heise, 2016; Louder and Wyborn, 2020). That rhetoric objectifies the loss of more-than-humans for the purpose of human transformation, and precludes other responses to the loss.

Recently, techno-optimistic rhetoric of novel “de-extinction” projects has appeared to discuss extinction differently, including questioning the finality of extinction and humans’ moral responsibilities in responding to or even “atoning” for it (van Dooren and Rose, 2017; Jennings, 2017). However, I argue that de-extinction nonetheless extends the conservation movement’s attempt to “make” the initial extinction event into a tragedy and an object of transformation; the rhetoric of de-extinction draws its emotional power from the idea that bringing back lost species helps “undo the damage” caused by past humans, simplifying extinction into a moral lesson for people today.

Here, I examine how both the rhetoric of conservation and de-extinction have objectified the loss of more-than-humans for the purpose of influencing the public. I will think through how the “making” of this loss has often failed to encourage an ethic of care and reciprocity with nature (Kimmerer, 2015). I will consider how we might “unmake” this idea of extinction solely as tragedy and how doing so may make room for new relationships and responses to the loss of more-than-humans.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper turns to weedy landscapes to explore conditions of livability for humans and more-than-humans alike, asking how invasive species in late nineteenth century Alberta, Canada, played a role in the formation of settler colonial space through the destruction of multispecies entanglements.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of extensive habitat destruction and multispecies extinctions, this paper turns to weedy landscapes in Alberta, Canada, to explore conditions of livability in the Anthropocene for humans and more-than-humans alike. Narrating the stories of native plants that have become endangered and the invasive species that threaten to replace them, I try to highlight both the encounters with human infrastructures and technologies that enabled invasion in the first place, as well as alternative collaborations for multispecies survival in this region. More specifically I ask how the introduction and extermination of invasive species in Alberta in the late nineteenth century played a role in the formation of settler colonial space. When settlers invaded North America, they brought with them a host of organisms which drastically changed the landscapes they encountered, replacing native flora, fauna and Indigenous people (Crosby 2004). Drawing from fieldwork with environmental volunteers as well as archival data of the 1880s until early 1900s, I ask how these ‘creatures of empire’ (Anderson 2006), initially facilitated the invasion of Alberta and later the formation of agricultural settlements in the region, through the destruction and control of Indigenous peoples and their ecologies. In addition I ask how human scientific and technological responses to these unwanted weeds became incorporated in human programs of ‘invasion, empire or capital’ (Tsing et al. 2020), further killing possibilities for multispecies entanglements to thrive.