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- Convenors:
-
Mara Dicenta
(William and Mary)
Alberto Morales (Drexel University)
Columba González-Duarte (The New School for Social Research)
Nathalia Hernández Vidal (University of Oregon)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Alberto Morales
(Drexel University)
- Discussants:
-
Elaine Gan
(Wesleyan University)
José Gómez (Universidad de Cuenca)
- Format:
- Closed Panel
Short Abstract:
We propose the concept of “techno-environmental racialization” to explore the co-constitution of race and time-making in The Americas. In this panel, we present four studies of human and other-than-human worlds involving seeds, ants, butterflies, and beavers.
Long Abstract:
Recent multispecies scholarship has explored human and more-than-human time-making processes and their interdependence (Gan, 2017, Tsing, 2015; Fitz-Henry, 2017). Some scholars have examined worldmaking practices that challenge the Eurocentric framing of the Anthropocene (Davis & Todd, 2017; De la Cadena, 2019); changing water, land, and animal relations through Black and Indigenous timelines (Roane, 2022); and industrialized other-than-human life under technocapitalist time (Blanchette, 2015; Chao, 2022; Hinchliffe et al., 2016). Such perspectives on time-making underline the co-production of technoscience, power, and racialization (Foster, 2019; Gan, 2021). While STS has examined experimental or disciplinary times in science (Vostal et al., 2019), temporalities of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2015, 2017), and forms of anticipation (Adams et al., 2009), this panel considers Indigenous, decolonial/anti-colonial movements and philosophies (Quijano and Clímaco, 2014; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018; 1984; Tola et al., 2019; Whyte, 2017) that accentuate how capitalist-modernist-colonial temporal regimes subjugate place-based temporalities by advancing racial formations for dispossession and accumulation. We propose the concept of “techno-environmental racialization” (Hernandez Vidal 2022, González-Duarte and Méndez-Arreola - forthcoming, Dicenta 2023, Morales - forthcoming) to explore the co-constitution of race and time-making in The Americas through five studies of human and other-than-human worlds involving seeds, crops, ants, butterflies, and beavers. We explore how multiple, contradictory, and other-than-human temporalities expand and open space for liberatory subjectivities, landscapes, and worldmaking projects that tend to relations of life, care, and time-place making. How do human and other-than-human temporalities operate as conduits for techno-environmental racialization? In what ways do temporal rhythms observed in our studies challenge or reinforce existing sedimentations of techno-environmental racialization(s)? How do other-than-human temporalities help understand emerging eco-political transformations?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Nathalia Hernández Vidal (University of Oregon)
Long abstract:
Critical STS scholarship has examined the temporal dimensions of capitalism by focusing on its speed. Using gender and class as the central categories of analysis, they have shown how the acceleration of time is crucial to further paid and unpaid labor exploitation. However, less attention has been given to how acceleration is a constitutive feature of the making of techno-modernity and, as such, operates as a mechanism of racialization of both human and more-than-human worlds. Drawing from the work of seed savers in Colombia and their temporal relationality with the seeds, I attempt to expand this realm of nascent scholarship production. Seed savers reject the paradigm of acceleration embedded in agricultural technologies to increase the speed at which plants grow and the quantity and “quality” of their production. Using a vocabulary and practices of attunement between the human and more-than-human world, they reclaim slowness and lethargy as key temporal dimensions of their ancestry and indigenous actualization. I base my analysis on my engagement with seed savers in Colombia for the past ten years and the ethnographic work that I carried out with them over the course of two years.
Mara Dicenta (William and Mary)
Long abstract:
Since 2008, a Chilean-Argentinian initiative with global funds has aimed to eradicate all Canadian beavers from Tierra del Fuego. Introduced in the 1940s to replicate Euro-American landscapes and fur industries, such projects sought to accelerate progress through techno-environmental whitening (Dicenta 2023). While the archipelago's cycles of innovation/abandonment have contributed to the Anthropocene, the beaver's adaptation places them as the main drivers of subantarctic forests' change since the Holocene. Prompting a reconsideration of anthropocentrism, the "Castorcene" draws attention to the politics of animal world-making (Dicenta and Correa 2021).
