Paper short abstract:

We focus on colonial-modern world-making imagined and engineered by developers of ‘new genomic techniques’ like CRISPR-Cas9. Undoing such worldings, we argue, is crucial for realising diverse alternative sustainabilities of peasant farmers, Indigenous peoples, and agroecologists.

Paper long abstract:

Deploying so-called ‘new genomic techniques’ like CRISPR-Cas9, a wide range of ‘super-creatures’ are being developed and promoted by powerful corporations, influential scientists, modern nation-states, and international governance institutions. These ‘super-creatures’ include big muscular animals, toxin-releasing plants, and root- and stem-boosting carbon-storage crops. They are argued to be essential for realising climate resilience and sustainability.

Reviewing patent applications, academic presentations, research proposals and promotional materials, we analyse the narratives developed by promoters of super-creatures in terms of the practical worlds they aim to engineer. A range of social movements and activists criticise genetic engineers’ and promoters’ focus on individual organisms to build resilience and sustainability. Criticisms focus on the neglect of organisms’ ecological embeddedness and of radical uncertainties. Focusing on individual organisms is also seen as directing attention away from the wider political formations that need transforming in struggles for sustainability. Critical among such formations are considered agro-industrial complexes, socio-technical regimes, and plantation capitalism.

It is to this conceptual mix that we add colonial modernity as a globally hegemonic formation to be transformed for sustainability (Arora and Stirling 2023). We show how the practical worlds aimed through the development of super-creatures assume comprehensive superiority of ‘modern’ ways of knowing over diverse alternatives; assert military supremacies in the name of security; extend imaginations of control, expand toxic extractions, and enforce gendered dominations . Without dismantling such constituting dimensions, modernity will keep engineering colonial ‘super-futures’ to marginalise alternative sustainabilities of peasant farmers, Indigenous peoples, and agroecologists.