In this presentation, I zoom into the eradication project to analyze how trappers, researchers, beavers, and other-than-humans respond to each other at necropolitical sites. Such analysis reveals two complex time-making projects: A) Haunting temporalities articulated by ghostly, injured beavers haunting life-scientists as well as by ghostly humans haunting beavers whose behaviors are more influenced by the memory of North American colonial terror than by habitat quality. B) Eradication temporalities: The project enforcement of speed and expansion to prevent beavers' learning and adaptation clashes with field practices where caring for beavers' suffering articulates slow, placed-based, and intimate rhythms. In the labs, an excess of beavers' corpses-turned-into-samples has enabled prominent research in a peripheralized institution.
Drawing from extensive fieldwork, I aim to raise critical questions about more-than-human temporalities, asking for ways to stay with relational approaches that help us be cautious with the ontologization of time and communities.
Columba González-Duarte (The New School for Social Research)
Long abstract:
This paper is based on a decade-long fieldwork conducted at the Monarch Butterfly Reserve in Mexico. It documents the various animal and plant rhythms of this forest and explains how a lens on more-than-human temporality can help us comprehend the forms in which technoracialization occurs and how it can be undone. The paper delves into the relationship between agrarian capitalism and conservation, mainly how the expansion of the avocado industry as an agrarian capitalist commodity is influenced by conservation capitalism. It highlights how agribusiness and conservation have used similar techniques to maintain racialization and induce rapid socio-environmental change. Both have reinforced the utilitarian use of nature to achieve a different use of time and space. By tracking the fast rhythms of avocado plantations, the paper also documents other ancestral more-than-human rhythms, such as those of the monarch butterfly and native corn. It ponders the power and struggles that both humans and more-than-humans face in this clash of temporalities and agencies. It also explores recent eco-political transformations that open space for the re-emergence of more-than-human worldmaking projects that lean to relations of life, care, and slow cultivation of time-place making.
Alberto Morales (Drexel University)
Long abstract:
Insect ecologies and multispecies relations, like in Ant-Fungus gardens, have now come to occupy the technoscientific imagination of natural products researchers looking for "entities of biological interests" that may serve salutary purposes for humans. Natural products scientists in Panama deploy microbial and ecological understandings of Ant-Fungus gardens that will enable them to isolate biochemicals to one day offer interventions for diseases and the growing ailments of late industrialism locally and worldwide. In this sociotechnical arrangement, Ant-fungus gardens are nested and entangled with other life forms, modes of being, racial histories, and various biomedical articulations such as tropical medicine, public health, and global health disparities produced by layers of colonial rule, U.S. government involvement in shaping hemispheric political economies, and imaginaries of development and their uneven outcomes. By closely examining the scientists' work "along with the ants" and the biomedical histories they are entangled in, I explore concerns with global health through ecological and multispecies relations to raise questions of difference, particularly persistent racial hierarchies in scientific knowledge production. I underscore how knowledge frameworks carried forward from colonial times continue to influence global health, technoscience, and biomedicine. How do scientists in Panama respond to relationships of power and difference in global health research, primarily those differences defined by and through historical racial formations and the longue durée of technoenvironmental racialization(s)? How can multispecies experiments contribute to understanding technoenvironmental racializations and their impact on emergent eco-political transformations in Latin American contexts?
Daphne Esquivel-Sada
Long abstract:
As climate warming is expected to disrupt biotic conditions across the planet, the scientific warnings tend to spare a certain category of living organisms, namely the extremophiles. Encompassing microbial to vertebrate lives, these organisms thrive under extreme environmental conditions, a feature that allows them to be technoscientifically qualified as a model and a resource for climate change biologies. I aim to contribute to the discussions on the violences intertwined to the uprooted, uniformizing, and unburden chronological linear Western temporality with a qualitative study on the implementation, with the aid of gene editing technologies, of climate-proof crops. The analysis builds on interviews with South American scientists and documentary analysis of scientific papers in the field, and is enlightened by scholarship on decolonial temporalities, and critical studies of Anthropocene temporality. The argument is threefold: firstly, the gene editing of extremophiles in South America expands the geopolitical territories of bio-appropriation/prospection (South America deserts); secondly, it uproots the biological interspecies entanglements (extraction of one single species to be edited for plantation purposes); lastly, it deploys the colonial legacy of industrial agriculture and cheap labour of Global South scientists, whose institutions, unable to keep pace with intellectual property rights infrastructure, can end up pushing them to supply Northern biotech companies for free.